Google Alert! October 22, 2008: The poetry news website Choriamb announced it will be hanging up its press chapeau after five years of linking to all the verse news fit to peruse. The site had been a labor of love for Tanya Angell Allen since August 2004, when she co-founded the site with Becky Rodia, according to the site's info page. In announcing the change from news and [...] by Travis Nichols

Impossible Life October 21, 2008: If This is a Man You who live safe In your warm houses, You who find, returning in the evening,    Hot food and friendly faces:    Consider if this is a man    Who works in the mud    Who does not know peace    Who fights for a scrap of bread    Who dies [...] by Linh Dinh

IN DREAMS BEGIN POEMS October 21, 2008: During private study with Clayton Eshleman in the early 70s, my friend Sylvia Rosen (Dreaming the Poem: a dream journal, Red Wind, 1994) became intrigued with Kilton Stewart’s Senoi Dream Theory, practiced by an obscure Malaysian people. This led her to Patricia Garfield’s Creative Dreaming. Inspired by the poetic potential she sensed in these [...] by Wanda Coleman

THIS MAN ALSO KNEW HOW TO SIT AT A KITCHEN TABLE October 21, 2008: However, this: "The simplest way I have found to make clear my own sense of writing...is to use the analogy of driving. The road, as it were, is creating itself MOMENTLY in one's attention to it, there, visibly, in front of the car. There is no reason this should go on forever, and if one does so assume it, it very often disappears all too [...] by Olena Kalytiak Davis

Before the Elections: The Darkness Surrounds Us October 20, 2008: A recent Harriet entry by Olena Kalytiak Davis begins "As Mother Said" and soon enough mentions "driving." The combination reminds me that I've wanted to write something about Robert Creeley's famous poem, "I Know a Man." This particular moment in American history makes it all the more timely. Robert Creeley in Bolinas, CA (more...) by Forrest Gander

AS MOTHER SAID OVER MY NINE YEAR OLD HEAD October 19, 2008: "many, if not most, children exhibit an early talent for art or science, even intellection; but we can never predict the one whose youthful giftedness will blossom not into a pastime, but a driving need, the kind that determines the course of one's life...in creative work, the driving need occurs when the talent is exercised, the possessor of it [...] by Olena Kalytiak Davis

Emily Dickinson explodes October 19, 2008: So did she or didn’t she and do we care? Travis Nichols is right to question the misguided investment made in how a poet goes about things and what they were wearing at the time, although there is sometimes something to be gained from putting the books down and going there. I lived in Amherst for five months and failed (quite unconsciously) to [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw

Legendary, Lexical, Loquacious October 17, 2008: Every year Poetry hosts a gathering for Chicago literary publishers called the Printers’ Ball. Over 100 local literary organizations showcase a diverse selection of print publications, available free of charge, including magazines, journals, weeklies, posters, and broadsides, plus a full night of live entertainment. See, hear, and read all about [...] by Fred Sasaki

Literature of the Undocumented October 16, 2008: I recently submitted a course description for a class I will be teaching next semester (si Dios quiere). Javier Huerta English R1B Literature of the Undocumented Book List: Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant, Ramón Tianguis Pérez; The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia; The Elements of Style, Strunk and White. A Course Reader will have [...] by Javier Huerta

Making Out with Emily Dickinson October 16, 2008: Mount Holyoke professor Christopher Benfey has an essay up on Slate.com that posits the “wild nights” of Emily Dickinson may not have just been spinster fantasy. "[Dickinson’s] exile on Main Street has seemed a necessary part of the Dickinson myth, so necessary, indeed, that contrary information—which happens to have been piling up [...] by Travis Nichols