2008 August : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for August, 2008

Alan Gilbert

Things I’ve learned while blogging for Harriet . . .

—that blogging is hard work
I have a new respect for people who blog every day. I’m a regular reviewer of art and literature for a variety of publications, and during busy periods I sometimes have a deadline a week. Yet even this doesn’t compare to the rigors of having something intelligent and coherent (not that I always succeeded) to post to Harriet circa every three days—during the easily distracting summer months, no less.

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08.31.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Mark Nowak

Labor Day Adieu

Several years ago in my essay for a special symposium on Adrienne Rich published in the Virginia Quarterly Review (82:2), I outlined a series of industrial accidents and union/social movement engagements with capital that had all occurred during the week the essay was written: 42 workers trapped in a flooded Chinese coal mine… 600,000 Korean temporary workers launching a strike over working conditions… Aerolinas Argentinas pilots and mechanics ending a successful nine day strike… a strike unfolding in French Polynesia… and much more from Guyanese workers, Jakarta teachers, Kenyan oil workers, Trinidadian employees, anti-globalization protestors in Hong Kong, etc. etc.
The paragraph for this past week would sound eerily similar: a strike by Guyanese sugar workers, 9 coal miners trapped in an illegal mine in China’s Hebei Province; a wave of strikes and sit-ins and labor protests in Iraq’s industrial sector; news of three murdered trade unionists in Colombia in August; the arrest of the secretary general of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions. [Note: for those interested in these and related stories, bookmark Labourstart in your browser.] And in the upcoming week, here in USAmerica alone, with Gustav nearing New Orleans and the RNC protest marches here in St. Paul tomorrow, what will the news bring?
And what will the reportedly “news that stays news” bring?

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08.31.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Linh Dinh

Thank You, Thank You, You’re Too Kind

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Solipsism n. 1) the theory that the self can be aware of nothing but its blog. 2) the theory that nothing exists or is real but one’s blog.
In 1984, there’s a telescreen in each room that can never be turned off, only dimmed. A sort of two-way mirror, it studies us as we watch it. Before writing his diary, an act punishable by death, before he could blog, so to speak, the protagonist, Winston, had to hide in an alcove, out of view of the telescreen.
In 2008, we love to stare at a screen as we share with a bored, restless and concurrently blogging universe an endless stream of our disconnected, autobiographical factoids; political, philosophical and literary half-thoughts; reading and publication announcements; digital self-portraits, sometimes crotch shots; and hasty poetic skits to be ignored if not sensibly deleted a day later.

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08.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Alan Gilbert

Fast poetry

Mark’s post about the Republican National Convention site being 2.68 miles from his house reminds me—in a non-self-congratulatory way—of the various political protests I’ve attended over the past decade, many of them with poets, some with non-poets, and a few alone. I say “non-self-congratulatory” because what I’ve mostly come away from them with is a head-scratching reconsideration of the role of political protest—and of the connection between poetry and politics (an ongoing theme of this summer’s run of Harriet). In this sense, the protests that most perplexed me were the ones leading up to the second U.S. invasion of Iraq. How could the largest series of protests in world history not fail to stop the war?

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08.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (16)

Lucia Perillo

I could be blogging or I could watch the red dog running in the field

Despite this experiment with blogging, I remain jittery about how computers have changed our experience of poetry, and our experience with each other, which is a bigger question that isn’t suitable to being addressed in something as ephemeral as a blog entry. Some quick thoughts though, from a computer know-nuttin, Harriet’s one and only dial-up blogger…

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08.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (16)

Mark Nowak

“The Republicans are coming! The Republicans are coming!”

2.86 miles.
According to Mapquest.com, that’s the distance from my front door to the barricades outside the entrance to the Republican National Convention, which opens on Monday at the Xcel Energy Center here in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
On Labor Day no less.
Four years ago, when we as a nation supposedly democratically decided that four more years of Bush2 was the way to go, James Bowman, a resident scholar at the right wing Ethics and Public Policy Center, was so captivated by a line in Georgia Sen. Zell Miller’s speech at the 2004 convention that he decided to pen a poem a day from the RNC at MSG (or maybe his room at the Four Points Sheraton). Here’s a stanza to whet your whistle:

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08.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Travis Nichols

Foetry! Get it? Faux-etry!

The sordid ghost of Foetry.com has stalked the internets this past week, with much being made of Stacey Lynn Brown’s tale of contest troubles with Cider Press Review.
According to Brown’s blog—and Cider Press’s Robert Wynne –Brown won Cider Press’s contest last year, but had her award subsequently “revoked” for reasons no one can agree on.
Brown says it was because the editor didn’t like her design ideas, and the editor says it was because Brown didn’t meet her contractual obligations (see Brown’s comment below for clarification)—but whatever the actual reasons, the whole thing has caused many bloggers to weigh in on the strange mania that overtakes poets when contests are involved.
One of the commenters on Brown’s blog was Alan Cordle, a name inextricably bound to the Foetry saga.

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08.28.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (65)

Alan Gilbert

Poetry’s violent dream

Blogging for Harriet this summer has felt a little bit like a slow striptease—never knowing how many personal details to reveal, or which parts to keep covered up. It’s my sense that readers enjoy a little bit of personal information (I definitely do), but too much—for me, at least—and I begin to think, Who cares? . . . or worse, if the information seems particularly self-indulgent. But it’s also a question of style. I could read Kevin Killian discussing just about anything, and those who’ve spent time with any of his nearly 2,000 [!] reviews for Amazon.com might agree. Don’t believe me?

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08.28.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Reginald Shepherd

Heaven Is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens: On Tim Dlugos’s “Turandot”

I am in the hospital for the fourth time in the past five months, this time for excruciating abdominal pain that turned out to be due to a bowel obstruction which has still not cleared up. I have had a tube down my throat and have been unable to eat for over a week. I spend most of my days trying to sleep through the pain and nausea.
In the course of the various tests to try to determine the cause of the obstruction, my surgeon found several large masses on my liver which, after a blood test and a liver biopsy, have turned out to be a fast-growing resurgence of my colon cancer. Thus I am in the hospital cancer ward for the foreseeable future, starting chemotherapy again (it had been on hold during my assorted medical crises of the past few months), before I have had time to fully recover from my recent illnesses and surgeries. I don’t have wi-fi access in my room, but my darling Robert is posting this for me.
Doug Powell recently wrote on this site about the late gay Tim Dlugos, which reminded me of one of my favorite of Dlugos’s poems. It’s one of the last poems Dlugos wrote before he died of AIDS in 1990, and my recent brush with death has made it particularly resonant for me.

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08.26.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)