When Jake Levine submitted work to me for EOAGH a few months back, the first thing I noticed was that his poetry was doing some things I have never seen before. From starting a poem with the jarring “Say high to your mom for me” to using the phrase “blow on a mirror” as both a noun and a verb, Levine’s poems sound very contemporary and are taking interesting risks. But it’s not just hipness, there’s a consciousness and an emotional intelligence here that is synthesizing different kinds of experiences as he proceeds. A further revelation of his process, which could be a late version of David Shapiro’s “Devil’s Trill Sonata” or Tenney Nathanson’s procedural games with intertexts, reveals that Levine often writes these poems collaboratively with different kinds of online music programs, taking turns with Pandora or whatever song is playing at the moment. The underlying dynamic here is thus something like an exchange between the shuffle function and acts of listening or improvising. And this originality isn’t confined to Levine’s works on the page. Charles Alexander notes that “Jake Levine is a firesteed. Traditionally, a particularly marvelous horse was said, by poets, to have ‘bones of flame.’ Jake Levine has for the last few years burned through the poetic landscape of Tucson, Arizona, calling us all to the post. I would join him for a pre or post-race beer anywhere, any time.” Please welcome Jake Levine to the EOAGH Reading Series.
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