Monday Muse Asks Did You Know?

Today's post is another in a periodic series of items about writers, poets, and poetry.

Did You Know . . .

✦ Poetry is delivered via water pipe in artist Jan Tichy's Beyond Streaming: A Sound Mural for Flint, a community-based response to the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, installed at the Broad Art Museum through April 23.



Read the Beyond Streaming catalogue online (pdf).

✦ Poet Eileen Myles issued last spring the poetry record Aloha/irish trees (Fonograf Editions). Comprising new and old poems, the recording was made live. Sample tracks are available at the title link.

Aloha/irish trees Cover Art

Rae Armantrout's Conflation, released December 6, 2016, also is available from Fonograf Editions, a vinyl record-only poetry press that is part of Octopus Books. It features some of the poems in Armantrout's Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001-2015 (Wesleyan, 2016).

✦ Henry David Thoreau's Walden is now Walden, a game. It's described as "a first person simulation of the life of philosopher Henry David Thoreau during his experiment in self-reliant living at Walden Pond." An alpha version on Itch.io opened this month. Here's the game's trailer:

Read Britt Peterson's article in Smithsonian magazine, "Can a Video Game Capture the Magic of Walden?" (March 2017).

✦ Hundreds of poems by Chinese immigrants who came to the United States between 1910 and 1940 were carved into the walls of San Francisco's Angel Island immigration-processing station. Some of the poems are included in Judy Young's Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (University of Washington Press, 2nd Ed., 2014). Another book, Islanders (Conundrum, July 2016), by Teow Lim Goh, also features poems from Angel Island.

Beenish Ahmed wrote recently about the poems and Young's and Goh's books in "The Lost Poetry of the Angel Island Detention Center" for The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog.

✦ Poets and essayists selected for a Fremont Bridge Writer/Poet Residency are given a furnished studio with a water view in the northwest control tower, one of four at the bridge. The residency is sponsored by the Seattle, Washington, Office of Arts & Culture. Poets and writers, as well as translators and literary critics, selected for the Jan Nowak-Jezioranski College of Eastern Europe and Artist-in-Residence Programme A-I-R Wro spend their writing residency at Wojnowice Castle in Poland.

✦ Calligrams can be traced back to the 9th Century manuscript titled Aratea, each page of which has a poem describing a constellation. See "Aratea: Making Pictures with Words in the 9th Century" at the Public Domain Review.

Read "What Is Concrete Poetry?" at the iris, the Getty blog.

✦ Even Grindr, the dating app, has a poet-in-residence: Max Wallis. Read the poet's article in The Guardian, "'Sex and Poetry Have Always Gone Together'".

✦ California's Getty Research Institute has acquired examples of concrete poetry by Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos, and those works are on view in the GRI exhibition "Concrete Poetry: Words and Sounds in Graphic Space", which opens March 28 at Getty Center in Los Angeles and continues through July 30. For more information about the acquisition and the exhibition, read "Getty Acquires Concrete Poetry by Two Modern Pioneers of the Form" at Hyperallergic.

✦ Poet Charles Coe is the subject of the short documentary Charles Coe: Man of Letters, directed, filmed, and edited by Roberto Mighty. Coe's collections include All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents (Leapfrog Press) and Picnic on the Moon (Leapfrog Press).

Charles Coe: Man of Letters from Roberto Mighty on Vimeo.