STEPHENS, Paul; DURBIN, Andrew (eds.)
Convolution #4

This issue of Convolution was published in conjunction with the exhibition, Sought Poems, at Company, NYC, in 2016. A few words from the PR of the show: “Sought Poems considers the legacy of minimal and found poetry in new work by Natalie Czech, Aram Saroyan, and Jason Simon. The poet K. Silem Mohammad, in a 2005 essay considering then-recent poetic movements that challenged the notion of authorship, writes that the ‘sought poem’ is extrapolated from the ‘found poem’. Whereas the idea behind found poems is that they’re just something you stumble upon and say hey, that’s poetry, I’m thinking of a process of aggressively looking for something, with the intent of enlisting it in some capacity. Sought poems come about as the result of invasive surgeries performed on already-mangled bodies. The poet knows those happy—or unhappy, as the case may be—accidents of language are out there, but it may take repeated sallies into the underbrush before they are flushed out. The sought poem is not passively awaited, but teased, prodded, hectored into existence. The poet thus assumes a level of involvement that in many ways is very old-school: She once again puts her manipulative ego into full gear, and becomes responsible for aggressively intentional structures.”

With contributions by Etel Adnan, Chris Alexander, Harry Burke, Natalie Czech, Andrew Durbin, Craig Dworkin, Kristen Gallagher, Robert Grenier, Diana Hamilton, Forsyth Harmon, Karl Holmqvist, Juliana Huxtable, Josef Kaplan, Shiv Kotecha, Sophia Le Fraga, Astrid Lorange, Holly Melgard, Nick Montfort, Kim Rosenfield, Aram Saroyan, Jacolby Satterwhite, Kit Schluter, Jason Simon, Carlos Soto Román, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Steve Zultanski, We Have Photoshop.

Published by Convolution, 2016
Design by We Have Photoshop
Periodicals / Poetry / Artists' Writings