2009 January : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for January, 2009

All of the staff and board at the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine express their profound sorrow at the death of John Updike.
Although many people knew him as a prolific novelist, Updike also wrote and published several books of poetry. Some of his poems were printed in Poetry magazine. He is, in fact, the author of this site’s most popular poem, Ex-Basketball Player. We spoke to him about the poem’s popularity a few years ago. You can read what he had to say here.
You can also listen to Eliza Foss read Updike’s short poem “Food” here.
We will miss him.

01.27.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Cathy Park Hong

Poet Musician David Berman quits Band, outs Father

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File this under random gossip. David Berman, best known as singer of the Silver Jews (and former member of Pavement) and author of Actual Air, just “announced that he will quit his band and continue on as muckraker and screenwriter. It doesn’t say anything about whether or not he’ll continue to write poetry. I hope he does since Berman is a hit with the college students. He’s a good gateway drug for that stubborn student who hates poetry. I could bury one of his poem in the back of a packet, and they will say, “I find the rest of these poems boring but I LOVE DAVID BERMAN.” Can they sniff out, through his laid back, laconic lines, that he’s also in a rock band?
He also outs his family secret. Apparently, he’s always had a curdling secret about his father being a food industry lobbyist: “My life has been riddled with Ibsenism. In a way I am the son of a demon come to make good the damage.” So I guess one can interpret his decision to turn to muckraking as some serious Oedipal revenge shit.
To conclude, I’m sad about the music. I liked the Silver Jews. But one must move on.

01.26.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Jason Guriel

What’s On Your Desk?

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Unlike Seinfeld’s Kramer’s coffee-table-book-about-coffee-tables, Evie Christie’s Desk Space – a Web site devoted to writers’ desks – is much more than a novelty.

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01.26.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (11)

Wanda Coleman

ASK

Black History Month approaches, and, it seems, is amazingly becoming a daily affair with the election of Barack Hussein Obama as our nation’s new president. I have never seen so many identifiably African-American faces on programming outside of BET, if most of our females look like White women dipped in molasses. This is both boon and bane. The positives are many and obvious, so I’m skipping them to focus strongly on one rarely discussed negative: People don’t ask when people don’t know.
I can’t count the times I have been embarrassed, lost a budding friendship (even a job opportunity), or gotten into life-threatening trouble because of the assumptions others make about me based on skin color, grade of hair and gender. Between ages 13 and forever, I have often entered a situation and immediately been handed a doobie, offered a line, a rock, or a glass of imbibe without being asked if I indulged. In every instance, I was met by a stranger who knew nothing about me and had not read my work. How I handled it depended. Learning diplomacy under such conditions has been quite the education.
The most recent incident took place two months ago in an insanely busy hospital emergency room, when the young intern taking my medical history cozied up to me and said, “Come on—you can tell me about the marijuana.” Looking at my dreadlocks, her body language inferred that she wouldn’t rat me out but needed to know if she were going to do her best to help me. (I had been severely burned in a home accident). “Damn,” I smiled, “I could use a joint right now! I haven’t had a good toke in decades. I simply can’t afford it anymore.” End of discussion.

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01.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (12)

Don Share

Of poetry and privilege

Despite its principles, the Republic of Letters, as it actually operates, is a closed world, inaccessible to the underprivileged.

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01.23.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Wanda Coleman

OF POETRY AND A-HOLES

In recent history, some insulting moron called films the poetry of our era—deaf to the thousands of poets who raise their voices daily, hoping America, and perhaps the world, will hear. The chilling, if not complete silencing, of contemporary American poetry at peak bloom is an awful thing to watch. Educational factors are too numerous to mention; however, the insistence by the mainstream that poetry sell, the death of independent bookstores, book reviews, and the overall throes of a publishing world that must revamp or die, is brutally ugly. Current economic crises are drying up funds for artists in general, poets and poetry specifically, even journalists, as “little” publications go under and poetry festivals are cancelled—laureates, the NEA, and the best efforts of arts councils aside. No surprise. It began in the late 1980s with declarations by major newspapers that poetry would no longer be reviewed and, ironically, corresponds to the birth, growth and ascension of The Internet—not that poems of all quality, schools and tastes, can’t be accessed in cyberspace. Some of that thrives. But immediate and unfettered doc.com democracy has also meant that anyone, with enough chutzpah, money, and site hits, may affect or direct literary currents—those of poetry, fiction and any other writing with or without the authority that comes with genuine knowledge and commitment. Any ignoramous can become a literary honcho without having earned the chops. In this kind of arena artistic integrity will get you nowhere.

01.22.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (24)

Monica Youn

OF POETRY AND POWER: REFLECTIONS ON THE INAUGURATION

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A little over a year ago, at a house party in Harlem, through some fluke I ended up standing within 5 feet of Barack Hussein Obama as he delivered his stump speech. Close enough to note hangnails, blackheads. Close enough to watch single pores bead up with sweat in the hot room. Close enough that I could smell on his breath that he had been cheating on his no-smoking pledge. It was an unsettling feeling, this forced intimacy –like watching one’s parents share a sexual frisson – a “too much information” moment, even as I savored its briefness. Surely someone should put a stop to this, I thought, surely someone shouldn’t allow him to be this vulnerable, someone should impose the degree of distance conducive to worship. This was before he got his campaign legs under him – that untiring, relentless gait – when he was still allowing the exhaustion to show on his face, sometimes coupled with a look of mute suffering, as if to say, “How did I get myself into this?” Sometime afterwards I listened to Obama on a recording of his remarkably candid memoir Dreams from my Father, marveling at his sensitivity to eddies of interpersonal emotion –awkwardness, tenderness – at his sensory recall of slanted light on a dusty late afternoon road.

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01.21.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Martin Earl

Keep Blogging

What will come after the blog? Where do bloggers go from here? Has the form, as is typical of new media, aged precociously? Are the big print media outlets, with their combination of traditional and new media formats (paper, a website which reproduces more or less a virtual duplication of the hard form, embedded bloggers, video, slideshows, podcasts, etc.) going to overwhelm the individual blogger? Do bloggers, who have not been trained as journalists stand out? How does a dynamically flourishing blog culture avoid redundancy, glut, glibness and overkill?

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01.21.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (30)

Jason Guriel

A Brief, Belated Review of “Twelve Visual Poems” (edited by Geof Huth, from the November issue of Poetry)

Actually, I don’t have too much to say about the poems themselves, which I found pleasant enough. But surely these poems deserve a livelier critical commentary than the polite one Geof Huth supplies.

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01.21.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (23)

Travis Nichols

The Inaugural Poem

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

While clearly not the event of the day, the poetry world was paying special attention to Elizabeth Alexander this morning, as she was only the fourth poet to deliver a poem during the inaugural ceremony.
The poem will be available in chapbook form from Graywolf on February 6.
Will any of you be buying it?
UPDATE: Many of you have already bought it, it seems, since Praise Song for the Day currently sits atop the Amazon poetry bestseller list (sales rank #181).

01.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (35)

Archive for January, 2009

Catherine Halley

John Updike (1932-2009)

Cathy Park Hong

Poet Musician David Berman quits Band, outs Father

Jason Guriel

What’s On Your Desk?

Wanda Coleman

ASK

Don Share

Of poetry and privilege

Wanda Coleman

OF POETRY AND A-HOLES

Monica Youn

OF POETRY AND POWER: REFLECTIONS ON THE INAUGURATION

Martin Earl

Keep Blogging

Jason Guriel

A Brief, Belated Review of “Twelve Visual Poems” (edited by Geof Huth, from the November issue of Poetry)

Travis Nichols

The Inaugural Poem

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Archive for January, 2009

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