Lemon (Hostile Books reprint) :: Ryan Kaveh Sheldon

An Excerpt

yr wager: we submit
our unsatisfied dead

to the reality test
of epistolary solicitation.

so we spell inter-
-locutor a ghost
well throated, a machine

THE MANUSCRIPT

Lemon—first published in a lemon juice-printed edition by Hostile Books in 2015—is a poetic series that channels or translates the spirit of Jack Spicer. In Asbestos, Duct Tape, Willow Bark, Sheldon describes the process:

I wanted a poem made out of real objects, a lemon with a lemon, a dead sparrow that’s a dead sparrow. There was a way in which we could generate this weird kind of pun around that in the sense that we’re going to take the agonized conceptual matter or drama of him thinking about what language can indicate and just say ‘It is made out of lemons! It is real lemons!’ Let’s just totally cut the knot in a way that one has to imagine Jack Spicer would be incensed by….

Then I was like okay, but what do I do with the translational quality of After Lorca? … Not speaking Spanish myself, let me, with a dictionary, just convert a bunch of Jack Spicer’s poems into storehouses of nouns, of objects. I’m not going to worry about translating the poems, I’m going to just pick out all of the objects and then translate them by looking them up in a Spanish-English dictionary. And then I was like let me do a homo-optic translation. Let me look up this word now and retranslate it into English.

THE AUTHOR

Ryan Kaveh Sheldon is Assistant Professor of English at Middlebury College. His research examines the interplay of quantitative reasoning, colonial governance, and form in long eighteenth-century British Atlantic writing. His creative and critical work has appeared in Small Po[r]tions, Poor Claudia, wildness, DIAGRAM, and Jacket2. With Veronica Wong and Joe Hall, he co-edited Hostile Books, a micro-press/book arts collective.

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