Poetic Machines 07 November 30, 2007: ----------------- "There is no mathematics more lost than love. I do not see her water, her peace, her rest. It is I who become her. My throat a sea in the depths and penurious enough to guess. The vast wrists, little wrists, huge wrists of a broken sail, like conscious toils. The dead prizes offer. Someone toddles a craft, where sails and eyes [...] by Christian Bök

no-yes November 30, 2007: Our toddler invented this spring, and still occasionally uses, the made-up and entirely apropos word "No-yes": he uses it when he's feeling independent, when we ask him whether he wants to do something (eat a banana, put on his shoes), and when his first instinct is to resist our suggestion, but his second-- once he realizes what he's being [...] by Stephen Burt

First Loves November 30, 2007: Debit: As an Accounting major at Temple University, enrolling in an Introduction to Poetry course was an indulgence beyond rationale for many of my friends and family. Credit: Of course I had “electives” but it was general knowledge that one used those “free” courses, not to enrich and round out one’s education and become a human being [...] by Major Jackson

Sound and Drink November 29, 2007: I don't think brevity will ever go out of style. June Dangled above the traffic's rasp: a contrail a crow a nail gun's echo. Sappho Hears gossip makes it song it won't be long before everyone hears "June" is by Joseph Massey, from a new chapbook called Within Hours (The Fault Line Press) and "Sappho Hears" is by Gloria Frym, from a chapbook called [...] by Ange Mlinko

every poem wants something November 29, 2007: All week I've been teaching Richard Powers' great novel Galatea 2.2, a book about computers and fiction-writing and lovelornness that does as much as almost any prose work ever written to explain why and where we want to read poems. Some of that explanation takes place over the course of the plot, or in the manifold quotations within the [...] by Stephen Burt

Poetry & Influence of the Non-literary Variety November 29, 2007: So many strands/strains of the old country and other people’s cultural traditions inform the arts of the Americas, even if we do not readily acknowledge them. Klezmer, Blue-grass, Deep soul, southern Gospel, the Blues: these musical styles embed in me, and I’d be so lucky to exact poems that are their equivalents in spirit and expression. I [...] by Major Jackson

Why No One Wants to be a New Formalist November 29, 2007: Some of the lively discussion at Harriet has alerted me to the fact that people debate over who gets to be in the church of the Avant Garde—who gets to be among the Elect, who gets to be in the Canon Outside the Canon. It is clearly a privilege, a badge of honor. (Maybe humans can’t even join—maybe you have to be a machine!) The rules [...] by A.E. Stallings

The dog of language snapping at my heels November 28, 2007: The poems of Elfriede Jelinek published in the November issue of Poetry (translated by Michael Hofmann) are her first to appear in English. But, as Hofmann notes, her literary career began with poetry; her first publication was a collection of poems, Lisas Schatten, in 1967, at age twenty-one. She is better known for her fifteen stage plays and [...] by Valerie Johnson

Wednesday Shout Out November 28, 2007: Javier O. Huerta’s debut, Some Clarifications y otros poemas received the Chicano/ Latino Literary Prize from the University of California at Irvine. I’m not sure it could have been a contender in any other competition (except possibly for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize) because half the poems in this collection are in Spanish or use [...] by Rigoberto González

Poetic Machines 06 November 28, 2007: ----------- The Writing Machine from The Voyage to Laputa by Jonathan Swift ----------- (more...) by Christian Bök