Archive for February, 2009
Travis Nichols
Back to Life
Second Run, an online magazine out of Ames, Iowa, just published its first issue last week, and it’s a peculiar thing. This Second Run does not want the newest, freshest work to show off; it wants old work, poems that have appeared in journals that have either gone out of print, been buried in the back of some grad student’s closet, or have never had any kind of online presence. It wants a kind of zombie poetry.
Camille Dungy
New kid on the block
I am going to assume, because you are here, reading this site, that you like to read. I am also going to assume, because you are reading this site, that you like to read good writing. My cousin always warned about what might come of you and me should we assume too frequently (if you don’t know the punch line, I’ll just say there’s a draft animal involved), but I am going to assume the risk of assuming you might occasionally want a tip or two about what to read. If that’s the case, visit Harriet each Thursday. I’ll tell you what’s keeping me happy that day.
Camille Dungy
In conversation
Friday night, in Chicago, I attended a tribute event for Gwendolyn Brooks. Lucille Clifton read Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “the mother” followed by her own piece, “the lost baby poem.” A highlight of my time at AWP was hearing Clifton read one and then the next, and hearing her discuss how her poem participates in direct conversation with the other. Brooks provided Clifton with an example of poetry written plainly about the life she knew. Clifton said, “She allowed me to see that none of this should be called a sin. She wrote about truth and she wrote it all.” How exciting it was to witness this conversation! How exciting it can be to watch these conversations unfold again and again and again.
Jason Guriel
Child’s Play: A Reading of a Poem I Like
One word that gets a lot of play in our critical writing – since the dawn of Derrida, anyway – is ‘play’ itself. We’re often wanting more of it, not less, and the freer the play the better. But I wonder if the logic of Eliot’s old saw about free verse – “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job” – can be extended to the more general concept of play: no play is free for the person who wants to play well. Which is only to say: it’s nice, maybe even necessary, to have some rules in which to wriggle, even if the rules are arbitrary and amount to little more than a Houdini’s self-imposed straitjacket. The children at play in Suzanne Buffam’s poem “Play”, from her debut book, Past Imperfect, have the fun they have because of the rules they set for themselves. They don’t escape from this play unscathed – and neither does the reader – but then play doesn’t always end in pleasure. The poem, in other words, only looks like child’s play:
Annie Finch
AWP, The Poetic Morning After
Ok, nobody else has started this thread yet, and I’m sure there are many folks out there dying to weigh in, so I’ll bite: How was Y’all’s AWP, from a poetry perspective, that is: favorite panels? readings? moments?
Affrilachian Poets Reading, Chicago Art Institute, Associated Writing Programs 2009 Annual Convention. Photo by Stephanie Pruitt-Gaines
Martin Earl
Translation and its Discontents, Part 3 (reading Blake backwards)
The last major twentieth century poet to have included William Blake in his gallery of crucial ancestors was Allen Ginsberg. Lately, we hear less and less about Blake, not to mention Ginsberg. This is perhaps a shame, but as shames go, not a great shame. They’ll be back; first to return will be, I imagine, Blake of the Songs. In fact, he continues to fascinate scholars and art historians. I’m sure poets will come around to him once again, as Jim Jarmusch did in his film Dead Man.
Jason Guriel
The Poetry in the Prose: Part Two
Last time around, I dealt with the unreadable poems of the fictional poets in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, or what one fellow blogger neatly dubbed, “dark-matter.” It’s not that these unreadable poems are composed solely of punctuation or something, like the experimental works of D.L., the self-anointed postmodernist in a certain David Foster Wallace novella. The Savage Detectives’ poems are unreadable because they’re nowhere to be found, because Bolaño withholds them from the reader, even though Bolaño, a novelist and poet, could’ve easily ghostwritten some decent lines for his characters. It’s fascinating, though, when novelists – especially those who aren’t known as poets – actually do write some poetry, for the purpose of, say, prodding along a novel’s plot. We usually neglect them, these works-of-art-within-works-of-art, but they’re not without their critics and admirers.
Travis Nichols
Neon Meat Dreams of a Octafish
Throughout the life of the online literary journal Octopus, various writers have showcased out-of-print or hard-to-find works through the magazine’s “recovery projects.” These projects offer close readings and commentary on books by poets like Laura Jensen, Kamau Brathwaite, Paul Mann and Wong May, among others, and have been offered alongside the new poetry and reviews of contemporary work that are the mainstays of the site (poets include Paul Muldoon, Barbara Guest, Sarah Manguso, Joyelle McSweeney, Robert Kelly, Linh Dinh, and on and on).
Martin Earl
Translation and its Discontents: Part 2 (some preliminary examples of attitude)
Two of the comments on my recent post stood out from among the others in the tone they struck. They were the ones that generated the dynamic of this particular thread. As obviously as Horace Engdahl was wrong about America and its relation to world literature, the questions that arose seemed to turn upon why he was wrong. One of the two commentators offered to eat his hat, while the other suggested Denmark and Switzerland were irrelevant in terms of the larger picture.
Javier Huerta
AWP: My Would-be Itinerary
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 12
8:00a.m. R100. Conference Registration. Attendees who have registered in advance may pick up their registration materials at AWP’s pre-registration desk on the lower level of the Hilton Chicago. On-site registration badges are available for purchase at the 8th Street side of the lobby level.
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