ABOUT THE BOOKS:Danny Hayward‘s Training Exercises:‘Organized violence committed on ordinary speech’ is therapy for those who don’t believe in literature as value. Training Exercises is an unpacking of that dictum: seven short essays, letters, reports and anti-biographies written to overcome the feeling of resistance to the defacement of what strikes us as true. An anti-purge written out by lipstick or hammer, scrawled over the top of itself and run through a translation program that turns everything upside inside down, its pieces include: a polemic against catharsis; a letter to the poet Dom Hale on his book Seizures; and a series of on-the-spot reports on the UK Illegal Migration Bill, East London poetry readings, the politics of the war in Ukraine, and a conversation about the meaning of damage in contemporary literature.‘First you learn to write down your ideas, then you learn again how to write all of your lurid political and intellectual and intimate disappointments and all of your childhood hopes over the top of them’. Jack Spicer scrawled the name of his book in pink lipstick on the cover of the academic journal he had published in: Training Exercises scrawls itself on top of that.Danny Hayward‘s most recent poetry collection is Loading Terminal (87 Press, 2022). More recent work, along with an earlier collection of critical essays, can be accessed at Free Trials Matthew Goulish’s Kingfisher:The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: ‘Kingfisher’ by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised turns? How also and at the same time to attend to an interruption – an accidental sighting – with equal curiosity? Sincerity follows the lines of the poem inside and outside, inward and outward, drawing in a series of correspondences and correspondents, roots and sources, until reading becomes a collective endeavor; the words of Ed Roberson, Michelle Sherburne, Renee Gladman, and Lyn Hejinian are also here. As the subject of this particular poem surfaces, to catch a glimpse is not so obviously a gift: the practice of catching sight might also be injurious to another’s freedom. And so we follow the trail of the poem through Smuggler’s Notch.About the author: Matthew Goulish co-founded Every house has a door in 2008 with Lin Hixson. He is dramaturg, writer, and sometimes performer with the company. He was a founding member of Goat Island, the Chicago-based performance group that existed from 1987 to 2009. His books include 39 microlectures – in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2001), The Brightest Thing in the World – 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure (Green Lantern Press, 2012), Work from Memory: In Response to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, co-authored with Dan Beachy-Quick (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and Pitch and Revelation—Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, co-authored with Will Daddario (Punctum Books, 2022). His essays have appeared in Richard Rezac Address (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Propositions in the Making – Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the Writing Program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
