from Jan Clausen

Magi Scalapino 1Over at Jacket2, that slightly obscure but thoroughly indispensable resource for thinking poetry, MFAW alum Jill Magi (most recent book: Labor) is pursuing a multi-month reflection on connections between textile production and the making of poetry. I love her description of the thread she’ll be following: not the easy equivalence of text = textile, but something more unsettling and allusive:

I will not say that a study of textiles will help us write poems; instead, I will document how simultaneous research into text and textile infects the making and discourse of the other. Touching your sleeve at this very moment, cloth invokes lived life and social realities; “cloth helps social groups to reproduce themselves” and is a source of great “semiotic potential,” say the editors of Cloth and Human Experience. Textiles may be objects of beauty and utility and they are socially situated, as is poetry.

Cloth and poetry as weave structure: a textile poetics.

Visit Jacket2 or find out more about Jill at http://www.jillmagi.net/

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Jan Clausen is the author of a dozen books in a range of genres, including the hybrid text Veiled Spill: A Sequence (GenPop Books, 2014). Her 1999 Memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity will be reissued by Seven Stories Press in 2017. Recent poetry titles include From a Glass House and If You Like Difficulty. Prose titles include the story collection Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover; and the novels Sinking, Stealing and The Prosperine Papers. Jan Clausen is the author of a dozen books in a range of genres, including Veiled Spill: A Sequence, from GenPop Books (2014). Other recent poetry collections are From a Glass House and If You Like Difficulty. Prose titles include the story collection Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover; the novels Sinking, Stealing and The Prosperine Papers; and the memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity. Clausen’s poetry and creative prose are widely published in journals and anthologies; her book reviews and literary journalism have appeared in Boston Review, Ms., The Nation, Poets & Writers, and The Women’s Review of Books. She is the recipient of writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He website is ablationsite.org.

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