The Form of Our Uncertainty: A Tribute to Gil Ott

Overview

From Kristen Gallagher's introduction to The Form of Our Uncertainty:

"Evidence of Gil Ott's proficiencies have been left in spray paint and street-corner soliloquies, as well as in his work of editing and publishing the poetry and prose of writers practicing diverse tactics and politics. One thing has concerned him consistently: 'the struggle to articulate.'  His acceptance of uncertainty and his history of stirring things up in status-quo-ville are the defining qualities of Gil Ott's poetics. One thing Gil says he has often reacted against is the assumption that 'people seek out order'  

Perhaps much of Gil's work gets its distinctive edge from his ability to hold tensions and attune to complex, often contradictory senses. In all of Gil's work one can find a certain pleasure he refers to as 'the satisfaction of articulation' – a presence of hearing and saying, of finding relation through more relation."

Author Biography

Kristen Gallagher’s most recent poetry collection is We Are Here (Truck Books, 2011). Since then: Florida, a chapbook from Well Greased Press, Dossier on the Site of a Shooting, a multiplatform digital work on GaussPDF, and Untitled (Rosewood Trip), text with screenshots, in Printed Web 3. Her essay Cooking a Book with Low Level Durational Energy; or, How to Read Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies just came out in Reading the Difficulties from University of Alabama Press, and her essay “Teaching Freire and CUNY Open Admissions” was recently anthologized in Class and the College Classroom: Essays on Teaching. She is a professor of English at City University of New York–LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York.

She has been a longtime friend of the activist, publisher, and poet Gil Ott, a mainstay of American independent poets for 40 years.