Welcome to the Widening Gyre! October 10, 2008: Let's begin with Sarah Palin. This week, Hart Seely offers up examples of the Alaska governor's poetry on Slate, prefacing it with this analysis: "In campaign interviews, the governor, mother, and maverick GOP vice presidential candidate has chosen to bypass the media filter and speak directly to fans through her intensely personal verses, spoken [...] by Travis Nichols

Why I did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature October 10, 2008: Because self-nominations are not accepted. Because I'm dirty, mean and mighty unclean. I'm a wanted man, Public enemy number one. Understand. So lock up your daughter n' lock up your wife. Lock up your back door and run for your life. The man is back in town. So don't you mess me 'round. 'Cause I'm T.N.T. I'm dynamite. T.N.T. And I'll win that [...] by Javier Huerta

What Some New York Poets Are Up To: Anne Waldman October 9, 2008: It’s as if people have ceded both their destinies and their imaginations to “a hopeless gray area of defeat and despair,” Anne Waldman comments in the introduction to the anthology Civil Disobedience: Poetics & Politics in Action
 (Coffee House Press, 2004). Few other American writers have responded to that malaise with as much joy, [...] by Forrest Gander

Numbered October 8, 2008: In "Doctor Brodie's Report," a 1970 short story by Borges, there's an Amazon tribe with no notion of cause and effect and no sense of the past. N. T. di Giovanni translates, "Since they lack the capacity to fashion the simplest object, the Yahoos regard such ornaments [produced elsewhere] as natural. To the tribe my hut was a tree, despite the [...] by Linh Dinh

The hybrid-way or the highway October 8, 2008: The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word "hybrid" comes from the Latin hibrida - the offspring of a tame sow and wild boar. There are lots of citations of Darwin, but we won't go there; now, I'm not the guy who just finished reading the entire OED, but it looks to me as though the word has fewer citations from poets than almost any other [...] by Don Share

Anthology Spoiler October 5, 2008: I received the following email from Stephen McLaughlin this afternoon, who asked me to post this here: "One morning about a month ago, I received a message from the Poetics List that began something like 'Announcing Issue 1 of Broken Caterpillar. Featuring new poems by . . . followed by a list of 45 poets' names. I'd seen one of them on [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

How to write a bad poem October 5, 2008: 1. COSMIC BLOOM Someone told me recently that I was ‘one big metaphor’. They had a point. One of my brothers has a PhD in astrophysics. I once asked him how his research was going and he replied, ‘It’s been a good month. I got a result.’ What was it? ‘Twenty-five million light years plus or minus twenty-five million light years.’ [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw

Oakland: The There There October 5, 2008: When he first introduced the current group of Harriet bloggers, Nick T. mentioned that I was in Berkeley. This is only partly correct. I study (or whatever it is that PhD students do) in/at Berkeley, but I live and write in Oakland. (from Oaklandish) (more...) by Javier Huerta

Death, with Compound Interest October 5, 2008: Give money me, take friendship whoso list, For friends are gone, come once adversity, When money yet remaineth safe in chest, That quickly can thee bring from misery; Fair face show friends when riches do abound; Come time of proof, farewell, they must away; Believe me well, they are not to be found If God but send thee once a lowering day. Gold [...] by Linh Dinh

University of Montana October 5, 2008: If I were a young poet looking to apply to an MFA program, one of the places most attractive to me would be the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, and not only because Missoula is so convincingly beautiful. (more...) by Forrest Gander