Lavinia Greenlaw

A broader question

G. And what have you found in Iceland?
C. What have we found? More copy, more surface,
Vignettes as they call them, dead flowers in an album –
The harmoniums in the farms, the fine-bread and pancakes,
The pot of ivy trained across the window,
Children in gumboots, girls in black berets.
R. And dead craters and angled crags.
Louis MacNeice, ‘Eclogue From Iceland’
This sign greeted me when I arrived in Iceland just before Christmas. I heard no harmoniums, ate no pancakes and wore no beret, but the landscape and twenty-hour nights disarranged my vision and so my economy.

12.31.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Emily Warn

Harriet Flarf

This post is partly what it’s like being one of Harriet’s ventriloquists. It splices text from Harriet bloggers, commenters, and anonymous robots who deposit semi-truck loads of SPAM for us to delete. Bloggers and commenters from whom I’ve pilfered include Kenneth Goldsmith, Reginald Shepherd, A.E. Stallings, Ange Mlinko, Javier Huerta, and Bill Knott. (By citing them, this is definitely flarf and not conceptual poetics.) I “composed” it for this year’s MLA offsite poetry reading, which was held Sunday night in San Francisco where more than 60 (usually) masked poets read for two minutes each.

Our task is to mind the machine.
Hi Guys! Today I was surfing the Internet
just as everyday. I checked my Facebook profile,

12.30.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Wanda Coleman

FOR POETRY LOVERS WHO DIG THE MANIC

This favorite link may be old news to some, but I was delighted to be hipped to the Caroline Bergvall Dante poem, “Via”, sent courtesy Dr. Natasha Saje at Westminster College, Utah. Received with pleasure. Enjoy….
Here’s the link: http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bergvall/Bergvall-Caroline-Via-2004.mp3

12.28.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Wanda Coleman

SINGING THE DIGITAL-AGE BLUES

Coming from the hard-knock world of secretaries and billing clerks, grappling with techno-advances in the workplace once seemed like a song. The turnover for “pink-collar workers” had accelerated for decades, starting with electronic typewriters. A gaggle of complaints flew up with each change, shocks coming every five years, then two, then every 18 months, then to whenever new office management came on board. Things chugged faster and faster, if typing speeds fell thanks to the ickiness of keyboard tabs, the visual bias of computer programs and the neutering of Gregg’s. When writing, I particularly enjoyed word programs and the rapidity of editing or restructuring poems, scripts, or stories. Cut-and-paste, an arduous task in the past, sometimes executed on hands and knees, had become pimp simple. The benefits of dot-communism (as one friend calls it) have been many, despite the drawback of “more paper faster” in a purportedly paperless world. Not so here. Laziness, or failure to make a hardcopy for backup of any worthwhile writing, exacts a horrible price, I unfortunately learned—as much as I loathe filing. Inspired by the blues poems of Langston Hughes and Sterling Plumpp, having composed a few myself, I began a new manuscript post-YK2. Painstakingly weaving my blues from scribbles on bits of paper and years of collected lines, my months of creative work vanished when my hard drive crashed. I wasn’t worried at first, until I realized I had made no hardcopies of the poems and my original notes had been scrapped.

12.20.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Emily Warn

Some Favorite Books of 2008

A few of these books were published last year, and there are definitely others that we’d like to point out to readers, but for the sake of brevity, we limited our picks. We hope you’ll fill in the gaps in the comment stream.

POETRY FOUNDATION STAFF PICKS

CHRISTIAN WIMAN
Creatures of a Day
Reginald Gibbons
Louisiana State Univeristy Press
ISBN: 0807133183

Creatures of a Day was a finalist for the National Book Award, deservedly so. There are some poems in this book that have become a permanent part of my consciousness. I remember reading “Sleepless in the Cold Dark” in manuscript and thinking that, though you could feel the antecedents (Williams mostly), something here was new. The poem is flat-out beautiful, and it accomplishes its effects with such small, sharp precisions of syntax and linebreaks that you hardly feel your heart breaking until it’s already happened.
Twigs and Knucklebones
Sarah Lindsay
Copper Canyon Press

Sarah Lindsay’s new book is unusual among books of contemporary poetry for several reasons. It’s almost completely devoid of the first person pronoun, for one thing. Most of Lindsay’s poems are historical or (as in the stunning sequence “The Kingdom of Nab”) pseudo-historical. One of the most memorable poems in the book is a strange, moving piece called “Elegy for the Quagga.” A Quagga was a zebra-like creature which was hunted to extinction in the late nineteenth century. Lindsay links this extinction with the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, and by the time you finish this poem you realize you’re never going to hear this sound that is the poem’s subject — and yet you’re now dying to. The poem ends “a kind of horse, less picture-esque than a Dodo, still we mourn what we mourn, even if when it sank to its irreplaceable knees, when its unique throat closed behind a sigh, no dust rose to redden a whole year’s sunsets, no one unwittingly busy two thousand miles away jumped at the sound, no ashes rained on ships in the merciless sea.”

12.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (11)

Wanda Coleman

HOPE ALL-AMERICAN GHETTO STYLE

Audrey called a week ago today. I went for family visit. We have been friends for forty years—a friendship that has corresponded to my literary pursuits. She has always appreciated my quest, if not so inclined. Like involuntary saints, we are survivors, having spent our lives in America’s unforgiving economic underclass—former long-time residents of some of the toughest neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles. Whenever we get together, “the headcount is a mutha”—among our dearly departed my son Anthony, her son Darryl, her brothers Emmet, Joe and Carl. Over coffee, scrambled eggs, bacon and rice, we surveyed our hearts, totaled up damages and dramas, and gave thanks that we’re still throwing blows and chasing the raggedy remains of our dreams. Sated on the personal, our talk turned worldward—we whooped about communal stupidities, “how they still harrassin’ us”, the O.J. fiasco (ssshiiittt, he never spoke out for Folk back in the day), and how—thanks to the housing and stockmarket crashes—we’ve got plenty of new company on the lower rungs. Then I say how me-and-mine cracked a bottle of spumanti and celebrated New Years on November 8th. Everybody in the house did the Obama holler. Comprising the first generation, Audrey and I yelled “I never thought I’d live to see the day!” Amens came from the second generation, Sean and DeShaun signifying, “We never thought we’d see the day!” Then Audrey’s twenty-something grandsons crowned our moment, “Hell, we didn’t think we’d see it in our lifetimes!”

12.19.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS