AML Online Book Club: Irreantum Long-form Poetry Readings, Jan. 22

The AML Online Book Club held a reading with the editor and poets of the recent Irreantum Long-form Poetry issue on January 22, 7pm Mountain Time. Among the participants were editor Michael Collings, and featured poets Theric  Jepson, Makoto Hunter, James Goldberg, Steven L. Peck, JS Absher, Daniel Cooper, and Bruce T. Forbes.

On February 19, 7pm, Mountain Time, we will be discussing Rachel Rueckert’s memoir East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon With Marriage. Rachel will join us to answer questions about the book.

Editor Michael Collings said of the Irreantum poems:

“The eight poets represented here demonstrate the range of possibilities for long poetry while dividing neatly into two distinct approaches. The first four have each created forms and structures that enhance their themes. Makoto Hunter exploits varying line length in her study of Emma Smith’s internal and external states as she contemplates her husband’s martyrdom and the ramifications for her, for her son, and for the Church Joseph helped establish. Steven L. Peck’s finely crafted couplets—painfully sparse, at times cryptic, lacking in formal punctuation—reflect the world he posits. Mark D. Bennion uses a different physical typography, working in eight ten-line blocks, sonnet-like in their impact, to represent the passage of time in the title. And J.S. Absher’s anatomization and dramatization of a key moment in the Book of Mormon depend upon the full scope of modern poetics to transport readers into a scene that is at once past and present, thematically locked in time and linguistically timeless.

The remaining four take a different tack. Here, readers can trace centuries of long-form traditions as the poets pay homage to powerful voices from the past. James Goldberg envisions a new wasteland, overtly modeled on one of the most influential long poems of the 20^th century, T.S. Eliot’s 1922 The Waste Land. Daniel Cooper moves back in time to capture the tone and texture of Dante’s 14,000-line Divine Comedy, applying the earlier poet’s rhyme, meter, and stanza form to a poem uniquely suited to the contemporary audience of Irreantum. Theric Jepson approaches long-form tradition and poetic homage from a different direction, transforming the theme of the medieval chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight while retaining the 14^th-century poem’s distinctive alliteration and stanzaic structures. In the final poem represented here, Bruce T. Forbes takes on arguably the most challenging of long-poem forms, Miltonic blank verse—challenging because it is at once easy to imitate and difficult to master and wield as one’s own.”