Con/Crescent #2

I am very pleased to annouce that the second issue of Jamie Townsend's and Nicholas DeBoer's Con/Crescent is now available in a PDF. This "music" issue features essays by Matthias Regan, Patrick Lucy, and others. It also features a gallery I coedited on contemporary poetry and Rap prosody, with contributions from Lauren Levin, Alli Warren, Dana Ward, Paolo Javier, Chris Martin, Dorothea Lasky, Garrett Caples, and some notes of my own. Thanks to the editors for inviting me to participate, and to the contributors. My editorial statement for the feature is as follows:

After my suggestion under a post at the Poetry’s Foundation Harriet weblog this past spring that Jay-Z might be read in tandem with Louis Zukofsky in terms of their mutual indeterminations of an English lyrical tradition (the “pentameter” post-Pound), the editors at Con/Crescent magazine solicited me to write a short piece about Jay-Z. My response was that the editors and I might propose creating a gallery devoted to contemporary poetry and Rap prosody, to which the editors responded enthusiastically.

The following collates responses to a call for various friends and colleagues whose work we felt to be somehow determined by Rap prosody to respond to the influence of Hip-Hop on their work. I hope it is just the beginning of contemporary poets engaging more critically with the confluences between Hip-Hop culture, Rap music, and innovative poetries.