2007 March : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for March, 2007

My suspicion is that most people reading this blog have attended a poetry reading and actually understand what happens there. But as a university professor I have the pleasure of introducing students to poetry readings for the first time. Many of them have never been to a reading and if they even know what happens, usually, they can’t understand the point. Hard to believe when readings are a part of your life. Yet no matter how often it happens, I remain surprised when someone musters up the courage to ask me rather sheepishly, “So what happens at readings?” At first I must seem incredulous, but when I attempt to explain, I begin to wonder about the very idea of readings: “Well. the writer,… well, the writer reads from their work… and… they read.” “So,” they offer, “we listen to someone read a book we could read ourselves—like elementary school?”

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03.31.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Poetry Foundation

GP on Rimbaud

A famous author’s blog has a 5-day hurrah for an Oulipian without rival, a facial hair champion, a wordsman so grand no long intro shall dim my post. I will just show you his initials: GP. (My brain’s jumping with GP anyway, having taught my class all about Oulipo on Monday.)
This blog has lots of cool stuff to absorb, including GP’s lipogrammish “translation” of Rimbaud’s “Vocalisations” (as GP has it), four stanzas that avoid our fifth orthographic symbol and *also* any original Rimbaudian discussion of said symbol…just as I am trying to do right now…

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03.30.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Jeffrey McDaniel

the long road to whitman

Reading Kwame’s confession a couple days ago concerning Whitman made me think of my own meandering path towards the Jolly Big Fellow. When I was in my early twenties, I resisted Old Graybeard, because I didn’t find the wild imagery on a line-by-line basis that I coveted in those days. In fact, I found Old Graybeard kind of boring; I couldn’t figure out what all the hoopla was about—the language seemed too direct and bloated, the sentiments too over-the-top and obvious. Little did I know then that the limitations were inside me, and not the text. Five years ago I returned to Song of Myself and was sliced up into little pieces. Suddenly I was able to see the bigger picture, the democracy of his vision, how the scope of the project was extremely imaginative, that he was using the self as a poetic vehicle, creating a persona who shared his name, expanding way beyond himself.

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03.30.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Fred Sasaki

“You’ll probably hate some of these poems.”

An intern suggests to David Eggers that he publish poetry. Eggers says OK how? Enter The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford, section one in McSweeney’s three-volume Issue 22. Here’s how it works:

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03.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Kwame Dawes

A Confession

So now that we are friends and quite familiar with each other, I have decided that in the spirit of the inevitable degeneration of blogs into self-indulgent confessional statements, I will now make a major confession. I could offer that it is this kind of thing that feeds my poetry—that keeps me grounded in society, that allows me to make art that Whitman would appreciate—not the real Whitman, but the cliché Whitman who embraces the masses and who seeks to find the sublime poetics of everyday existence. Truth is that Whitman, like Wallace Stevens, is a poet that does not give me goose bumps even though I understand that both of them are seriously defining American voices that excite American writers greatly. I have taken to lie and say “I am not really fond of Stevens” just to get a rise out of largely white American male poets between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-six.

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03.28.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Patricia Smith

W.H. (Whatta Hunk) Auden. Sigh…

I have fallen absolutely, irrevocably, unflinchingly in love with W.H. Auden.
I’m ashamed to say that I created a few new expletives when his 897-page collected works popped up on my MFA reading list. I planned to quickly scan the monstrous volume for cool stuff (mentions of lust, free coupons, whatever) and pen a heartfelt, though somewhat cursory, analysis, using words like “sweeping,” “intricate,” “concise” and maybe even “hullabaloo.”
But W.H. is a snaky seducer. I’m reading every page aloud:
Motionless, deep in his mind, lies the past the poet’s forgotten,
Till some small experience wake it to life and a poem’s begotten,
Words its presumptive primordial, Feeling its field of induction,
Meaning its pattern of growth determined during construction.
Now I’m gazing at his craggy, hangdog countenance on the book cover, thinking yea, I would’ve married him in a heartbeat, and we’d be miserable, a tortured couplet for sure, but damn, he writes like a guy who sold his soul to the devil for a pen.
Why didn’t anybody tell me about this before?

03.28.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Jeffrey McDaniel

Bad Hair Day

Overheard yesterday in a coffee shop:
“I see you cut off all your hair.”
“Yeah.”
“What, you got sick of it?”
“No, I donated it to Locks of Love. They’ll make it into a wig for a cancer patient.”
I had long hair once—my junior year of college I had dreads. My hair was kind of curly, and I never brushed it, and it just evolved into dreads organically, meaning I didn’t have to sit in front of a mirror and twist them or anything, which in my mind back then seemed to be false dreads—weren’t they a symbol of looseness, a hands-off approach to life, I thought. So my dreads took care of themselves. At least for a while.

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03.27.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Poetry Foundation

Peel Slowly and See

Let’s make a Venn Diagram. Circle one consists of Einstürzende Neubauten fans; circle two, Dante aficionados. If you’re in the overlapping region, it’s time to check out Radio Inferno (posted at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog), a 1993 collaboration between E.N., Andreas Ammer, and the late great new-music DJ John Peel. (Thanks to Kosiya Shalita for the link.)

03.26.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Patricia Smith

Don’t be boring, please.

Sorry folks, I’ve been out of commission for a few days…at a poetry workshop thingie on Block Island with spotty phone and net access. But I did the “island thing” with gleeful abandon, including the requisite chilly early morning walk along the deserted shoreline accompanied by a manic Golden Retriever, And yes, I began a poem about the ‘twilight of my life.” How could I not?
For reasons I won’t go into here, I also started thinking a lot about folks standing up to read their poems to groups of other folks. I wonder why it’s so difficult sometimes. Can a poet reading an interminable boooorring singsongy ode to himself actually hear that interminable booooring singsongy ode to himself and recognize it for what it is? Can mass yawning among his listeners be interpreted as a clue? Can another poet, whimpering into her hands while the second row strains to hear, finally learn to lift her head and speak as if she actually believes in what she is saying?
I’m here to help.

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03.25.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rachel Zucker

And, Speaking of Mark Wahlberg

I found this conversation on line:
orangecounty888: Hey I was just wondering if anybody out there has any pictures of Mark Wahlbergs dick or package. Hes always been a hunk and I have noticed that he’s done Calven Klein ads and such. So please post some pictures if you have any!
Thanks.
dfox7×3.5: Mark’s huge cock in Boogie Nights was a prosthesis. When the movie came out he even called a news conference to explain that it wasn’t him. That was very cool of him. He’s a cool guy.
mattness: Mark also said in another interview, when asked about the prosthesis (paraphrasing), “At first when I heard about it, I was offended, because…I’m not so bad, you know what I mean? But then I saw it and said, “ohhhhh, ok…I get why you want it now…it’s HUGE!”"
jonb:AFAICT, there are no real nude images of Mark Wahlberg. I’ve seen several fake ones; a few were stupid enough to claim Mark Wahlberg was uncircumcised.
DerSchwanz: I don’t think Mark Wahlberg is Jewish. He’s one of nine kids (We don’t usually have families that big), and according to his bio on www.us.imdb.com, he “Is of Swedish, Irish, German and French Canadian descent.”
Jonb: Anything with berg in it’s Jewish. Ditto for gold, stein, and fein.
DoubleMeatWhopper: Frankenstein was Jewish? :blink:
Proudly_Italian: Ever heard about Golem, dublemeat?
Lapdog2001: I went to school with a bunch of Wahlbergs in the Boston area (not Mark or Donny), none of whom were Jewish.
jonb:Donny’s Jewish. I’m pretty sure Mark is too. Just it’d be strange if he broke the rule.
As for Frankenstein, the doctor was. In fact, the whole story’s based on the Golem of Prague.
(For more excellent literary and cinematic criticism like this—can your students make connections between Mark Wahlberg and Mary Shelley this artfully?—you can visit the Large Penis Suport Group website.)

03.25.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Archive for March, 2007

Kwame Dawes

The Reading

Poetry Foundation

GP on Rimbaud

Jeffrey McDaniel

the long road to whitman

Fred Sasaki

“You’ll probably hate some of these poems.”

Kwame Dawes

A Confession

Patricia Smith

W.H. (Whatta Hunk) Auden. Sigh…

Jeffrey McDaniel

Bad Hair Day

Poetry Foundation

Peel Slowly and See

Patricia Smith

Don’t be boring, please.

Rachel Zucker

And, Speaking of Mark Wahlberg

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Archive for March, 2007

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