I’ll be signing my new book, Arsenal/Sin Documentos, at my publisher, CLASH Books, table on Friday, March 29th from 2:00 pm-3:00 pm. Stop by!
Click here for conference info.
I’ll also be doing an AWP offsite reading:
CLASH Books Offsite AWP Reading
Friday, March 29, 2019 at 7 PM – 10 PM
EAST SIDE DELICATESSEN
1109 S.E. Madison St. Portland, OR 97214
Pre-order here: https://www.clashbooks.com/new-products-2/francesco-levato-arsenalsin-documentos-preorder
“Francesco Levato reveals the sinister undertow of the bureaucratic language in the American state’s enforcement codes. This is dystopian poetry, enmeshed with verbal machines of terror. Arsenal/Sin Documentos enacts a Promethium struggle to break free.”
-Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss
“Here is the music saved from the savagery of “documentos.” Unearthing the lyric voice in the machinery of the state, from policies and protocols, Levato shows us that what is withheld is what is truly alive, the silence breathes.”
-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
“Francesco Levato’s Arsenal/Sin Documentos is a courageous book. More importantly, it is a necessary book. Every discourse is constructed with an intention, and this type of poetry demands a ruthless, fearless deconstruction of that discourse in order to reveal the truth.”
-Gabino Iglesias, author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs
More at: https://www.clashbooks.com/clash/2019/3/20/arsenalsin-documentos
A discussion of the poetics of my new book, Arsenal/Sin Documentos, from CLASH Books.
Excerpt:
CM:
One of the reasons why I was drawn to your poems is their alignment with documentary poetics. Joseph Harrington’s Tracking Teaching monograph, which is a dossier of practical and theoretical ideas about docpo featuring poets such as Allison Cobb and Kaia Sand in conversation, Philip Metres, Donovan K?hi? Colleps, and others, places emphasis on the preservation of memory, which to me suggests questions concerning epistemology. Mark Nowak calls docpo a “modality” which “participates in the social field” in a short essay over at Poetryfoundation.org and connecting this with Harrington’s introduction to his Tracking/Teaching monograph, which seeks the rewriting and reclaiming of the archive as an aid to the preservation of memory, implies docpo as a mode of investigating methodologies concerning epistemology, among other notions. With this and your poems in mind, do you see them as making an epistemological intervention through poetic discourse?
FL:
I view my documentary work as part archaeological practice—excavating language that might otherwise be hidden and bringing it to light—and part activism in that I use that language to subvert or resist the dominant discourse. The poems from Arsenal/Sin Documentos use the language of the State against it, documenting how the state constructs the Latin American body.
An important note here: as I was preparing for this interview I tried to access “With Liberty and Justice for All: The State of Civil Rights and Immigration Detention Facilities,” the original document used for the construction of the poem “The Maggot Allegations,” and found that it had been erased from the public archives at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights website (if you search the site it still appears in the results, but clicking the link results in a “page not found” error). For me, this reinforces an essential function of documentary poetics; the preservation of important public documents in the face of systematic institutional erasure.
Read full interview here.
New work in the summer issue of Rise Up Review — featuring poems By Anastasia Jill, Anuja Ghimire, Buffy Shutt, Caitlin Gildrien, Catherine Anderson, Catherine Kyle, Da Borer, D.A. Gray, David Davies, D.R. James, Elizabeth Sunflower, Emma Scott Schaeffer, Francesco Levato, Frederick Wilbur, Ghada Khalil, J. Spagnolo, Jane Ann Fuller, Janette Schafer, Jed Myers, Joe Cottonwood, Joel Peckham, Julie Naasko Deutscher, Kari Gunter-Seymour, Kristin Garth, Laura Theis, Lesley Wheeler, Matthew Murrey, Max Heinegg, Megan Merchant, Michelle Brooks, Peggy Dobreer, Raphael Joseph, Robbi Nester, Roscoe Burnems, Sandra Faulkner, Sarah Stockton, Taylor Portela, Timothy Tarkelly, And Bill Greenfield
Read here: http://www.riseupreview.com/Francesco-Levato.html
Very happy to have a feature from my new project, Active Conflict Zones, in Cleaver Magazine. Active Conflict Zones Is A Series Of Visual Poems Constructed With Language Appropriated From Executive Order 13780, Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States, And Screen Captures Of Digital Video Compression Artifacts Found Between Frames In Battle Beyond The Sun, An Americanized, English-Dubbed, Version Of The 1959 Soviet Science Fiction Film Nebo Zovyot.
Read here: https://Www.Cleavermagazine.Com/Active-Conflict-Zones-By-Francesco-Levato/
Many thanks to Mark Young for publishing poems from my forthcoming book, Arsenal/Sin Documentos, in the new issue of Otoliths.
Read here: https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2018/02/francesco-levato.html
Issue 22 of Matter, featuring the phenomenal and powerful words of Leah Umansky, Vanessa Villarreal, Matea Kuli?, Lorenzo Carlucci (translated by Todd Portnowitz), Anne Champion, Emily Viggiano Saland, Marc McKee, Francesco Levato, Sasha Haines-Stiles, Franklin KR Cline, Michael Marberry, Benjamin Harnett, and Sarah Giragosian, and the stunning visual art of Jazz Szu-Ying Chen!
We invite you to the first reading for fall 2017 for Non-Standard Lit at Gym Standard, Sunday, October 1 at 5 pm, featuring one extraordinary reader and one extraordinary performer: Francesco Levato & baby.
https://www.facebook.com/events/493169904377149/
Read More “Reading for Non-Standard Lit – Oct. 1, 2017″
My chapbook, A Continuum of Force, was just published by Moria Books/Locofo Chaps, many thanks to publisher William Allegrezza.
A Continuum of Force is a selection of poems from a larger documentary poetics project that examines the material implications of Latin American otherness as constructed through U.S. policy, in the case of the poems collected here via the erasure of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Use of Force Policy, Guidelines and Procedures Handbook—a set of policies that discursively constructs a criminalized other while authorizing physical harm to that other.
This fall I’m teaching Digital Poetics: Introduction again at the Chicago School of Poetics. The class is an introduction to digital literature, with a specific focus on poetry. During the course of the session students will examine a variety of digital forms of literature, from hypertext, interactive, and audio/video poetry to videogame, social media, and code-based poetries. Students will view, experience, and immerse themselves in these digital works while exploring their own poetry through multiple modes of digital creation.
Registration is open now, and more information can found here.