2008 February : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for February, 2008

Some things I liked this week:
Terrance Hayes has two good poems in the January/February 2008 APR; you can read “Support the Troops” here,
which I liked, and I liked even more “The Shepherd” which is a surprising riff on James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child,” on sheep and on fathers. It’s hard to give a sense in an excerpt of the building of urgency via digression in this 50+ line poem, but here’s a chunk from the middle.
Whenever my parents fought, my father would drive me
to the dollar movies to watch and forget the movies.
The rain left stripes on our faces. The news
of another sheep’s death was often on my mind.
The story of how sheep fall in love with moonlight;
how sheep go astray and are bruised.
My father sometimes burned upon the sofa
like a campfire and a dry whimper
broke from him…
I liked Charles Bernstein’s poem, “All the Whiskey in Heaven,” in the March 3 issue of The Nation. (You have to be a Nation subscriber to read the whole poem, but you can see the first half of it, in any case.) He does very funny parodies and he sometimes does this strange and fascinating other thing, which is to write poems which are deliberately creakily-written, but which get to you anyway. It’s a little like watching a juggler who, in a display of fake clumsiness, sometimes almost drops a plate or two the more to impress you when he starts juggling the flaming sticks. This one is a sometimes not-quite-semi-rhyming-except-where-it-perfectly-rhymes Valentine’s Day ode. It’s half parody and half sincere, and the more interesting for being both.

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02.20.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Christian Bök

Late Review 01

—————–
“Bad abba the endgame. In-
seminal doomdom alert:
pueblo naturans or
else. But the breadcrumbs are gone, and the
story goes on, and how
haply an ending no
nextwise has shown us, nor known.”
from “Tale”
in Yesno
by Dennis Lee
Anansi Press, 2007
—————–

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02.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Christian Bök

Random Poetry 08

—————–
“Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Now is the time that face should form another;
Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
And threescore year would make the world away.
Look, what an unthrift in the world doth spend
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.”
from 11,112,006,825,558,016 Sonnets
by William Gillespie
Spineless Books, 1999
—————–

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02.18.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Don Share

Seeing is believing

This rose is a rose and its mirror image—eight petalled. Above and below the two heads glow, larger, translucent. Together, they form a hexoctahedron—that is, if you were to cut out the two ‘roses’ and fold them in triangular facets you would make a 48 faceted solid of eight irregular ‘planes’ composed of six facets.

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02.18.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

A.E. Stallings

Snow on the Parthenon

It has been snowing—yes, snowing!—the past two days in Athens, and the concrete city of horn honking and jack hammers, illegal parking, protest-marches and garbage collection strikes, has suddenly been transformed—briefly— into something nearly silent and pristine. The Parthenon, sugar-dusted, gleams against a bright blue sky. Youths normally dressed in black and sulking in cafes with cigarettes and cell-phones are out in the streets, grinning and hurling snowballs at one another. Small children are looking at the wondrous stuff often for the first time in their lives or short memories. (Northern Greece—an altogether wilder and woollier place—is quite used to being snowed in; but here in Attica it is a rarity.) It is laiki day—farmer’s market day—but only a few vendors have trundled in from the frozen countryside, bearing oranges and leeks and potatoes.

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02.18.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Daisy Fried

On Poetry

swim%2520front.jpg
(Research report: Couldn’t find a picture of one with the legs stuck together. Most look like this now.)
One whole summer, I taught kids to dive at the Albany JCC. First the sitting dive: sit on the edge of the pool, feet in the gutter or hanging into the water, close to but not in the shallow end. Raise your arms up alongside your head, press your biceps against your ears. Tilt till you fall scalp first into the water. Invariably kids pick their heads up at the last minute, and sputter and splash. Eventually they go in cleanly, especially if I help them tuck over by putting one hand on the back of their head and one on their back. Once you’ve managed the sitting dive you progress to kneeling: Same thing but starts higher up, more a plunge. Your feet might scrape on the tile deck going in, but it’s nothing serious. This transitional dive helps nervous swimmers feel more secure before you try the standing dive: Stand, leaning till you fall, then you learn to swing your arms and push off. Eventually you can spring or jackknife or kick or twist however you want going in.

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02.17.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Reginald Shepherd

My new New Year’s Resolutions

I have almost never made a new year’s resolution, but online events of the past month (I think we all know what I’m referring to) have prompted me, belatedly, to make some for this year, plus a couple more just for good measure. Instead of nine muses, I have nine resolutions. This post is partly humorous, but fundamentally, I’m quite serious.

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02.17.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rigoberto González

Ugly Duckling Presse

Ugly%20Duckling.jpg
(The “e” at the end, the UDP website explains, comes from Kafka- or K-Presse, a small German publishing house.)
First of all, isn’t this like the best name for a press? This art & publishing collective was founded in 1993 by “a couple of college kids who wanted to put together a zine, without really knowing what that is.” Fifteen years later, this humble do-it-yourself-Xeroxed-project-beginning matured into a reputable and cutting-edge enterprise that publishes poetry by undiscovered voices, lost works, translations and artist’s books. It also produces chapbooks, broadsides, a magazine and a newspaper. And each and every publication contains a “handmade element” that “calls attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.” This is indeed a refreshing approach that answers to the mass market product (and sometimes uninspired content) coming out of the large New York houses.

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02.17.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Rigoberto González

OPEN BOOKS: A POEM EMPORIUM

Here’s an unusual double-duty entry: both a special Thank You to my favorite poetry bookstore Open Books in Seattle, where I stand around and gab for hours about all-things poetic while browsing the fabulous shelves (over 9,000 titles and counting!—indeed the poetry reader’s paradise), and a special Friday Shout Out to its co-proprietor, poet J.W. Marshall—John, to you and me—whose debut book of poems, winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize, was just released. Poetry poetry everywhere, indeed.

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02.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

A.E. Stallings

Edward Lear

I’ve been thinking about a post on Lear, but a couple of entries have pushed it to the fore… Steve’s which mentions the ghazal, and Daisy’s on Rexroth in Rome. And I have been thinking too about poet-painters and painter-poets. And it ties in as well with some of my recent entries on children’s literature–Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss. One of the pleasures of having a small child is revisiting the literature of childhood in the presence of those fresh eyes and ears, remembering the intensity of childhood listening and reading, which is on a different, almost magical level, it seems to me, from adult reading–a complete lack of sense of divison from the narrative and the words, a total unity with it. The parent who takes the small amount of time required to memorize “The Owl and The Pussycat”–if it is not already lodged in the memory–so that it can be pulled out of a hat to calm or entertain or entrance, will never regret it.

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02.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Archive for February, 2008

Daisy Fried

Bits: Reading Around

Christian Bök

Late Review 01

Christian Bök

Random Poetry 08

Don Share

Seeing is believing

A.E. Stallings

Snow on the Parthenon

Daisy Fried

On Poetry

Reginald Shepherd

My new New Year’s Resolutions

Rigoberto González

Ugly Duckling Presse

Rigoberto González

OPEN BOOKS: A POEM EMPORIUM

A.E. Stallings

Edward Lear

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