Avant-Garde and Modern, Part Four June 20, 2008: Like the previous post, this fourth and final post on this topic was largely prompted by Brent Cunningham's comments on the second post. Some of it will be more clear if readers refer back to that post and its comment stream while reading this entry. I like the terms “Modern” and “Modernist” because of their bare descriptiveness: they make [...] by Reginald Shepherd

From Peter O’Leary: Poetry of the 1970s, Day 2 June 20, 2008: Thursday, June 12 began with me waking up at 6am as the light slanted through the blinds in my gulag-like but nevertheless comfortable dorm room on campus. Despite staying up late, and despite being away from my kids, who wake me up every morning at the same time, I couldn’t sleep any later. Instead, I sought out some breakfast with Ross Hair, [...] by Michael Marcinkowski

Office of Insular Affairs = Poetry? June 20, 2008: It’s not every day that a poetry collection I write a blurb for appears on the U.S. Department of Interior “Office of Insular Affairs” website. OK, so I’m one of those US poets imbricated in party politics: I read on a 2004 Democratic campaign stop with former VP Walter Mondale and then VP candidate John Edwards (though Edwards’ plane, [...] by Mark Nowak

“Think of the Stamps!” June 20, 2008: With Andrew Motion’s tenure as Britain’s Poet Laureate coming to a close next year, there’s been active campaigning for the post to be filled for the first time by a female poet. The post—formerly held by Ted Hughes and Ben Johnson, among other dudes—involves a five thousand pound salary, free sherry, and an obligation to write poems for [...] by Travis Nichols

From Peter O’Leary: Poetry of the 1970s, Day 1 June 19, 2008: Your guest blogger with Tom Raworth and Clark Coolidge, Orono, June 2008” The day before I left to attend the “Poetry of the 1970s” conference held every four years by the National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine, I was asked whether I wanted to cover it for Harriet. Mos def, I thought (in the words of D’Angelo Barksdale), [...] by Michael Marcinkowski

Avant-Garde and Modern, Part Three June 17, 2008: I’d like to thank everyone who has commented on “Avant-Garde and Modern, Part Two.” This piece began as a response to Brent Cunningham, those scruples and whose comments are both appreciated—I do indeed enjoy principled disagreement, and am getting to the point in my recovery that I can again take pleasure in such meetings of the mind. But [...] by Reginald Shepherd

w00t vs. harumph June 17, 2008: Galleycat wonders ablog if social networking sites like Goodreads can supplant the studied expertise of professional book critics. Martial Flourish VS. Or something like that. It's an interesting question not just for the Steinbeckian pre-teens in the UK or dead Russian novelists, but for the contemporary poetry tribes, too, since poetry [...] by Travis Nichols

Banal Probe June 17, 2008: The Blogosphere is, as they say in stand-up comedy, a tough room: so many audience members seem to have shown up just to heckle. It’s strange how people lob remarks from the void—I wonder, often, how those same people might behave at parties. Of course, a healthy dose of criticism is good and necessary. And it may even be useful to call out [...] by D.A. Powell

Philip Guston and the poets June 16, 2008: Philip Guston was a lifelong friend of poets—from his teenage years in Los Angeles, to his time as a member of the New York School of painting, to his move to Woodstock. His famous—for some, infamous—switch in the late ’60s from abstraction to figuration lent itself to collaboration with various writers. The Morgan Library’s current [...] by Alan Gilbert

NAFTA Superhighway Poetics June 16, 2008: Driving the width of USAmerica from Minnesota to Texas and back as I did the past two weeks (and may again later this summer), I began to imagine somewhere in Kansas or Missouri what a tri-national, social, cultural, and politicized middle North American poetry and poetics would look like, sound like, and read like. It’s a thought I return to [...] by Mark Nowak