by Dick Edelstein
When an overdose of reading the news causes the horrors of today’s global politics to hit my psyche like a flurry of blows in a boxing ring, attending a poetry event can remind me of the value of life’s small pleasures and reaffirm my faith in the good intentions of at least some parts of humanity.
Recently I attended the Sunflower Sessions, a poetry reading held regularly in Dublin that enjoys a certain status among local poetry buffs. Its organizers make a concerted effort to maintain the reputation and continuity of the readings, taking their responsibility to heart as a sort of sacred trust. This sentiment was reflected by quite a few of the people who read their poetry that night when they used part of their reading time to thank the organizers of the event for their conscientious efforts.
Twenty years is a long time for a regular poetry event to persist and the three Dubliners of long experience who organize it are only too conscious of the pitfalls. Success depends on constantly attracting new participants while retaining the interest of poets and spectators who have already attended many times. Also, there is the precariousness of having to depend on the generosity of pub owners or managers to provide a free venue. Master of ceremonies Declan McLoughlin, while promoting FLARE, the quarterly poetry magazine associated with the event, admonished his audience, “If you only have enough money to buy the magazine or a pint, then get the pint because since COVID it’s become nearly impossible to find a free venue.”
The success of this venture can teach us a few things about the appeal of poetry reading in an age where the mass media strongly compete and generational change drives cultural preferences. Although these sessions are popular among poets who have passed into middle age and beyond, the organizers make an effort to appeal to the younger generations, making it clear that the door is wide open to them and to participants from all parts of Dublin society, including those whose native language is not English. While this is not an easy task, their efforts continue to prosper as they manage to bring together poets and listeners from different social groups and generations. In the face of these challenges, keeping the reading series going is like cultivating a delicate flower. Read more »
This is the first in a series of three articles on literature consider as affective technology, affective because it can transform how we feel, technology because it is an art (tekhnē) and, as such, has a logos. In this first article I present the problem, followed by some informal examples, a poem by Coleridge, a passage from Tom Sawyer that echoes passages from my childhood, and some informal comments about underlying mechanism. In the second article I’ll take a close look at a famous Shakespeare sonnet (129) in terms of a model of the reticular activity system first advanced by Warren McCulloch. I’ll take up the problem of coherence of oneself in the third article.
Before I met Hayat Nur Artiran, I had only had a raw understanding of what female selfhood may look like, a notion I have been attempting to refine in my writings over many years. Here, at the Mevlevi Sufi lodge in Istanbul, I received a lifetime’s worth of illumination about the power of the spirit in the company of Nur Hanim, beloved Sufi Hodja and the President of the Sefik Can International Mevlana Education and Culture Foundation. A researcher, author and spiritual leader on the Sufi path known as the Mevlevi order (based on the teachings of Maulana Jalaluddin Muhammad Balkhi Rumi, known in the West simply as the poet Rumi), Nur Hanim’s accomplishments shine a light on an ethos that has transformed hearts for nearly a millennium. More instrumental than personal achievement in this case, is the Sufi substance and finesse that Nur Hanim has nurtured in the running of this Mevlevi lodge. Spending a day here, on my most recent visit to Istanbul, I came to experience what I had thought possible, based on my Muslim faith, but had never witnessed before: men and women coexisting, learning, working and serving in harmony, a place where one forgets the ceaseless tensions between genders, generations, ethnicity, or those caused by differences in religious beliefs or the self-worshipping individualism that has become the insignia of modernity. 
Ryan Ruby is a novelist, translator, critic, and poet who lives, as I do, in Berlin. Back in the summer of 2018, I attended an event at TOP, an art space in Neukölln, where along with journalist Ben Mauk and translator Anne Posten, his colleagues at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, he was reading from work in progress. Ryan read from a project he called Context Collapse, which, if I remember correctly, he described as a “poem containing the history of poetry.” But to my ears, it sounded more like an academic paper than a poem, with jargon imported from disciplines such as media theory, economics, and literary criticism. It even contained statistics, citations from previous scholarship, and explanatory footnotes, written in blank verse, which were printed out, shuffled up, and distributed to the audience. Throughout the reading, Ryan would hold up a number on a sheet of paper corresponding to the footnote in the text, and a voice from the audience would read it aloud, creating a spatialized, polyvocal sonic environment as well as, to be perfectly honest, a feeling of information overload. Later, I asked him to send me the excerpt, so I could delve deeper into what he had written at a slower pace than readings typically afford—and I’ve been looking forward to seeing the finished project ever since. And now that it is, I am publishing the first suite of excerpts from Context Collapse at Statorec, where I am editor-in-chief.
