Just hand me my walker…. March 21, 2007: What I wanted: To teach my sweet, suburban high school freshies to write love poetry. I gave them the tools, hoping they would visit the innocent days of romance, find ways to chronicle their fresh, fumbling attempts at love. I thought I might gather their ode and maybe send them in to Art Linkletter or--in case Art was dead or [...] by Patricia Smith

Direction Reaction Creation March 21, 2007: For no good reason, I’ve been reading the liner notes to Direction Reaction Creation, the Jam boxed set (boxed set of Jam sounds delicious) from—I was going to say “a few years back,” but this thing came out in ‘99! (Or ‘97, if you’re a vinylist.) The booklet, which is rather massive, keeps falling open to this passage—a sure sign [...] by Ed Park

Shame On You, Mr. Walcott March 21, 2007: It's astonishing to me that a writer as celebrated as Derek Wolcott would condescend to spewing such clichés of "terror at the blank page" or tired Romantic notions as to "whether he can make a successful poem again" to a national audience. Do we need this "great Nobel laureate" to reinforce such narrow, sophomoric and unsophisticated notions of [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

Prizes? We Don’t Need No Stinking Prizes! March 20, 2007: Kwame, man, do we ever live in different worlds. I am an American poet but in the poetry world I inhabit, first books never win prizes; in fact, the sorts of books myself and my peers write are never even considered for prizes -- even some twenty or forty books into a career. This whole awards system you describe -- with its sense of entitlement [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

I’m sick. Bask in my aura. March 20, 2007: There’s nothing as pitiful as a sick poet. I’ve been tussling with a rather raucous flu bug lately. And I’ve never been one of those stiff-upper-lip sickies, sucking it up and persevering, conquering the malady by refusing to give it power. Pshaw. I like to surrender to my germs and wallow among them. I’m a feverish, whiny drippy snorter, [...] by Patricia Smith

Poetry Terrors March 20, 2007: On NPR a few days ago, Derek Walcott confessed to feeling terror at the blank page—the terror of someone wondering whether he can do it again, whether he can make a successful poem again. The interviewer laughed with some disbelief remarking that even the great Nobel laureate could feel such terror. Walcott insisted, “Anyone [meaning any poet] [...] by Kwame Dawes

“Name, a novel” by Toadex Hobogrammathon March 19, 2007: Name is about as close as one can get to a "novel" that was written by a machine and for a machine: it seems especially primed to attract and repel spam-blockers with its pseudo-porn opening, and yet it also tosses a distracting bone to the bots with its stream of seemingly random verbiage after its first paragraphs. But far as we can tell, Name [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

In Sara Mencken, Christ and Beethoveen there were men and women (1944) March 19, 2007: "In her very truly great manners of Johannes Brahms very heroically Sara Powell Haardt had very allegorically come amongst his very really grand men and women to Clarence Day, Jr., John Donne, Ruggiero Leoncavalo, James Owen Hannay, Gustav Frenssen, Thomas Beer, Joris Karl Huysmans and Franz Peter Schubert very titanically." - John Barton [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

Kingston Afternoon March 19, 2007: There is something physical about the comfort of Kingston for me. Clearly, stitched into my skin is the memory of the body’s reaction to this heat, these smells, these sounds and the sudden amazement of pouis trees blooming with uncanny colors—bright surreal yellows and delicate light blues as if someone has decided to create an otherworldly [...] by Kwame Dawes

And I didn’t even get your name… March 17, 2007: It began with my father. Grizzled and slight, flasher of a marquee gold tooth, Otis Douglas Smith was Arkansas grit suddenly sporting city clothes. Part of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern cities in the early 1950s, he found himself not in the urban Mecca he’d imagined, but in a roach-riddled tenement apartment on [...] by Patricia Smith