Archive for October, 2007
Rigoberto González
A Cure for Writer’s Block
To clarify: I’ve never suffered from it. I don’t mean this as a boast. I’m simply saying that I’ve been too busy writing to not be able to write. I’m always navigating through so many different projects at once—book reviews, essays, poems, and now, blog entries—that I don’t have time to encounter that state of distress I’ve always heard about but have yet to experience. Never. But as a writing teacher, I have my students to contend with, and though in the back of my mind I’m positive that it’s lack of discipline more than anything else, I still have the responsibility to provide some solution by way of advice on how to overcome this “block.”
A.E. Stallings
Postcard from America: Place Names
We are currently in West Chester, Pennsylvania, but we have been travelling over the last week through Kentucky and Indiana, enjoying the exotic particulars of place names. We keep driving past signs here pointing us to a town called “King of Prussia”. Our favorite may have been in Indiana, Gnaw Bone, Indiana, where we saw a camper/rv park called “The Last Resort.” What a great address–”The Last Resort, Gnaw Bone, Indiana.”
Stephen Burt
like winter
Fall moving into Boston, and along with the up-and-down ALCS, which has more or less mesmerized our household– game six is tonight!– we’ve had a series of misty days: the weather hasn’t changed my reading habits much, but it has helped me pick a poem from Laura Kasischke’s new book, on which more below the fold.
Ange Mlinko
H is for House
A is for apple.
B is for butterflies.
H is for housesparrow, hedgesparrow.
H is for hen.
C is for cat.
H is for hedge, hedgehog, horsetail, hawthorn, heather, hemlock, holly, hellebore and hazel.
H is for [hats?], my [hat?]
H is for haberdashery, hunting, [harthing?], [halfing?], hog, horse and hiccup.
W is for the wren has a loud, dramatic song with high pitched phrases and trills.
H is for houseparrow, hedgesparrow. H is for holiday. H is for [hero?]. H is for [harris?].
H is for homemovie and Hollywood and R is for russets. G is for grannysmiths. C is for cox’s orange pippins.
H is for harvest.
H is for House, Peter Greenaway’s 1973 short, may be my ideal movie: under ten minutes; an organizing principle that distracts you from the highly personal motivation; orchestrated like a piece of music rather than a prose narrative. Has anybody else seen this? It’s so obscure it’s not even on YouTube.
Stephen Burt
naive advice for paisley rekdal
Paisley Rekdal, who has written some neat poems herself, says it’s a bad idea to drink five bottles of wine a week, and certainly I wouldn’t try it. (I prefer n pints of coffee and m pints of beer per week, where 2n>3m. Values of both n and m vary from week to week and are not for public disclosure.)
More seriously, Paisley Rekdal also says it’s too hard to read five books of poetry in a week. Which surprised me a bit, since that’s something I do, or thought I did, almost every week. Advice– for her and for you, maybe– below the fold.
Christian Bök
One Last Anagram from Canada
—————–
Language
is a virus
from outer space.
Language
is a pursuer
of covert aims.
Language
frames our
virus as poetic.
Language
tapers our
vicious frames.
Language
for a sum is
a corrupt sieve.
Language
for us promises
a curative.
—————–
A.E. Stallings
Postcard from America: Filling Stations
We’ve left Chicago, and are now in Georgetown KY, located in the rolling hills and white fences of horse country. This is also bourbon country, though we discovered (on trying to get a couple of beers at a filling station–it had been a long day of travel with an ornary toddler) it is a dry county. We’ll be driving today to Bloomington Indiana, and stopping at filling stations along the way. Which in turn has been making me think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station.” I am an ardent admirer of Bishop, but it has taken me years and years to get over an initial dislike of this poem.
Rigoberto González
Wednesday Shout Out
As the second winner of The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize hits the bookstore shelves (future shout out, y’all) I am reminded of one of Montoya’s early champions, poet Lee Herrick, founder and editor of In the Grove, where Montoya’s first published poems appeared. Sadly, Montoya’s only book the ice worker sings was published posthumously in 1999, a year after his premature death at the age of 31. Since then, a collective effort by writers of all stripes has kept his memory and art alive. Hence the memorial poetry prize spearheaded by Letras Latinas of the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, hence the following poem in Herrick’s debut collection of poetry:
Fred Sasaki
GONZO PURO!
At birth, before the umbilical was cut, Ralph Steadman pooped in the hand of the hospital nurse. This marked, according to Steadman, the “earliest manifestation of a Gonzotic event.” He claims to have sole understanding of Gonzo, a term taken from an astonished medical student, Giuseppe Gonzaga, who witnessed the immaculate crap and shouted, “Biologico impossible! Mama mia! Gonzo puro!” Steadman figures, “Pure shit.”
Stephen Burt
small, busy flames
John Keats wrote 64 sonnets, some very famous and rightly admired all over the wide world, and some that wouldn’t get, nor deserve, much attention, had their author not been Keats.
And some fall in between: there are good lines in bad poems, startling stanzas next to dully conventional ones, and effects in unfamiliar poems which remember, or echo, the same effects in later, more durable verse.
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 »
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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.
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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)
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Beyond Careerism? (Redistributing Poetic... (30)
Women’s History Month: A Salute (3)
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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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