Julie Carr and Andrew Joron: September 11, 2014

Andrew Joron reads the abedecarian poem "Absolute Black Continuum" from his book, Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems, followed by "Back Of" from The Sound Mirror, written using found language from Robert Duncan's H.D. Book. Next he reads "To the Power Of" and "Of the Doomed Love Between a Cube and a Sphere," poems inspired by a failed effort at a collaborative artist book. He finishes with "Earthward" and "A=A" from Trance Archive. 

Julie Carr reads a single long poem from each of two different works. The first, from Think Tank, is informed by Cesár Vallejo's Trilce. The second is from Rag, a book she describes as being about women and girls, with various shapes and forms running through it. Carr finishes with a series of fourteen-line poems, which she calls "jokes or teases on the sonnet." These include "A Fourteen Line Poem on Adoration," "A Fourteen Line Poem on Thirteen," "A Fifteen Line Poem on Boredom," "A Fourteen Line Poem on the End," "A Fourteen Line Poem on the Ritualized Shaving of Women's Heads After World War Two" — about the so-called horizontal collaborators, French women who slept with German soldiers during the occupation of Paris — and "A Fourteen Line Poem on Healing." 

In response to questions from the audience, Andrew Joron remarks on the importance of breaking rules in poetry, something he does in his abecedarian poem. Julie Carr, in response to a question about her use of the word "body," relates her interest in bodies in space to her early career as a dancer, and characterizes her attention to the word "body" as "a resistance to those that resist the presence of bodies in poems."

This leads into a conversation about the title of Rag, which Carr says can refer to a dirty throwaway newspaper, a slang word for menstruation, slang for woman or girl, and a kind of music that prioritizes "being off the beat."

Carr and Joron then discuss the way sound functions as the body of language, and their mutual interest in the surface of language, as well as the secrets it contains in the layers underneath. A discussion of indexing leads Carr and Joron to invite the students to write an index poem sourced from another work.