Anthony Cody and Chaun Webster: December 3, 2023

The Poetry Center presents Anthony Cody and Chaun Webster, in conjunction with the Howard Zinn Book Fair, held at City College San Francisco, Mission Center, on Valencia Street. The thematic for the 2023 Howard Zinn Book Fair is "Against Amnesia," which the poets take up in the delivery of their work, continuing into a conversation in response to questions and comments from the audience (poets Oscar Bermeo, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Raquel Roque Salas Rivera among them). Cody reads from his books Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020) and The Rendering (Omnidawn, 2023), and Webster from Wail Song (subtitled Wading in the Water at the End of the World, Black Ocean, 2023). As noted, the event takes places at 10:00 am, as one of multiple opening events for the day-long annual book fair. Steve Dickison introduces the poets. 

Publisher
BECA (Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts)
Location
Howard Zinn Book Fair, City College San Francisco, Mission Center
Date
2023-12-03
Event Run Time
01:13:46
Contributors
Oscar Bermeo
Barbara Jane Reyes
Raquel Roque Salas Rivera
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Anthony Cody (00:23:19)

Anthony Cody speaks of connections with Chaun Webster and his work, and to the Howard Zinn Book Fair's thematic "against amnesia" in a time of genocide. He tells of speaking with Juan Filipe Herrera about "the infinite poem" that can go on forever. He then reads from The Rendering, at one point showing on paper scrolls some of the graphic material presented in the book and, via weblinks, outside the formal book as book. 

Chaun Webster (00:26:34)

Chaun Webster opens by speaking to shared interests ("the fragment, rupture, thinking in the space between") with Anthony Cody. From the Zinn Fair thematic "against amnesia" he says he's "often wondering what memory is" and whether it isn't always in part "a work of imagination," and considers "nation states that monopolize memory" and that "have a way to render it as something that can be complete."

He tells of currently being involved in a University of Minnesota seminar studying "madness and the mad figure," producers of "discontinuity...disordered speech" which gets "measured against...total continuity...chronology....causality." He speaks of "those of us who exist on the receiving end of imperialism" and thereby need to work "in the space of rupture" where "there isn't a full continuity of events." 

After noting that, along with Cody, "we both do come from the school of [Douglas] Kearney," he reads from his extended poem Wail Song. 

Conversation (00:17:19)

Chaun Webster and Anthony Cody respond in turn to questions and comments from an anonymous audience member and from poets Raquel Roque Salas Rivera and Oscar Bermeo.

In entertaining the questions they speak to uses of the archive in its fragmented nature, ideas of "world making" within writing and issues with that concept, how what one makes can touch on the future, how materials one works with can shape the work, and the "infinite poem" vis-à-vis Nathaniel Mackey's serial works "reaching toward exhaustion." 

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