This is upsetting.

"Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius." Blake

HATING AI IS GOOD! I have believed this. It’s good to have beliefs. To believe in the human brain and its worth. To work to preserve our dignity as a creative species.

Our Lady of Flowers Moby Dick The Sound and the Fury

Split / Game of Little Deaths by Réka Nyitrai is out in two weeks! We’re honored to have these four masterful poets blurb this strange & surreal 2-in-1 book. @noahfalck.bsky.social / @vikshirley.bsky.social / @johannesg.bsky.social / Mikko Harvey

“Zurita’s poetry is constantly accumulating mystical, iconic qualities while engaged with issues of violence in and against the body... This insistence on the wounded body and the wounded landscape both gives rise to a sense of allegory and disrupts the allegory.” substack.com/home/post/p-...

Great new issue of Mercury Firs, one of the best new poetry journals. Including poems by Mexican poet Berona Teomitz, translated by my student Adriana Toledano Kolteniuk: www.mercuryfirs.org/8-berona-teo...

I wrote this essay about Raul Zurita for the wonderful Swedish journal 10tal (now 20tal) when they introduced Zurita in Swedish. Here it is in English on my Substack account: johannesgransson.substack.com/p/the-limitl...

"the reason I’ve done the things I’ve done is simply because I found them beautiful. It’s beautiful to see a poem of madness, love, and death traced on the sky." - Raul Zurita

Super congratulations to Action Books author Raúl Zurita, who has been awarded a Griffin Lifetime Achievement Award. He's been such a profound influence on me over the past couple of decades. Pleased to see his work recognized this way. griffinpoetryprize.com/press/announ...

I often think about that old norse story where the hero eats the dragon’s heart and suddenly he can understand bird song. (The birds all tell him his friend is going to kill him.)

Was working on something but fell into the Warhol Hole, writing about Warhol, Dylan and @jhoberman.bsky.social 's brilliant book Everything is Now: open.substack.com/pub/johannes...

New Aase Berg poem, "Feminist Depression," from her new book Aase's Death up at Poetry Daily: poems.com/poem/feminis...

Here's a poem by great Argentinian modernist Oliverio Girondo. It's from his great last - and most experimental, erotic. and combustive (so much for "late" writing being subdued) - En la masmedula, translated almost incomprehensibly wonderfully by Molly Weigl (In the moremarrow, Action Books).

If you watch and share one thing today make at this. Why is every democrat in the country not talking like this?

Just got back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival. A great time - grassroots poetry is alive and well in this country. One poet asked me to grind up her book in a blender and drink it. Another told me he was "a big fan of Goransson's work" (we had no name tags). Strong recommend. nolapoetry.com

Chicagoans make sure you check out this event!

Helena Boberg tr. Johannes Göransson

even if you don't care about the accompanying writing prompt, I share one unreleased poem here every Sunday morning Recent writers include: Johannes Göransson, Claire Hopple, Tom Snarsky, Vi Khi Nao, Jay Besemer, Zan de Parry, Joanna Ruocco, Todd Dillard, Michael Bazzett neonpajamas.substack.com

I wrote a substack about some recent poems and the much-maligned idea of "poetry as therapy," which I used to dismiss but now understand differently. johannesgransson.substack.com/p/poems-abou...

Attending a lecture on the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld prompted me to write some thoughts in response (and on CADA and Zurita): substack.com/home/post/p-...

Congratulations to Joyelle McSweeney for winning a Windham-Campbell Prize. A lovely surprise.

Wrote a post about this poem (by Lars Norén, 1970) on substack: substack.com/home/post/p-...

New from Action Books! Leia Penina Wilson's Call the Necromancer! "What is necromancy if not a refusal of order? Wilson’s ecstatic narrator is narrative’s transcendent rejector"[email protected] "written at a blistering pitch in the key of Cassandra"-Lara Glenum actionbooks.org/leia-penina-...

"...Berg’s shocking guinea pigs and how the poems made me feel like I felt the first time I ever Tori Amos, aged 13: winter-bad-good and crisp and freed up for comedy... girl rage charge" Olivia Cronk's "stock room picks" from the Action Books back catalog: www.google.com/url?q=https:...

"The bloody ones the long-haired ones the wind-shaping ones" The Whitmanesque beginning of Jaime Saenz's Death at the Very Touch (trans Ted Dodson):

"I had said goodbye back in my youth, and after many years I understood, when I realized I was in love with the cold. And now I am in the cold— here I am writing about it... " - Jaime Saenz, from "The Cold"

ABSTRACT DEADLINE EXTENDED TO APRIL 1 What Miracle: New Revelations on the Prose Poem A Prose Poetry Network Conference at the University of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway More details here: call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/02/...

"Incantation or hex? Curative or curse? Buzzing, clomping, and crying out solilo-quies, Leia Penina Wilson’s call the necromancer performs boldly on the page. Be medusa’d, be transmogrified" New from Action Books today: Call the Necromancer by Leia Penina Wilson: actionbooks.org/leia-penina-...

Released TODAY: a new book by the great Bolivian poet JAIME SAENZ (translated by Kit Schluter and Ted Dodson). "With Blakean intimacy, these two sequences trace a double path through life and death, a cosmic and compact universal guide." actionbooks.org/jaime-saenz-...

“A dance of resemblances and dissemblances. A mess of mimicry.” 🎭 Split / Game of Little Deaths, a two-in-one book by Réka Nyitrai, is out in May & this blurb by @johannesg.bsky.social is A+

There ought to be a law against Henry coming around… Weird that I have never read anyone point out that Bob Dylan's ”Ballad of a Thin Man” is something of an homage to Berrymans Dream Songs. Is it too obvious of a point? Anyway Id be interested to know if theres any mention of this anywhere?

Might be a couple more additions to the lineup 🤫 but here's what we have in store for Wednesday! Starting AWP on a high note

New books from Action Books coming this spring! Two Poems by Jaime Saenz (trans Schluter/Dodson) and Call the Necromancer by Leia Penina Wilson. The Saenz includes the long poems The Cold and Death at the Very Touch. Both visionary masterpieces.

"Memory is mortal. Some evenings, Billie Holiday lays her sick rose in my ears." - Antonio Gamoneda (trans. Hedeen/Nunez)

"Almadhoun, formed in the crucible of diaspora and residing now between Stockholm and Berlin, is more an Aimé Césaire refreshed for an age of post-9/11 neoliberalism and identity politics." - Alex Tan on Ghayath Almadhoun's I Have Brought You A Severed Hand clereviewofbooks.com/ghayath-alma...

"The voice in the poem is not your friend." - Sean Bonney

Because it's Valentine's Hating love Roque Dalton Without your hands my heart is the enemy in my chest.

I wrote a substack post about the superb podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" and Bob Dylan, genius, corruption, mimicry: open.substack.com/pub/johannes...

rarefilmm.com/2017/07/abis... Wuthering Heights? A blatant hacienda melodrama that camps out on poverty row, pushing mediocre actors & hyperbolic montage to the max, before blasting triumphantly into the stratosphere, Luis Bunuel's 1954 Mexican version is a true surrealist classic.

The wheel upon which Minnesota broke them

Great to see a lot of groundbreaking new work in translation from the Scandinavian countries. This morning Im reading Mette Moestrup’s brilliant To the Most Beautiful (trans Ögaard-Jensen, @coimpress.bsky.social ) which uses nine different formal system (”magical machines”) to engage with Beauty.

ICE AGENTS ARE FOLLOWING OBSERVERS TO THEIR HOMES. THEY ARE DOING THE EXACT SHIT JOHNSON SAYS IS INTOLERABLE!

This is the 38th time that the U.S. military has unlawfully killed civilians on the orders of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump. At least 130 people — never charged with crimes, their identities unknown to their executioners — are now dead.

Had a discussion about this yesterday so I'm posting a link to it again. And to @neonpajamas.bsky.social 's prompts. I think I called it a "haiku" bc of the snow: "The poems which maybe at first were written in a crystal ink were meant to protect me against the snow’s beautiful gestures"

Read six poems by Ann Jäderlund, translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson, in WPR 8: worldpoetryreview.org/2023/05/17/a... WPR is currently open for submissions for issue 13! Translators of poetry encouraged to apply! worldpoetryreview.org/submissions/ #translation #poetry #poems #poem

Joyelle McSweeney on Claude Cahun: "the writing is rambunctious with puns and made singular by its instinct to drive all syntaxes toward the plural. It's also stylish, sexy, and funny, a kind of handbook of what Cahun called "angel slang." hyperallergic.com/claude-cahun...

AWP 💥 BALTIMORE 🚨 Mark your calendars‼️ It’s all happening on March 4. See you there?