My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part II) July 13, 2008: So my second favorite poetry reading is one I never would have predicted: Clayton Eshleman reading the entirety of his translation of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. There was a reading series in the late ’90s held in a gallery in New York City at the corner of Broadway and Houston that was dedicated to a single poet [...] by Alan Gilbert

Poetics (Mine) July 13, 2008: I’ve spent more than a decade researching the global extractive industries, in part for a project on the I.W.W.-led 1916 Mesabi Miners’ Strike in northern Minnesota’s Iron Range; in part for a new collaborative book (with Beijing-based photographer Ian Teh) forthcoming early next year from Coffee House Press—Coal Mountain Elementary—on [...] by Mark Nowak

Accessible Poetry July 13, 2008: By which I mean "easy enough to get there." Especially from anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area. This Friday, 18 July, at 7:30 p.m., a stellar line-up of poets will be reading in San Francisco to benefit the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. (more...) by D.A. Powell

I may regret this July 12, 2008: I tried to capture Pound’s Canto LXXIII (73) but the spirit of Ez must have been thwarting me because neither scanning nor capturing from the web would work. But there is a readable translation on the web, done by an Australian—the canto is written in Italian. The web site gives what seems like a good walk through the history of this [...] by Lucia Perillo

My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part I) July 12, 2008: It’s hard to estimate how many poetry readings I’ve attended in my life, but it must be somewhere in the hundreds and hundreds. If I’ve been going to poetry readings regularly for eighteen years, and I’ve averaged about fifteen to twenty a year, that would put the total at around 300. That doesn’t sound right, especially since I have [...] by Alan Gilbert

Agitprop vs. Poetry July 11, 2008: During the Vietnam War, both Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov “struggled aesthetically with the turn from lyric to public address.” The different ways that they resolved that issue destroyed their friendship. After reading The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov and a collection of essays analyzing their conflict (Robert Duncan [...] by Emily Warn

Left of Karl Marx (Part II) July 10, 2008: “On the left is a black woman, determined to articulate political and ideological positions that would contest the boundaries of freedom of speech as defined by American bourgeois democracy. These boundaries, while ostensibly ‘real’ rights such as freedom of the press and habeas corpus nonetheless carry limitations, which keep the [...] by Mark Nowak

Identity and culture July 9, 2008: Each of the four weeks at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program is organized around a theme. Invited faculty and the workshops they teach, the panels they sit on, and the talks some of them give are loosely grouped according to these themes. The one for this summer’s fourth week is “Performance. Community: Policies of the USA in the [...] by Alan Gilbert

Scattered Thoughts on Fracture July 9, 2008: I am in the hospital with complications from my previous illness. In the meantime, my partner Robert is posting this piece of mine for me. Despite its many accomplishments over the past century or more, poetic experimentation for its own sake has gotten become rather routine, even rote. By now it has frequently come to seem like a form of keeping [...] by Reginald Shepherd

Left of Karl Marx (Part I) July 9, 2008: As has probably become more than evident to anyone reading my entries thus far on Harriet, I’m interested simultaneously in both Poetry and poetry—that upper case canonized (MLA-ized, Norton-ized, Super-sized!) beast as well as its lower case comrade which I’ll loosely categorize (with a change of preposition) by June Jordan’s phrase [...] by Mark Nowak