2007 October : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for October, 2007

A.E. Stallings

Happy Halloween, Happy Birthday, John Keats

Keats owns autumn, as this post by Ange reminds us.
Every Halloween I think also of Keats since this is his birthday. His last poem, which breaks off rather than ends, is appropriately “haunting”:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.
. . .

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10.31.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Stephen Burt

on connotation

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes words can be replaced, without loss, by any synonym or dictionary defintion. In poetry, though– and in many cases outside poetry– connotation matters: the force a word has includes the force of its associations, the emotions and situations we associate with its prior uses, the cloud of light or dust a familiar term, like a comet, trails as it moves.
I was surprised by connotation three times yesterday: once by Canadian words inside a poem, once by an Internet brand war outside any poem, and once by a horrid symbol at the center of a continuing ethical and political mess. More on each below the fold.

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10.31.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Rigoberto González

Wednesday Shout Out

Believe it or not, it’s a coincidence that this particular book cover made my Shout Out feature on Halloween. This is cult poet Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s fifth volume of poems. Though she was on faculty at Arizona State University while I was attending their MFA program, regretfully I never studied with her, but I read everything she publishes because she’s brilliant, she’s bitchin’, she’s Beckian.

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10.31.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rigoberto González

In Praise of Online Journals

About a month ago, the National Book Critics Circle sponsored a panel on the demise of the print journal and the rise of the online journal. Actually, it was a little more complex than that, but the gist of the conversation was this: that libraries and other institutions with diminishing budgets were cutting back on (or eliminating altogether) their literary journal subscriptions, and coupled with the popularity of webzines and other forms of online sites dedicated to publishing contemporary literary works, it seems that the nails of the print journal’s coffin have been inevitably secured.

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10.28.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (37)

Christian Bök

The Audiatur Festival 2007

Approximately a month ago, around the end of September, I flew to Bergen, Norway, in order to perform at the Audiatur Festival—a multilingual extravaganza for the avant-garde, at which many celebrated performers of both phonically-based poetry and constraint-based poetry attended, including the likes of Tomomi Adachi (from Japan), Caroline Bergvall (from Britain), Leevi Lehto (from Finland), and Jacques Roubaud (from France).
Organizers of the event have now made available, online, many of the audiovisual recordings from the event….

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10.28.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

A.E. Stallings

Ochi Day

Today is a national holiday in Greece, the day when Greeks celebrate the word “No!”

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10.28.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Christian Bök

Quick Review 08

—————–
“Prose took the minstrel’s verse without a squeeze
His exaltation shocked both youth and crone
The understanding critic firstly sees
‘Ere meanings new to ancient tribes are thrown
They both are right not untamed mutterings
That metred rhyme alone can souls enslave
They both are right not unformed smatterings
That every verbal shock aims to deprave
Poetic license needs no strain or stress
One tongue will do to keep the verse agog
From cool Parnassus down to wild Loch Ness
Bard I adore your endless monologue
Ventriloquists be blowed you strike me dumb
Soliloquies predict great things old chum”
from “100,000,000,000,000 Poems”
by Raymond Queneau (trans. Stanley Chapman)
in The Oulipo Compendium
Atlas Press, 1998
—————–

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10.27.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

A.E. Stallings

Postcard from nowhere: airports and assumptions

Why are there so few good poems about air travel? And are there any great ones? Is it just that it has been around for public transport less time than boats or trains or even automobiles? I can think of terrific poems about all of these, but only a brace of air travel poems spring to my mind, both about the attendant misery of airports, among other things. I’m sure folks here can remind me of others and broaden my list.

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10.27.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (11)

Stephen Burt

am I an americanist?

Odd encounter at a conference today (not the one Ange’s been blogging, but a much smaller one):
Scholar of contemporary culture, film and fiction #1 (pointing at me): “Is he an Americanist?”
Scholar of contemporary culture, film and fiction #2: “He’s a poetry person.”
Was that a version of “No”? If not, what was it?

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10.26.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)