2007 November : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for November, 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 and transports
bring sombreness.
Where mathematics brings its love.”
“Like a Proof”
by Erica T. Carter
(a.k.a ETC3)
—————–

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11.30.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Stephen Burt

no-yes

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 asked to do– is to accept it, since it’s something (banana, shoe-wearing) he actually wants and likes.
I thought of No-yes when I received, this week, the new issue of No: a Journal of the Arts, not only because I enjoy saying yes to No (it’s a journal I’ve enjoyed since issue one) but because its centerpiece, for this sixth issue, is the long text of the very contrarian– really, overtly hostile– final film by the Situationist thinker Guy Debord, whose instinct is to say “No” to everything, who wanted a “revolution of everyday life” (see Lipstick Traces for the proto-punk rock details) that would set aside all the regularities and deferred gratifications by which people in bourgeois society take care of one another, learn professions, enrich corporations, plan their lives, and learn their crafts– including, it may be, the craft of writing poems….

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11.30.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Major Jackson

First Loves

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 of intellectual breadth, but to minor and specialize even further within the School of Business in some field as Marketing or Economics, or that other academic magnet Pre-Law.
Debit: No one had any notion as to how studying Poetry would prepare me to take the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam, a future event we seemed to obsess over as much as we did our final exam in creating Financial Statements for Mergers & Acquisitions, which I doubt any of us would ever have the occasion to do.

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11.30.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Ange Mlinko

Sound and Drink

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 The Lost Sappho Poems (Effing Press).

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11.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Stephen Burt

every poem wants something

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 narrator’s thoughts. Some of it gets condensed near the end into this paragraph, worth hanging on someone’s wall– it’s enunciated not by the author, nor by the character also named Richard Powers who stands in for him, but by the computer program whom the “Richard Powers” within the novel has been teaching how to read:
“‘Every poem loves something. Or each wants something in love. Something loves power. Or money. Or honor. Something loves country.’ On what catalog [Powers asks] could she be drawing? ‘I hear about something in love with comfort. Or with God. Someone loves beauty. Someone death. Or some poem always is in love with another lover. Or another poem.’”
It’s all true. What new poems might somebody love today? Go below the fold to see…

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11.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Major Jackson

Poetry & Influence of the Non-literary Variety

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 am often asked after a poetry reading, maybe too frequently, by some earnest undergraduate, if I listen to music while composing a poem, because, well, my poems sound so rhythmic, “even on the page,” a dubious observation, at best, in my opinion. It’s like saying water is liquid. Probably the query of music listening is 2nd only to “creative process.” (Then, third would be: “What hip-hop artists are you listening to these days.” I wonder if my buddy Billy Collins is posed that question.)

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11.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

A.E. Stallings

Why No One Wants to be a New Formalist

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 are necessarily arcane and known only to a few. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo!
Well, New Formalism is exactly the opposite. Anybody can join—you just have to write a sonnet or three, and the rules for that are easier to get off the Internet than directions for making a fertilizer bomb. (No one says the sonnet has to be good.) The club which anyone can join though is the club of which no one wants to be a member. Nobody but nobody wants to be known as a New—or even worse–Neo- Formalist.

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11.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (51)

Valerie Johnson

The dog of language snapping at my heels

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 eleven novels (five of which are now available in English translation), including the widely regarded (and heavily autobiographical) Der Klavierspielerin, or The Piano Teacher, adapted into a 2001 film by fellow Austrian Michael Haneke, starring Isabelle Huppert.

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11.28.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Rigoberto González

Wednesday Shout Out

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 Spanish in key moments within the poem in ways that not even the context can illuminate the meaning for non-Spanish speakers. It’s a book without apologies in terms of audience: You have to know Spanish and be familiar with elements of the Chicano/Mexicano culture, no matter who you are, to fully appreciate the book. The following prose poem is a more accessible piece for non-Spanish speakers: