So What So That
Praise for Marjorie Welish:
"[Welish] challenges 'prettiness' at an almost feverish pitch, working against a poem's anticipated flow even as she moves it along with jazzy verve." —Bookforum
Welish uses the page—not as a surface upon which to buoy language, but as a core construction of the poem, in visual and kinetic relationship with text. One of our most challenging and rewarding poets, the pleasure is to simply marvel.
From "Vamp ('avant pied')":
In laughter you acquit
the betwixt divided
by half and half helped into the indecent
parentheses brooding on
reasoning, resonance--too much reverb
lay in the epilogue
Marjorie Welish is the author of The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems, Word Group, Isle of the Signatories, and In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy, all from Coffee House Press. Her honors include the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship from Brown University, the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship at Cambridge University, and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has held a Senior Fulbright Fellowship, which has taken her to the University of Frankfurt and to the Edinburgh College of Art. She is now Madelon Leventhal Rand DistinguishedLecturer in Literature at Brooklyn College.
