Summer Edition of Poetic Labor Project Features Jamie Townsend, Anna Vitale, Josef Kaplan, and Catherine Wagner

The newest installment of The Poetic Labor Project is up, featuring a "new set of texts considering poetry, politics, and labor" by Jamie Townsend, Anna Vitale, Catherine Wagner, and Josef Kaplan. What a lineup, seriously. You can read these beauts at the blog or download them as a PDF. For now, might we fawn over Cathy Wagner: "I work at a park-like sharecropper estate called a university. I am not myself a sharecropper; I am an associate professor of creative writing." And Josef Kaplan, who says, "Fuck even thinking about your stupid fucking job." Anna Vitale writes in third person about psychoanalysis, which made her work as poet and scholar possible. Jamie Townsend writes it all in a poem. A bit from that:

THREE JOBS (from SHADE IN 3 PARTS)

work-hardened the former
weak aenemic flesh every-
bodies working again, on breaks
fucking up in the parks hands
compressing beds pathways
or words given sanction no
longer waiting for a public body
politic chosen to reinscribe a dance
of muscle & thought over futures
projection down avenues now
overgrown w/ intimate histories un-
earthed rootwork buried in
nerves attuned to our beds
growth our mass reconstructed
memory finally standing at
the end to form a living horizon

[...]

Read all of the summer responses--and those from the archive--here.