New Poetry Out Now in SPAM003

Returning to blogging and a new poem published

New poetry out now!

While I never intended to keep a strict schedule on this blog, I have meant to get back to it after a short, deeply needed holiday that I took after an intense and productive period last spring and early summer. I have quite a few updates to share, including a presentation I made in this year’s IConA International Conference on Architecture, a forthcoming academic article on poetic practices in ‘reading’ urban space, and other presentations/publications, not to mention some literary news.

To start, though, I am happy to share that I have a new poem published in SPAM003, a post-internet literary press and journal, based in the United Kingdom. You can read the issue for free on their website, and it’s well worth checking out the whole thing — there’s a really delicious breadth of poetics on display, and I think it offers a very telling look at where today’s poetry is working, especially when we get beyond the heart/nerve center of the American Poetry Industrial Complex. You can also hear nearly all the poems read by the authors on SPAM’s accompanying podcast, URL Sonata #12, also free, and available on their website, Spotify, or Anchor.

My poem, ‘ars t(r)opica’, comes from a longer project that explores tropological space, particularly through the lens of the trope of the ‘tropics’ in the imaginary, but set into tension against timely and concrete inconveniences, ie. the topical. While the project as a whole doesn’t deal directly with architecture or urbanism, it did spring from my first year as a doctoral candidate, as I tried to pivot my creative practice away from older projects (notably a series of poems working through film & tv tropes).

I think the longer manuscript maintains a certain adjacency to my thesis project, since it grapples with the very real space of the imaginary, and we can’t and wouldn’t want to fully separate that domain from, for example, physical urban space, especially if the objective is to bring poetic practices into urban design. Likewise, finding ways to better confront and cope with current and timely events or ideas is deeply needed in contemporary spatial design, and so poetics relevant for that shift for would need to mitigate or even shrug off literary bagage related to timelessness.

Afterwards, it might be worth admitting that living through the COVID-19 pandemic exposes us to all kinds of viral material, and my own personal health regime obliged me to find means of evacuating frustration about certain kinds of human and social rot. Which is to say, no, I’m not writing this blog from a beach bar with free wifi and a massage service available, but I invite you to check out the poem from wherever you find yourself situated.