Fact-Simile 8 (2012)

The new issue of Fact-Simile, “a large-format (8.5 x 11) literary journal published annually,” is now available.

This issue features an interview with Rebecca Brown by Elizabeth Rollins and new work from: Rebecca Brown, Nate Pritts, Craig Watson, Zeke Hudson, Mark Young, Noah Falck, C.S. Carrier, Megan Burns, Christine Reilly, Jacob Bennett, Dennis Etzel Jr., David Wanczyk, Kimberly Alidio, Pattie McCarthy, Genna Kohlhardt, Scott Abels, Nicholas Grider, Laura Neuman, Kristi Maxwell, Chris McCreary, Jennifer Phelps and Bern Porter. Yes, Bern Porter!

In the back, there’s also a lovely little review of Cutting Time with a Knife:

Thanks to the editors for this inclusion.  I’m particularly enjoying the found poem by Bern Porter that graces the back cover of the issue.

I reviewed the re-issue of Porter’s magisterial Found Poems (Nightboat Books, 2011) in Hyperallergic back in February. This is my concluding paragraph:

Porter has said, “Confronting the bombed buildings, the concentration camps and the gulags, artists had the choice of saying nothing or transforming anything that came to hand into something new.” This is, of course, a logical fallacy, a false dichotomy: artists did indeed have more options in responding to the traumas of the twentieth century; nevertheless, Porter’s statement suggests a compelling way around the Adornian dilemma that “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” His post-lyrical founds constitute a major statement about the status of knowledge and art after Hiroshima. Like Adorno, who, with Max Horkheimer, wrote The Dialectic of the Enlightenment during World War II, Porter acutely grasped that the so-called progress of science and technology had led to regress, that rationality had become irrational. Porter’s multi-volume series of founds amount to a kind of counter-encyclopedia, a massive archive of obscure fragments that refuse instrumentalization, a repository of fractured knowledge that, in its glorious indecipherability, stands in tacit protest to the ravages of modernity.

~ by Michael Leong on December 21, 2012.