Archive for March, 2007
Kwame Dawes
And What of the Haiku?
A few years ago, I was going through the sometimes frustrating but always engaging task of putting together a collection of poems. The poems were all there, but the task was the architecture of the book—the organization of the manuscript. Then I had a brainwave that I am sure many others have had. Let me create these choric codas throughout the manuscript that would signal mood changes and serve as epigraphic accents at key points in the manuscript. The idea kept getting better and better. I had been writing haiku as something of a lark, and I really had not shown these to anyone and barely looked at them myself, but in the heat of creative thinking, I could tell already that these haiku would serve as the perfect section dividers for the manuscript. This same heat may explain why I would not admit to myself then that this was hardly an original idea, one that must have occurred to other poets in the past. So I pulled out the haiku, stuck them in and put away the manuscript with a self-satisfaction that few of us know. Some days later I came back to admire my handiwork. What a disappointment!
Rachel Zucker
On Not Writing
It’s been a while since I’ve written a new poem. While I was at AWP I wrote a 27 word ode to sexy-man Mark Wahlberg, but other than that, nary a poem since October when I wrote a “this happened then this happened” short super-realist poem. Last summer I wrote a five-page miscarriage poem and a short anti-Bush poem inspired in part by the Wave Books Poetry Bus. Nothing last Spring. Two poems in Fall of 2006. Six poems in a year and a half, including my Mark Wahlberg masterpiece. Not nothing, but not much either.
Jeffrey McDaniel
James Dickey’s top 10 poets of 1971
Bought a copy of Crux, The Letters of James Dickey, the other day at a very good used bookstore, Alias on Sawtelle in West LA, and stumbled upon this bizarrism. According to the book, in 1971, Gordon Lish proposed that a well-known photographer take pictures of the “top ten US poets”, and then James Dickey would write a paragraph response to each, stating why he was a superior poet. Lish suggested among others: Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, J.V. Cunningham, (someone should have told him to change his name away from junior varsity), Allen Ginsberg, Galway Kinnell, Alan Dugan, and Howard Nemerov. James Dickey wrote back to Lish’s proposal:
Jeffrey McDaniel
more about Los Angeles
One cool thing about being a poet in Los Angeles, (a strange positive that perhaps came from being in the shadow of Hollywood, faraway from the power brokers of the literary world), was that when I met other literary writers I was genuinely excited, and there was a lot of space for unconventional things to happen organically. For instance, in 1999, I was hosting an event at Beyond Baroque to raise money to take six high school poets to a teen poetry festival in New Mexico, and one of the featured readers, an actor/writer named Sarah Koskoff, performed Plath’s Daddy. She didn’t just read the poem; she embodied it. Fiction writer Aimee Bender happened to be in the audience and came up with the idea of organizing a Dead Poets Slam, featuring Los Angeles stage actors and performers who would embody the work of dead poets. A couple weeks later, I was in Aimee’s living room, with several UC-Irvine grads (Genevieve and Alice Sebold—pre-Lovely Bones), mapping out potential teams; we finally decided on the Natural Deaths vs. the Unnatural Deaths. We rifled through sprawled anthologies, looking for dead poets to bring back to life. I can’t imagine an event like that happening, in the same small, funky way, in any other American city.
Kwame Dawes
The Hard Poem: A Sort of Fiction
A graduate student in my verse composition class said recently, “I don’t want to write poems that can be read in five minutes.” He did not mean, by this, that he wanted to write epics. He meant that he wanted his poems to demand more of the reader than might a five minute gander. I wondered how long would be enough. Ten minutes? Twenty minutes? An hour? Five hours? A year? Had we but world enough and time…, I thought. But I did not say that. I did say that perhaps a good poem could be apprehended in five minutes. He countered that any poem that could be fully apprehended in five minutes was invariably a weak poem, a superficial poem. We were, I could tell, slowly moving towards the aesthetic of the “hard poem”. He believed in the hard poem—the poem that demanded more of us. That is the kind of poem he wants to write.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Los Angeles
I am about to fly back to New York from Los Angeles. I lived in LA in the late 90’s, early 00’s, and it is a city that many people around the country love to hate. I’d get on a public bus in Seattle and strike up a conversation with the driver, and then mention Los Angeles, and it was like I’d pushed the venom button in the back of his neck. Los Angeles does have its drawbacks: the traffic, the sense of alienation that results from driving everywhere in mental thought bubbles, the Hollywood narcissism (“I’m a writer.” “Oh, what studio do you work for?”). But there are joys to be found too. Here are 5 recommendations.
Kenneth Goldsmith
6799
A Tribe Called Quest Midnight Madness, A Tribe Called Quest People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, A Tribe Called Quest The Low End Theory, Abba Greatest Hits, Ragaa Ragaa Abdou, Peter Abelard Monastic Song, Absinthe Radio Trio Absinthe Radio Trio, AC DC Back in Black, AC DC Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, AC DC Flick of the Switch, AC DC For Those About to Rock, AC DC Highway to Hell, AC DC Let There Be Rock, Johnny Ace Again… Johnny Sings, Daniel Adams Caged Heat 3000, John Adams Harmonium, John Adams Shaker Loops / Phrygian Gates, John Luther Adams Luther Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, King Ade Sunny Juju Music, Admiral Bailey Ram Up You Party, Adventures in Negro History, Aerosmith Toys in the Attic, After Dinner Editions, Spiro T. Agnew Speaks Out, Spiro Agnew The Great Comedy Album, Faiza Ahmed Besaraha, Mahmoud Ahmed Ere Mela Mela, Akita, Azuma and Haswell Sakaibara Ich Schnitt Mich In Den Finger, Masami Akita & Zbigniew Karkowski Sound Pressure Level, Isaac Albéniz Piano Music Volume II, Isaac Albéniz Iberia, Willy Alberti Marina, Dennis Alcapone Forever Version, Alive Alive!, Lee Allen Walkin’ with Mr. Lee, Steve Allen How to Think, Steve Allen On The Air, Terry Allen Lubbock (on everything), Mose Allison The Best of Mose Allison, The Allman Brothers Beginnings, The Allman Brothers Eat A Peach, The Allman Brothers Idlewild South, The Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East , The Allman Brothers Live at Ludlow Garage, Duane Allman An Anthology,
Poetry Foundation
Holding pattern
Remember Brandon Stosuy’s awesome PoFo piece on the Hold Steady/John Berryman connection? (You know, “How a Resurrection Really Feels”—the article with the passages that you tattooed across your back and upper thighs?)
Jeffrey McDaniel
contests. contested. the pros and cons of testing.
It’s interesting to read the recent posts by Kwame and Kenny talking about first books and prizes (or the lack thereof). It makes me wonder what percentage of first books published each year are attached to contests. I’m glad that Kenny pointed out that a number of first books do get published each year outside the mainstream. (Is “mainpuddle” more appropriate?)
Kwame Dawes
Oh, The Terror, The Terror!
So, maybe terror is the wrong word to use casually, these days. I mean, is it really terror that Walcott feels in front of a blank page? Can a blank page terrorize a poet? Would this work for anyone else? If so, I think high-minded terrorists would just have to drop blank leaflets all across America to really frighten us and make our lives miserable. Teachers terrorize students. At least that is how we felt. But everyone said, “Come on, you are such a melodramatist.” Which was not helpful, but they may have been right, that was not terror. Some people know terror. I can’t rehearse them here. Still, terror is terror to the person feeling terrorized. Our code of decency, however, makes us try to always keep terror of feelings of terror in perspective. It could be worse. At least one can walk away from a blank page. Walcott, though, is being melodramatic, hyperbolic—for God’s sake, he is being a poet.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
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RECENT COMMENTS
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Gary Geddes has offered us some amazing anthologies, among other things. Thanks for the reminder. MORE »
Sina Queyras | 03.18.10 -
WARNING. OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY. DO NOT READ. MENTALLY ILL FAILURE AT WORK. ALERT. ALERT.
Do you know ... MORE »
Eric Landon | 03.18.10 -
I like what Patrick Kavanagh wrote, thanks Don.
Poets don't have careers. That's what everybody ... MORE »
Henry Gould | 03.18.10 -
Hopelessly old-fashioned, yes, but perennially radical. MORE »
pam lu | 03.18.10 -
Gwynn,
You are perfectly right. I should have thought of that. I apologize for that comparison. ... MORE »
Ron Silliman | 03.18.10
Who or what is a poet critic and why is the... (27)
Graphic Poetry Spotlight: Jai Arun Ravine’s... (3)
To Sonnet, to Son-net, Tuscon Net (54)
Beyond Careerism? (Redistributing Poetic... (30)
Women’s History Month: A Salute (3)
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- Who or what is a poet critic and why is the academy so up in Poetry’s face?
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
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