
Fortino Samano
The Overflowing of the Poem
Omnidawn Publishing
Will be published approx. on 1. October 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
200 pages
978-1-890650-67-4 (ISBN)
Description
Fortino Samano (the overflowing of the poem), translated by Cynthia Hogue and Sylvain Gallais, with French on facing pages, is a collaborative work by the emerging French poet, Virginie Lalucq, and the distinguished philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Lalucq wrote the serial poem, Fortino Samano, after seeing an exhibit of photographs on the Mexican Revolution by Agustin Victor Casasola. Her series is a meditation on the single, extant photograph of Samano, a Zapatista lieutenant and counterfeiter, which Casasola snapped as Samano, smoking a last cigar, appeared to stare death nonchalantly in the face moments before his execution by firing squad (it was reported that he himself gave the order to fire). Little is known about Samano, and Lalucq's poem makes no attempt to be biographical or historical. Rather, she treats the image itself, the fact that the camera caught the image of life just prior to its end. What, then, does the image represent? She asks. Nancy's section, Les debordements du poeme (The overflowing of the poem), is a series of poetic commentaries on each of the poems in Lalucq's series. It is a philosophical contemplation of the specific poem, Fortino Samano, and also, a poetic investigation of the lyric genre, which works hand-in-hand with Lalucq's poems. Fortino Samano is an exciting poetic dialogue, and a significant work in poetics, which Hogue and Gallais have brought into English.
Reviews / Votes
"We all know that the reader collaborates in the text. Here, a reader was given the chance to articulate his reading, which in turn changed the poem. The roles of poet and philosopher seem almost reversed: the poem's language is plain, stripped down, and engages philosophical questions, whereas Nancy attends to words rather in a poet's way, playing with sound, punning ... what we have here is extraordinary: a collaboration that throws light on processes of thinking, poetic or philosophical." --Rosmarie Waldrop, author, Driven to Abstraction "A significant contribution to the literature of phenomenology and a work of groundbreaking scholarship." --Richard Rand, professor, on Listening "It encompasses both philosophy and autobiography, intellectual exploration and examination of feeling." -- Shenandoah Literary on Or Consequence "Nancy is indeed one of the most interesting thinkers in France today." -- Common Knowledge on Being Singular PluralMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Richmond, CA
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 226 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
340 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-890650-67-4 (9781890650674)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Cyntia Hogue is the author of The Never Wife (Mammoth Press, 1999). The Woman in Red (Ahsahta Press, 1989), and has co-edited an anthology of essays on women's avant-garde writing, We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 2001). She currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she directs the Stadler Center for Poetry and teaches at Bucknell University.