Thursday Shout Out (Okay, It’s Monday) April 7, 2008: The first time I heard Abraham Smith read I was shot back in time. I pictured me, a scraggly beat-girl, hearing Burroughs and thinking Whitman while rocking back and forth to a new sort of preacher’s sermon. Smith has a rolling rhythm come from deep in the backwoods of Ladysmith, Wisconsin that rocks a bit like a boat on the rough Mississippi [...] by Ada Limón

It wasn’t a writers’ strike April 7, 2008: Harriet has been experiencing technical difficulties the past several days, meaning our writers couldn't post, and we couldn't publish your comments. We've resolved the problem, so look out for a barrage of new entries. by Poetry

Our Bodies, Our Selves April 7, 2008: How do you square this: Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one at all. With digital fragmentation any notions of authenticity and coherence have long been wiped. When we're everywhere and nowhere at once -- pulling RSS feeds from one server, server-side includes from another, downloading distributed byte-size torrents from [...] by Linh Dinh

Poetic-isms April 6, 2008: "Talk of poetry as communication worries poets and critics for a variety of reasons, some good, some not. Those who view language itself as essentially suspect will see that definition as either naive or deceptive." (more...) by Don Share

Good News From My World April 2, 2008: Now that it's official, I can finally tell the world that I have, on my fifteenth try (yes, I've been applying since 1993), been awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. While I would certainly have liked to have received one earlier, this fellowship could not have come at a time when I needed it more, as my medical bills for my cancer [...] by Reginald Shepherd

Gassed! April 1, 2008: To follow up on Reginald Shepherd's post about technophilia in the artistic avant-garde: it's true that technological advances and artistic innovations went hand in hand through much of the twentieth century, especially its first half, as mankind went through a dizzying series of unprecedented changes affecting every aspect of life. The machine [...] by Linh Dinh

Why We Read Poems April 1, 2008: I’m on the couch reading the Spring 2008 Threepenny Review; Maisie’s on the floor with a whirlpool of kiddie books around her. She’s been “reading” them for almost half an hour, pretty good attention-span for a 14 month old, but starts pulling some plastic off one of the book covers. I don’t care what happens to the book—it’s a [...] by Daisy Fried

Avant-Garde Technophilia April 1, 2008: Once more illness has kept me away from the blog for a while, this time due to surgery to kill the tumors on my liver. The surgery was successful, or so I'm told, but I ended up in the hospital for several days due to complications. It recently occurred to me (I’m not sure why it took so long) that there’s a decidedly disproportionate [...] by Reginald Shepherd