Elegy for Splice, January 2022–April 2026
(With Landscape Sketched in Invisible Ink)
Henry Goldkamp
Several months back, I reached out to Little Mirror to pitch a compendium of introductions I’d written for featured poets at Splice, a monthly reading series I helped host here in New Orleans (along with my poetry comrades Rodrigo Toscano and Sean F. Munro). I not only wanted to archive the hard work that goes into offering words of praise and wonder to some of the finest practitioners in our avant-garde midst, but also goad notions of what exactly “literature” is comprised of. A lyric introduction, as I take it, is plopped midway between a review and a hard place—in Splice’s case, the legendary Bywater dive Saturn Bar on St. Claude. The introductions were written not for the eye but for the ear, as they were to be their own kind of performance, a kind of knock-‘em-down round-up of thematic talismans that audience members might “look out for” during the featured poet’s setlist if they were unaware of the work and seeing them for the first time, under the lowly rainbow lights of that aforementioned planet.
Little Mirror acted with affirmative interest, but also with a suggested caveat that I should’ve seen coming: Yes, but why not paint a picture of the local scene across that time, tell us what exactly is going on down there while we’re up here. Indeed, a natural thing to ask for any curious party! And we, too, are a curious party we have at work here in New Orleans, and have had for nearly a decade now (when I think of who I might consider my local “cohort,” if you’ll allow...). But, when I would begin writing the invitation, oftentimes I felt as if I was merely parroting the guest list: and chummy name-dropping isn’t what we’re about here. For every worthy poet hacking it out in the heat down here, there’d be one just as worthy that might go unmentioned.
At the same time, I felt that early drafts of my introduction to the introductions, as it were, might feel too paltry and thin if I didn’t add some concrete examples: several small presses here make international splashes from our little corner of swamp, and many of the city’s poets are well-known and making so-called “names” for themselves (as if they didn’t have those already! cathedrals everywhere, as the saying goes!). It would be ridiculous to feign humility and deny my personal involvement with the so-called scene here: I’m immersed in varying degrees of its humidity. I teach in the area, assist with a small press and online journal, am one of the organizers of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, and as of April this year co-hosted Splice, among other pelican feathers—but I don’t do this to flex or appeal to my authority on the matter, but to admit that however much I might squeeze into various lacunae out of sheer love for poetry, mine is ultimately a myopic viewpoint. I can’t speak for the scene. The speaks for itself. We would love for you to come on down and get within its earshot.
And so one of my jobs in the recent past was to pipe up as hype man for several poets coming into town to experience our little scene via Splice. It’s with great pleasure that I offer a wholesome blend of favorites that Little Mirror’s editors and I compiled together. While we couldn’t include everyone who read over the years, I do want to thank everyone who came out for Splice with my whole fat heart: you made poetry’s pulse thump like a motherfucker, every goddam second Saturday at six at Saturn on St. Claude—like clockwork. Thanks to the bartenders, the audience, every poet who read behind that dented microphone—and to whoever is reading this right now, keeping a little part of Splice alive. Big feelings of memento mori as I write this, but I’m going to miss getting so drunk I forget to turn the ice machine back on so, so much. Phil [owner of Saturn], I’m sorry, it won’t happen again—I know I’ve said that more times than I could count, but now it’s true, for Splice is over. One for the books and the miniature ages of Splice’s four-and-a-half year run.
And so, party people, rather than blather the guest list or allude toward flippant auras of mystery in terms of the local scene, I’d rather split the hair of the dog by doing my usual as New Orleans Poetry Festival’s communications director, i.e. rousing up a promotional interest in the upcoming NOPF from April 15-18, 2027. To say “you just had to be there” is not a cliche cop-out when it comes to live and in-person experiences of the best sort. It’s true by the nature of live performance. Everybody writing poems here in New Orleans knows that there’s magic in the air... And now I can speak for everyone, actually: We consider ourselves lucky to breathe it.
See you come spring : )
Henry Goldkamp
A note on the text: These are printed exactly as they appeared in my saved documents, and will undoubtedly contain a serviceable amount of typos and questionable grammar. They ain’t in MLA format and they don’t mostly cite their sources. Often times edits or addendums were made on the fly on the page itself, right up until I was walking up to the mic to intro the reader (IYKYK: ten minutes before showtime, me up on the wrap-around balcony, scribbling away on the pew, squinting under the low light). Collectively, Rodrigo, Sean and I had to do two of these a month, which resulted in a flurry of work work work. Shit was hectic. We also made a point to pay the poets from a total pool of $350 each month—our “Splice dues,” we called it. Ultimately the personal cost of finances and labor caught up with us, but we loved it deeply, and we want to share our appreciation to all of those organizing readings anywhere in space-time. For any of you sticklers want to see exactly what was read and how it was delivered, every Splice was recorded and archived here.
Robert Fitterman // Adele Elise Williams // Holly Melgard // Alicia Wright // Ginger Ko // Madison McCartha // Stine An // Sommer Browning // Alex Tretbar // olga mikolaivna // Kai Ihns
Introduction to Robert Fitterman / February 5, 2022
I was thinking, there's got to be some sort of joke out there where a luddite tries to Mapquest their way to someone's broken heart.
There isn't, so I tried it myself.
If you try to do such a thing, Mapquest—instead of rejecting you outright—asks a couple of important questions: Where are you starting? And, Where are you going?
A sort of allegorical, anecdotal metaphor is often used to describe the notion of infinite regress, which is basically where if you justify one thing, you have to justify the justification of that thing, then justify the justification of that thing. So on, so forth. Its an image of an ancient turtle holding the world on its back. Beneath that turtle, a larger turtle. Beneath that one, another. It's turtles all the way down, they say. A universal sprawl—we might say.
At least those turtles know the way down. Our luddite is still scratching their head how to get to the heart of it all.
Robert Fitterman is going to read from a book-length poem called Creve Coeur. It's named for a little suburban city outside of Saint Louis, Missouri. It's where he grew up, where he was born. It comes from the French for "broken heart." It's all pretty romantic, I guess. A town peopled by power walkers, and grocery baggers... oh, and also a poisonous chemical firm, and racist white denizens who don't want Black people to live in their neighborhoods, who, like dregs in a 1950s decanter, aged like a fine wine—and by that I mean, so far aged it's gone corked, long before the grape even grew on the vine.
Rob's poem uncorks these suburban genies who have self-served nothing but their own wishful systems. In its search, in its research, this poem drives home the idea that "sadness is not the same as suffering." How much longer are we to justify the lazy, sleepy-eyed frameworks in which we view the light of the world? Endlessly? Rilke said "You must change your life." Then James Wright famously doctored it to "I have wasted my life." Somebody fact check me on this, but I believe that poem takes place in a modest ranch home in Creve Coeur.
It's not as far away as you think. You actually just go down St. Claude to 610 West, then that'll turn into 10, stay in that for about 20 miles, then hop onto 55 north alongside the Mississippi, then in about 500 miles you'll hit 270, take that and get off at Olive.
It's not that complicated, these broken hearts. Hop in his car, Rob will show you: Where we're going, it's Creve Coeurs all the way up. Where we're going, found language can get lost again, can abandon its conceptual post...
Oh look! There's a turtle, floating on the edge of Creve Coeur Lake!
Introduction to Adele Elise Williams / August 11, 2022
One of Adele Elise Williams' manuscripts in-progress is called WAGER. One definition of the word goes something like "betting on an unpredictable event." A risk is involved. Now depending on who you ask, "risk" is either preciously abundant or head-scratchingly absent in the motherlode of American poetics at this moment in time. Either way you blow it, there's gold in these here Saturn Bar Hills.
Saliva is the same whether it's spit or drool, you know what I mean?
In an era where avant-garde modality seems to be surging into ellipticals—not unlike a dog slobbering with the zoomies running in circles when they have too much energy to know what to do with—the will of the poet, or at its worst—pop topicality—takes a backseat to the poetics, gets grafted into the process itself, becomes a speed-trap. In contrast, Adele's poetics hits the freeway running. In fact, Adele hits the gas so hard "all the faces are highway blurs" (I Don't Know How to Write Pretty Poems). And we might call it overdrive when the speaker notices, "I'm so far down the road I got no clue how to get home" (Body Surge).
Float your hand through the window, and its death that threads through the road-tripper's fingers. The song out the radio is a snowy mix of Stephen Crane's pitch-black mar of an Old Testament God, the sassed utterances of Denise Duhamel, and the sardonic snarl of Catherine Wagner's first collection Miss America, which always makes me think of the edginess of a pitbull in an evening gown. "God says kiss me — my body says what's at stake" (It Comes From Having a Body) rings of what Duhamel strives for in her poem "Artistic Statement": "Holy Ghost poems that cannot be read but only felt."
One of many arcs in WAGER is from birth to death, a movement out of one poem's question "What does a pre-teen know of death besides dirt and worms?" The answer swerves, with a nod to fellow Houston poet Pall Wall, I might even say tippin' on 44s. Death a blurry focal point for the youthful speakers of the ms's first section, which comes closer and closer into focus as it proceeds in its funereal procession. "i'm rolling / down a hill and the hill / is made of holes" (Say What). Those holes eventually come into focus like the pockmarks on the oily cheek of Satan, that devil in those details, in those holes, in those holes, holes, holes, holes, holes the mother is a rope. Who wouldn't worship its maternal twines when she's the only thing down there with you, when it's your only chance to grab onto something other than yourself? The martriarchy here is ineluctably knotted together with the orange of a backyard extension cord, the kind with the tips that glow to let you know the receptacle is hot.
For instance, an imagist's bike ride through the childhood neighborhood in the poem "Covetous Ode," the violence that pulses in the neighborhood kids' cute little hearts, which then manifests in a boy getting his brains smashed in by falling off a cliff.
In The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young likens the poet to "one of those cartoon characters who has stepped off the cliff only to remain suspended" (147). He goes on to say "The impossible is the first necessary condition of any faith. It is impossible to write poetry, therefore we do it. Without discipline" (148).
But you can jury-rig discipline, Dean, and a motor's still gotta run on a piston-ed system. Whether the various iteration within yourself listening is "a whazzy / twenty-something" or a "willied lily ass that trembles / with every / shock of life" (Deconstructing Milk Baby), there's just something to Adele's journey I believe would resonate with anyone who hears it, the audience just spare change jingling in a faded cargo pocket, "as though my joy, my little girl life, mattered to the entire world."
It just so happens the entire world is in attendance tonight—let's get to matterin'. Adele Elise Williams, everyone!
Introduction to Holly Melgard / December 2, 2023
ACT 1
"I can gather all the news I need on the weather report," warbles Paul Simon in the 1970 hit "The Only Living Boy in New York."
There's definitely some metaphor at play here, because there are lots of boys, (and other kinds of people, Paul) who live in New York—Joey Yearous-Algozin and Holly Melgard and among them. But they have sojourned here to not only bring us this unseasonably warm weather in our increasingly unseasoned climate, but of the larger weather patterns that comprise and influence the cultural climate and its fumes of zeitgeist.
A lot has changed since 1970, including the implication of insouciance in such a lyric as Paul Simon's quoted above: more recent weather reports include headlines like "Why the New York City Floods Should be a Wake up call"; 2023 The Hottest Year On Record" or "Winter Among War: The Freezing Struggle of Gaza's Displaced." Okay: you get it. You're depressed. I'm depressed, stressed out.
But what if I told you these two meteorologists have adapted their long-term forecasts to make you giggle at the void, chuckle at the truth of our soul-crushingly pathetic insignificance as a species, slap your knee at some casual harassment, make you wet your pants in fear and laughter at the same time?
Here to break the story is Sean Munro, folks.
ACT 2
Holly Melgard's Fetal Position (Roof Books, 2021) is a contradiction in the best sense of the word. Despite its title, the six poems under its covers are constantly on attack. One poem slams the brakes on nuclear families on reproductive auto-pilot. Another sullies the media-sterilized miracle of child-birth. Yet another acts as soothsayer to the grotesque destiny of your precious lil' squirt, who will undoubtedly grow up to be a pervert just like the rest of us, no matter what kind of Anne Geddes act they might be trying to pull in their pink and wrinkly butterflied beginnings. Through gut-busting humor, post-conceptualist litany, and a wet-n'-wild approach to subjects too often cut-and-dried, Melgard wrenches her satirical social commentary into a brand of paradox all too rare in the poetry world: laughing at the unlaughable.
"I want to laugh a little
The way I did while living:
Knowledge and laughter are one."
—from "What the Deceased
Had to Say About Himself,"
by Nicanor Parra
ACT 3
We now have some idea of what to expect. A reminder: Precipitate means "to throw down."
Partly Cloudy, Chance of precipitation. Partly sunny. Chance of participation. Mostly cloudy. Chance of elimination. Partly funny: a frog falling out of the sky. Hey, you've got nothing to do today but smile, right?
This has been the Splice Poetry Series for the National Weather Channel, thank you and don't forget your umbrellas.
Introduction to Alicia Wright / February 17, 2024
Given the atmosphere, it feels right to begin Alicia Wright's intro with the opening two lines to her poem, "Night Habit": "I have a night habit, darkly moving in the air, / Not mattering—a veil of incident light." Later in her collection, You're Called By The Same Sound, as the persona Jane who starved to death in 1609 in the Jamestown Settlement, the speaker confides, "I'd learned to read // how bodies are susceptible to change: / I grew shadowed / by water's wane."
The collection—unpublished for all you poetry publishing scouts out there—kicks off with "Wraparound," which renders the Dickonsonian em-dash as crowbar, peeling back the clapboard rot, airing it out... but also goes big in terms of its Romanness, which is to say Rome, Georgia, the springboard from which many of these poems done get sprung. Her poems are erudite but ruddy, researched but constantly searching. In "Town Under Lake," Wright's triadic line turns to visual pits, where one reads two ways at once: "I have so many handfuls / of shadows looking / backward ten degrees."
Such is the case with history, especially here in the south, how ubiquitous the "angel of history" hides in the public eye, and it is the job of the poet to activate its tactility, its earthenness. To riff off of Carolyn Hembree's reading from For Today last night, "Cotton.... exists! Guns..... exist! Violent oppressive dregs drag and.... exist!" Alicia Wright rights that ship, writes that shit: "Are you saying you didn't know, you didn't know, how could you / have known? Each glint in the river water? How will you atone?" ("Tabloid Facts").
A touchstone poet for Wright, CD Wright (of no relation beyond spiritual, poetical, and metaphysical) said "No fires should be / unattended. Especially when wind." And it's a windy weekend in the little hard city of the Big Easy. Words can hurt in the mouth of a poet like Alicia Wright. As salve, I'd like to offer this translation of the Creek—one of the predominant indigenous tribes to Wright's homestate of GA by Jerome Rothenberg, after Frank Speck: "Snake Medicine Poem for a Toothache":
coiled up on the road
on a long stick coiled up
at the water's edge
he was coiled up
& coiled up around a branch
& was coiled up on a hollow tree
he kept on hissing
waiting making a noise
he was a stone in the grass
coiled up there &
waiting making a noise
on a long stick
coiled up there &
waiting making a noise
in the sun / on the road
coiled up there &
hisssssSSSSssSSssssSSSsss Aliccccccccccccccccccccccccia Wright, everybody!
Introduction to Ginger Ko / March 9, 2024
Aram Saroyan claimed that print is dead as a technology, due to boredom: to read every text the same no matter who wrote it—left to right, top to bottom—was a drag in his eyes. He instead suggested a movement toward a poetics of visions, of a language that you could "see" all at once instead of "read" in piecemeal fashion. Similarly, I think of NH Pritchard's epigraph to his groundbreaking 1970 collection The Matrix: "Words are ancillary to content." I think about this sentence often, and each time its meaning glimmers a little different, but today I'm thinking of it as how insubordinate language can become in the face of the real, how supplementary and plastic they are compared to, say, a rock, or a set of keys.
Ginger Ko extends the lineage w/ these radical poets above, as she is a poet who recognizes the shortcomings of our primary poetic technologies in the throes of painful, brutal, and deadly capitalism—but one who also celebrates the fact that "...where there is technology, there will be hackers."
Ko's last book Power On was simultaneously launched as a free app which encourages user-friendly collaborations b/w reader and speaker—infiltrating the digital tech that by and large is always developed into weaponry of some sort, don't @ me—thus questioning the structures ala critics of AI and its adjacent technologies such as Meredith Broussard and Sherry Turkle, whose research spotlights how foundationally racist, ableist, and gender-biased these so-called tools in fact are at their core. She has another digital project called NFP (Non-Fungible Poem), a one-to-one direct exchange of poem-for-poem with digital strangers, and another forthcoming which activates collaboration in the form of digital bubblegum balls... In other words: a real hackjob.
In a recent interview, Ko states, "I think that the Capitalocene [era] says 'I dare you.' When systems of power extract resources and energy from people and things, that type of move is a translation of...: "What are you doing to about it?" Saroyan and Pritchard hacked their way into the mainframe of the page with their forms of answers, and likewise Ko's poetics are as much about what they do as what they say, activating the linguistic possibilities of spitting back in the face of capitalism's supposed paradigms, in fact to devalue them so much as to eventually prove they are not paradigms at all. "Power on": a mantra of continuance, of a micro-chipping away, of momentum.
A currently unpublished ms, Bitter Bitter, a series of epistolary apostrophes, among others some to a lover, an employer, a childhood teacher, summarizes the approach: "When I wasn't in your classroom, grownups were petting me on the little mound between my legs, were teaching me about how money makes people feel things, inflects every decision about how they treat people—strangers, acquaintances, and kin." Well, let's push the cash out of our brains for the next half hour, if only for a moment, if only for a momentum...
Everyone please give a warm welcome to Ginger Ko!
Introduction to Madison McCartha / July 13, 2024
I hope you will not judge me when I admit that until very recently, the term "grotesque" ultimately was deferred in my peapod of a brain as a fancy way of saying "ew." While the etymology goes back to the Italian for grotto, which stemmed from the Latin for crypt... or "in the cave," what's of interest is the glomming on of the idea of the comic... a figuration in such fanciful disarray of the animal, the human, the natural, that perhaps the grotesque image offers a pang of hope amidst the ridiculous turmoil laid out in front. After all, by the mid-nineteenth century, a "grotesque" was to describe a type of French circus clown "whose comic improvisations embellished what was basically a display of acrobatic skill" (Towsen 162). This is ultimately the start of what we know of the circus today: juggling, tumbling, rope-dancing, the varietal sight gag. Thus, the grotesque splays a motion, a tumble, a splat containing the comic and the tragic in one bodily glimmer...
Madison McCartha, to my mind, is one of a long line of linguistic acrobats that at once estranges and familiarizes their audience with their own impersonal sideshow, equipped with a slight of hand that enables them to "[hide] a gem in a germ" (CS 21). It's a toss-up between the hard and precious versus the fluid and microcosmically sick... a textural and intellectual "freak show." In their debut collection, a long sequenced poem Freakophone World asks of our eyes: "you think you are / a freak of a freak? i am the irradiate landlord of freaks" (52).
Undoubtedly McCartha delights in grotesquely glitching the image sets of basic english, no line ever relying on the idols of cliche or received phrasology—each occult coinage totally their own, somehow populating the paradoxical city on a page of natural skyscrapers growing from the field of Aimé Césaire's concept of Negritude, which he himself summarizes simply as "a resistance to the politics of assimilation" in his Discourse on Colonialism. Of course, this is a gross understatement ("ew") on the brilliance—perhaps irradiance, even—and impact of Césaire's concept, one which Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris correctly position as "our culminating modern movement" in terms of 20th century poetics in their massive anthology undertaking in Poems for the Millenium.
It's important to note Césaire goes on to clarify "that everyone has his own Negritude." Indeed McCartha torques and toys (tragedy and comedy, remember?) their own version of defiance:
"this translucent chub-chub poking through / my spook-smear spook-scape"
Ghastly, at once there and not-there, imminently charged with the bloody remainder of oppressive policy and lust for power the world over by systems still well-rooted in place, if rusting in its late-stage hinges. As McCartha begins in pt. 1 of Freakophone: "if you're hungry / for the end then // HELLO" (24).
As McCartha's speaker (a megaphone? a microphone? the waffle iron quality of them both?) calliopes from its oracular hinterland, “my million tongues / coming up...” the speaker transmutates themselves across species, genus, or the "hidden order" as stated by the book's epigraph of Edouard Glissant, much like the derogatory "freaks" are tucked away out of sight in their tent, often a population of disabled persons in uncomfortable, borderline impossible living conditions. As one circus scholar writes of them, "Onstage, freak shows exploited the continuity between life and performance by having people with disabilities perform everyday tasks: a person with no arms or legs lighting a cigarette; conjoined twins dancing, singing, and turning cartwheels; Lobster Boy tying knots. Likewise utilizing the knotted hyperdiction in terms like "schizospittle" and "lunar leak," McCartha finishes the poem w/ a spasmodic conditional of "if" "if" "if" and the invisibility of a supposedly required "then..."
This is no spoiler alert to frame how the book length poem finishes, as the manuscript is already rotted... it's a matter of a trick of time: reading this book it's as if you can see the hands that hold it decay before your very eyes, the inevitable rot which is holstered inside the flesh, a future clarified through McCartha's tumble set of lexicography. As if to say step-right-up, and guess how many people in this room will one day die...
If Freakophone World registers on the analog, then their forthcoming The Cryptodrone Sequence acts as an extension into the digital... the bread and circuses of Roman distraction at our fingertips, racing along biometric sensors "in the same fetid hole sucking your data from the wet-site" (CS 7). Still expounding on the McSweeney-esque diction, the polyphonic asides of Douglas Kearney, the iffy if not dubious character of the Cryptodrone speaker floats among the paginated technology where "permissions can be added or removed" (CS).
McLuhan: "As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist" (From Cliche to Archetype 13). So again the compounding, violent ghost of so-called civilized history repeats itself: "by spookfall / it's cryptodrone who plays the flute" (CS 5). Like it or not, it seems we've all been caught dancing in the mirror. [**snaps twice** to a beat, badly dances]
"snap twice," states the Freakophone speaker...
"that's the time is takes // for / FOOLS to die alone" (26)
But before the flash in the pan gets its spark... before the sight-gag gets its eye... let's clap a lot and live a little and freak out: it's Madison McCartha, everyone!
Introduction to Stine An / October 11, 2024
I've been lucky enough the past several months to have been swimming in rich conversations on poetics with the poet Stine An, developing when we first crossed internetted paths as comrades with a shared interest in the art of clown. Most recently, she was telling me about her thoughts on that nebulous but tantalizing state of mind that occurs when one reads a book while half-asleep, which in turn renders language as a kind of hallucinogen; how when you read a certain passage, then look up from the codex, the world does not always look the same, has been re- or un- or de-coded—at least for a spell. Until the next trip.
There's a lot of bad acid out there in the world. Gratefully, An's forthcoming debut collection B-Dragon Suite, winner of last year's Nightboat Poetry Prize, set off in my readership the proper whirling rainbow state of mind when "dropping" a book. I can't remember the last time I've read a collection which activates so many textures available to poetry, like a variety show blistering hot: in a matter of minutes inside B-Dragon you experience translation, concrete vispo, poets theater, lyric as lyrics, iconography, code poems, prose poetry, hand-drawn illustrations—all for the low low price of a couple eyes and maybe ears....
The collection pulls us through the eyes and mouths and bodies of a fictional K-pop band, even walking through the warm-up vocals, the songs, the music videos, the modes of production, constantly toying with the Korean language—a display of how the ideogrammatic hanja can multiply in the poet-translator's hands into every possible color, like a prism and sun on a cloudless day. And like any good trip, I'm not sure if the reader is the sun, the poems the prism, or the other way around.
In another sequence of poems, "The Snail Bride and Other Summer Stories," earthy lyrics of love and of brevity are contained by the fragile shell of language, sauced in the slime of snail's mucus, which serves a very pragmatic purpose: to lubricate its slow crawl across the landscape of "slimed glitter, moon balloons, ice cubes." It somehow manages to be tensely erotic, transcendental, and hilarious (it's worth mentioning that An worked in stand-up comedy for nearly ten years before moving to poetry).
Above all, An embraces the fact that one the page, it can do anything: if the stage directions say B-Dragon the lead "wrapper" is bouncing in a hydraulic lowrider, miming pistols with hands, then they are bouncing in a hydraulic lowrider, miming pistols with hands. The poetry of realism here can't get into the cartoonish club (it's also worth mentioning that An is a frequent illustrator as well): An acts as bouncer, tossing them out and asking why would we want more of this brutal reality we already live in? Why would we make two of those?
"The cartoons expose the fact that what parades as civilization is actually barbarism."
—Esther Leslie
Welcome instead to a certain version of earth littered with big guns, big cars, big money... where even "applause is a kind of explosion." Such a dangerous world, of course, is not without its problems. Those seem to have license to parade anywhere they like...
from "Korean Language School in the Key of B-minor":
They tried to take our fucking language from us. Do you understand? You're going to have to give all that up? For what?... So that certain Americans won't laught at you for reading "mirage" out loud as "my rage"?
And the speaker is right, it's bullshit, but the etymology of the word suggests this is the product of being beasts of burden, how capital and colony zooify us daily. Those systems as we know well don't mess around, but neither does An. Her multimodal spiral lights fire to the calliope, rewires the synthesizer, goes big on the drum machine... Brecht's famous little ditty of a question was "in the dark times will there be singing?"... and An's answer comes in a heavy-bassed "yes, we will be bumping, cruising, riding dirty to the dark times until we get the fuck out of them."
Sianne Ngai establishes the new aesthetics of our day to be either cute, zany, or interesting. An's poetics welcomes them all under one paginated roof: zany in concept, cute in emojis, interesting in its unpredictable consequences... like a GRMW video in a funhouse mirror, you see yourself in it... but you question yourself, too.
Zany originally was a noun meaning a comic role, especially that of a servant, in Commedia dell'arte.... yet the paradox of those traveling thespians were both stocked (expected) and improvisatory (unexpected). The job of the zany, according to Ngai, "demand[s] that they be able to take on virtually any job in any moment, in an incessant flow... thus defining the ideal worker of the 19th century industrial capitalism described by Marx: the perpetual temp, extra, or odd-jobber... itinerant and malleable—for whom all labor is abstract and homogenous." (9-10).
Those 17th century people were actors, editors, writers, and performers of their own material—they had no choice but to do it all. To my mind no role of contemporary artist comes closer to taking on this many jobs upon themselves as, you guessed it—the poet. Call it a calling or call it shit work, it doesn't change the fact that we will continue the poetic plod.. until we can't. But for this next set, we can kick our hooves up for a spell, transform into a fly on Stine's brain, tapping your legs to the fantastical snail slime, K-pop, K-kapow, K-blat blat blat...
Rub your wings together and let the buzz tingle your soul: this is bound to be hot shit (**air horn**) Stine An on the mic!
Introduction to Sommer Browning / September 20, 2025
Most of us might be familiar with Nietzsche’s comment that if one stares into the abyss long enough, the abyss will gaze back into you. But what happens if both of y’all get the giggles? More so than any living poet I can think of, Sommer Browning is willing to crack a smile in spite of all space-time’s tragic uncertainties, from her pseudo-psychological diagnostics of “telling you what your problem is” based on your favorite Twilight Zone episode, to a tumbling domino act of ingenious one-liner jokes in the self-described joke book You’re on My Period.
All jokes elicit laughter by some version of incongruity. In other words, a disruption of expectations. And don’t we all know here in our own personal bits and acts that comprise our waking hours: life is full of surprises. But if you reflect back to the last time you really cracked up and lost your shit at something a friend said, or something you saw, and locate that feeling in the body... how it felt to lose control, involuntarily—maybe in the belly, or the cheeks, or the soul... that same biological musculature is activated when grief hits us like a ton of bricks and the TNT plunger gets plunged and we lose our minds to sorrow. It is the clown and the poet both who know better than any how to traverse these great swaths of emotion, unfazed by the slack rope hanging between the two worlds...
This element of the tragic cannot be forgotten, always some tinge of pain behind the giggles. If humor becomes entirely formulaic for the clown, it becomes useless because, as Yale Theater Director and clown teacher Christopher Bayes says, “There is no poetry in it.”
Continually, the clown asks us to do the impossible, for not only must we enhance our comedy deeply with tragedy, but also mask that tragedy: as the narrator of Heinrich Böll’s Nobel Prize-winning novel The Clown emphasizes: the “worst of all clown sins” is “that of arousing pity.” In Wayne Kostenbaum’s novel Circus the mysterious circus artist Orfei states: “That has always been [my] salvation: I can convert any painful subject into circus.” Baudelaire, the mysterious poet agreed, who once said un rire trempé de pleurs qu’on ne voit pas (a laughter wet with tears that people do not see).
Let this be our entry point today: conversion rates of laughter, death, violence, pain, a-yuk amuck a-yuk. The time is right for it, as we all know. Our American hell of insufferable selfishness has finally come home to roost in our own streets instead of everywhere elses. Bayes elsewhere states that laughter “helps.. purge toxins from the body,” and following this clown logic, that by way of making an audience laugh we lengthen their lives as well. This is the spiritual and/or existential trapeze of the clown and poet both, ever-suspended between the bars of the comic and the tragic, of immortality and the brief life of humanity that in actuality is cosmic dust. Let us help each other toward more seconds here on this planet, second-helpings of time. It won’t be easy. We’ll have to do things we never thought we’d have to. To quote the final message of Lucy E. Parsons in her letter “A Word to Tramps”: Learn the use of explosives! (Italics hers, and mine, and yours.) When Dante gets to Paradise after his long ascent from the Inferno, he hears choirs of angels singing. He describes it as “mi sembiana un riso dell universo”—it seemed like the laughter of the universe.
Let’s face the abyss with the poet, the portal, Sommer Browning, just for a bit, everyone, and see if we can’t blow this joint to smithereens, if only for a moment...
Introduction to Alex Tretbar / October 25, 2025
[This introduction was, curiously, missing in my files, and when I called Alex to check if he had a copy, he reminded me that I gave him the only copy—this was the only handwritten intro I had ever done, and only one copy exists!]
Introduction to olga mikolaivna / November 15, 2025
One of my favorite poem titles ever is “Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.” It’s by—yeah, you guessed it—Vladimir Mayakovsky. The whirligig bravado it would take a poet today to offer up a poem examining their (and their art’s) place in space-time with a title like this is I think in short supply. Now I’m not saying that Olga Mikolaivna: A Tragedy has the same egomaniacal swagger as that admirable Russian Futurist—one both olga and I admire and are indebted to—but there is a shared mosaic sensibility and cerebral introspectacle which ping-pongs across my neural circuits when reading either’s work. Olga, who trollops atop that icy surface of postmodernism’s global village from center to center, hut to hut, thinker to thinker. In the circle whose centers are everywhere, olga isn’t afraid to get dizzy with it. In reading her words, whether from her as the creative source or in her mediumistic translation work, its fragments compound until they unleash themselves into the page-mind as prose blocks, line chunks, ice curdling atop the river of time. From Mayakovsky’s “tragedy,”: Have you noticed /...on the foamy necks / of galloping rivers, / the bridges have clasped iron fingers in mourning?” From olga’s: “heavy / rock steady / the heaviness. the formlessness and the heaviness. and the heavy rock. and the form. and the heavy. heave. heave. heave.”
Which is to say, when reading either I’m immersed in the environs of their languages in a way that makes me forget the act of reading, afloat into full experience of the work itself. I read: and I’m there. Cities near and far, real and unreal, populate olga’s map of concerns—not as beacons in the mirage-style of puritanical city on a hill, but a cities in a pit, and in her forthcoming book ““our monuments to Southern California.” she calls them.’’’’ It’s a tripping the fight fantastic outward into a pseudo-ekphrastic lyric essay—one of my favorite genres of writing, by the way, the pseudo-ekphrastic lyric essay—that spills across the highways that hastily suture those cities together—yet keep us apart. A full on-plopping down onto the pedal into the problematic, perhaps bullshit, rhetoric of “freeways,” the same title of American photographer Catherine Opie’s sequence of unpopulated, emptied highways from 1990s SoCal that spurs, if not spurns, the concrete veins of our transportation systems.
The poet Mayakovsky: the optimistic motor-mouth; Opie, the hypotext of olga’s forthcoming book, serves as gauzy mystic of optics, with her “preconception of what history looks like,” as olga frames it. An Opie quote about the pyramids: “The Freeways are the architecture that will be left behind like the pyramids in Egypt.” More often than not the architecture of brutalism is thought of in terms of its vertical—the deeply angular shadow it throws—but highways are overlooked as brutalist structures given their sublunary status—low to the earth, hugging the ditches, ever horizontal. We take them not just for granted, but by decree, especially here in the gulf south, so many livelihoods in so many ways tethered to oil, the way it spills into everyday life.
While meditating on Opie’s photographs, I coincidentally read a Brecht poem, “Song of the Machines” and realized the highways are a kind of sheet music for this song, ambivalent ...
This isn’t a song to the lonely star
It is the wild din of our daily labour
We curse it and we hold it dear
this wild din is the voice of our cities
And it pleases us to sing this song
For this is the language we all understand
And soon it will be the world’s mother tongue...
And Here to tie it in knots is olga mikolaivna....
Introduction to Kai Ihns / January 10, 2026
In her book sundaey, Kai Ihns maximized repetition in a manner that tread-milled a coin on its side of conceptualism and sonic earnestness. Ihns’ newest collection, whose titular prepositional nebula, Of, conjures a brass hinge in a vacuum, or the knob of Ron Padgett’s lineated drawer in which nothing—which is in fact an actual something—resides. I refer to his sonnet in which every one of the 14 lines simply states “Nothing in that drawer.” In an interview he talks about the beauty of how no matter how hard we try, we can’t utter the same word exactly the same, which I’ll alley-oop over to Marjorie Perloff, who reframes Duchamp’s notion of the “infrathin,” in her book of the same name. She reminds us no copy is the same. Duchamp begins his definitions of what constitutes infrathin in a couple of delicious, concrete examples: being able to taste both the remnants of cigarette smoke and saliva in a kiss, the warmth of a subway seat from the person who previously sat there, and so forth. Ultimately, he declares “In time, the same object is not the same after a one-second interval” (Duchamp qtd. in Perloff 3). As Perloff reiterates, “the case is made for difference, however minute, between an A and a B” (Perloff 3).
Ihns’ Of floats this infrathin notion right at the start: “you appear to me through the episode / in which you are appearing as its shape” (from “Hickory”—perhaps the type of wood Padgett’s dresser is made of?). Imagism is sometimes vaporized, other times simply entered as if a metal room and clanging around with a hammer, in lines such as “a beach making fuck.” (“Orange Shadow”), and in yet in others we chase its labor, like a game: “tree swing its fruit through fog who is all moving in stillness,” (“New Year”). This line’s landing pad of paradox is reminiscent of mime teacher Jacques Lecoq’s famous mantra-like philosophy: “tout bouge,” or everything moves.
Yet on the other end of this spectrum there is the painter Rouault’s lament that “Le contour me fuit” (the contour escapes me). Of relays a chase scene in slow-motion of particulate matter, equal messes sign and signifier. But this action flick is refreshingly clear of any of the usual James-Dean-brick-wall-leaning on pop culture references and Pepsi-Cola product placement. Idk, is spinoza like, a celebrity? Did you know he was a skilled lens grinder, like actually, as an occupation? Did you know Natalie Portman has a strong interest in beekeeping? The metaphors are baked in.
What I mean is the poems of Of are cluttered with broken jokes, and it’s what these jokers do next to each other that sheds light on the poetics: do they nudge, bump, clink, clip into one another? Pretend they don’t know one another? Or do they just float like the “ho-hum of ghosts”? Sonics, syntax, or a situationship among silly-billies? (“One of Them Are”) Take for instance, the poem “Gloria”:
through my ceiling now:
huge dog
named Gloria
Huge Gloria Dog
Huge Gloria
she has vulnerable feet
Ihns feels like an oracle who has clocked in at the company for decades, whose desk is high on a mountaintop, who decided ages ago to quiet quit:
I embrace you frailed head
I embrace you, head
Empty of jewel
I embrace you floating on the stoop of the
sea before the sea (“BLISS AND DEATH”)
And here’s her speaker of the longer poem “Repair Hours” at what obviously must be the company retirement party for Gertrude Stein.
Musics of the roof repair, up there, do they freeze? They are a wet waving flag, a drop and weave—there to me through my ceiling, come down. Are you coming there to me, these sounds? I hold up and I open. A vanillic curling up, a rasp, so I’m open. (p. 34)
If Of’s odd combos of words placed side-by-side could be codified, the short poem “ ‘Romantic Ventilation’ ” might act as ars poetica: “the matters are where each other is! // in yes no condition,” who’s punchline on a short leash yips a little later: “little bit of pee”. While there might also be a little Rae Armantrout stuck in Ihns’ teeth, the speaker still smiles unabashedly about it: “the pizza put in my mouth got hot and burnt there” (“Plants As Of”).
Its questions are asked all askance, that are oddly discomfiting. It feels like a tangle of chairs in your skull, as you kind of shake and push their legs around to make them fit haphazardly, queries such as
“Who are still stupid like me?” or “well, what is the thing that can bear? // bear things like “red”.
Is this an aesthetic of off-putting-ness, or putting thingness off its rocker? Language tickers, syntax juggles itself in circles, or other times the balls are just thrown into the sky, never to see earth again. Well, until it crashes back down “like a bread pump.” (“Plants as of”).
The identity markers of a biological epidermis being shed in real time. We are not the same as we were this morning. We will not be the same after this, or any poem, we see in the flesh. That Of-ness, the emphatic invisibility of the everyday hinges that slam open the days—all of time is a hinterland, and here you can breathe in its mist—the ear becomes a mouth, the brain a lung. Here to put some ~weird~weird~weird~ in the Splice wires, tonight, give it up for Kai Ihns!
The Splice Poetry Series was a monthly poetry series in New Orleans at Saturn Bar, hosted by Henry Goldkamp, Sean F. Munro, and Rodrigo Toscano. It ran from January 2022 until April 2026 and had the pleasure of featuring 108 poets over the course of its lifetime.
Henry Goldkamp lives in New Orleans. He teaches clown and cartoon at Louisiana State University, serves as communications director for the New Orleans Poetry Festival, participates in the international artist group Collective Task, and acts as intermedia editor for Tilted House. His books include Not My Circus (Ursus Americanus 2025), JOY BUZZER: A Clown Show (Ricochet Editions 2025), and Balloon Animal (Cloak 2026). More at henrygoldkamp.com.