Unusual Woods

Aesthete and Propagandist: An Interview with Gene Tanta

by Brooks Lampe December 10, 2010 Aesthetics

In the introduction to you refer to your poems as “ghost sonnets.” Why “ghost sonnets?” And what prompted you to (a) select a definitive form, the sonnet, in which to write the poems and (b) to shave a line off the form? I call them “ghost sonnets” because they’re missing the 14th line of a [...]

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A Ghost (Sonnet) in Gene Tanta’s “Unusual Woods”

by Brooks Lampe November 8, 2010 Header

Last time, we saw that in his critical introduction to , Gene Tanta wants us to approach his poetry both as immigrant poetry (which means a couple of things) and for its aesthetic value. I postulated that he accomplishes a dialectic between “local” and “universal” through strategies that extend and enrich Deep Image and surrealist [...]

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Gene Tanta’s Illuminated Chapbook

by Micah Towery October 1, 2010 Header
The Cartographer Electric is Dead

A few years back, I met at a writing conference in Binghamton, NY. We ended up talking metaphysics and Marxism and Beat poetics deep into the night. After Gene left, we kept in touch and Gene ended up contributing to The Cartographer Electric! the magazine I helped found as an undergrad at Binghamton. After I [...]

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