Archive for March, 2009
Jason Guriel
Some Thoughts On Poetry Readings: Part One (A Lot of Less Is More)
Recently, I agreed to take part in an upcoming poetry reading with an economy-sized premise: twenty poets read their poetry but for only five minutes each. A few years ago, a music critic, assessing The Magnetic Fields’ triple LP 69 Love Songs, assured readers of the review that the 69 songs are brief: “nearly all under three minutes: there’ll be another one along soon.” The same principle would seem to apply to this upcoming reading: attendees who don’t dig my stuff won’t suffer too much; they can rest assured there’ll be another, less sweaty poet along soon. And since I have been known to sweat when speaking publicly – my students are used to my ever-present Evian and handkerchief – five minutes sounds about right (to my metabolism, anyway).
Camille Dungy
Home Town Poets
I had a conversation yesterday afternoon about how deeply Richmond, VA honors the memory of Larry Levis.
Annie Finch
Listening to Poetry
Listening—openly taking in the words of another being, while allowing the words to remain in the other being’s voice—is a simple and powerful secret, one that life reminds me of in ubiquitous ways. Parenting, for example. Listening to my children, I am amazed at the insights and solutions they have to offer, steadily ignored or discounted as this wisdom usually is by well-meaning teachers, not to mention by myself. As director of an MFA program, I am also constantly reminded of the power of listening. Every problem I’ve encountered can be seen as the result of barriers (external ones—technological and logistical, social ones–hierarchical and political, or internal ones—interpersonal and psychological) to listening. And every problem that has been solved has been solved, eventually, through listening.
In this context, an art that opens us to the words of another person while keeping the words in the other person’s voice is an art worth heeding. Do you ever hear poems aloud in your mind—maybe poems by others, or poems you are composing as you hear them? Judith Weissman’s book Of Two Minds: Poets Who Hear Voices traces this common phenomenon through centuries of poets.
Catherine Halley
Herrera and Kleinzahler Share 2008 NBCC Poetry Prize
The Poetry Foundation would like to congratulate Juan Felipe Herrera and August Kleinzahler whose books “Half of the World in Light” and “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City” have both won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. This is the first time two poets have shared the award.
Learn how Herrera found his voice as a poet, and read some poems from his winning collection, “Half of the World in Light” here.
Read some poems that appear in Kleinzahler’s collection “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City” here.
Find out more about the NBCC winners in other categories, including Roberto Bolaño whose “2666″ won for fiction, here.
Jason Guriel
Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon: An Extended Letter for the Print Magazine which I’ll Just Post Here
Until I read A.E. Stallings’ recent piece on rhyme for the print magazine – a future-classic-of-poetics-masquerading-as-mock-manifesto? – I was living, unbeknownst to me, a slightly complacent life. I now realize I was prepared to let the American songwriter Jimmy Webb enjoy the last word on a tired rhyme – moon/June/spoon – a rhyme I assumed had long since seized up, succumbed to rigor mortis. Webb, a savvy lyricist, takes up the rhyme in his song “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” – performed by The Three Degrees in the The French Connection – which assures the listener that, yes, “it’s customary in songs like this to use a word like spoon.” And it is customary. And yet it doesn’t matter. Self-reflexivity saves Webb’s song – is, indeed, the song’s whole gimmick.
Camille Dungy
The Line: Here
Three of the grand mysteries: What makes a poem? What makes a stanza? What makes a poetic line?
Catherine Halley
Poets House Tribute to Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008)
I was so happy to see that Poets House in New York is holding a tribute to poet, critic, teacher, and former Harriet blogger Reginald Shepherd tomorrow night, Thursday, March 12th at 7:00 pm.
Those of you in New York might want to go.
If you can’t get to Poets House, you can read his Harriet blog posts, a few of his poems, and a short bio here.
Rodrigo Toscano
Futurism and the New Manifesto Reading: MOMA, February 20, 2009
a decantering of steely ghosts, and pulse-check at the heel of a dying elephant
11:00 am
Klammer in hand, hazpashing the music skrand, thuda-reatening to crip apart a Miró on the sfwall (the sfwall as a sfwall on the sfwall a sfwall after all), srkelted out “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in tones unkrimmen! With hizzzzzz braulding boki-boke, ka-taldering the space, to some 3, 000-5, 000 polycarbonate contempro performative A-Holes (like u!) pasking and pasking to and fro, (MOMA arrived in tow) and pauzing, “being there”, being, in fact, nowhere, aka C-U-R-I-O-U-S (note: you can very easily find the manifesto on-line, between your de-potentializing of every thing you touch, O Browser, throughout your bedraggled day (you should go home! you should sign off! you should quit!)). A-maaaaaaaaaazing cHARLES bERNSTEIN—red. I wuz wuh-waiting wuh-wankshussly fur die paart boot hate them the feminine everything futuristi, you know, that airborne fascist germ in your avant-garde coffee still. Whooooooooo—cHARLES, laid into, double-xtra, as by louder! How else? Exposé! Left me noivuhs-noivuhs, though. Later
Martin Earl
Wernicke’s area
Sometimes I wonder how it would go if I had to chose between writing and reading. It’s one of those desert island questions. More than travel, more than interpersonal relations, more than food, sex, sleep, these are the two loves of my life. They are what connect me to myself, and connect my self to the world.
Annie Finch
Marina Tsvetaeva and the Poet-Pair
A cab driver vending at a Russian street fair on the lower east side of NYC once sold me a little leather notebook with a woman’s head engraved on the cover. “Who is that?” I asked. “Famous Russian poet,” he answered. “Akhmatova?” “No, no! Greater!,” he grinned. Then he spelled her name for me, Marina Tsvetaeva, my first entry in that notebook.
Marina Tsvetaeva
Anna Akhmatova
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
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RECENT COMMENTS
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Gary Geddes has offered us some amazing anthologies, among other things. Thanks for the reminder. MORE »
Sina Queyras | 03.18.10 -
WARNING. OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY. DO NOT READ. MENTALLY ILL FAILURE AT WORK. ALERT. ALERT.
Do you know ... MORE »
Eric Landon | 03.18.10 -
I like what Patrick Kavanagh wrote, thanks Don.
Poets don't have careers. That's what everybody ... MORE »
Henry Gould | 03.18.10 -
Hopelessly old-fashioned, yes, but perennially radical. MORE »
pam lu | 03.18.10 -
Gwynn,
You are perfectly right. I should have thought of that. I apologize for that comparison. ... MORE »
Ron Silliman | 03.18.10
Who or what is a poet critic and why is the... (27)
Graphic Poetry Spotlight: Jai Arun Ravine’s... (3)
To Sonnet, to Son-net, Tuscon Net (54)
Beyond Careerism? (Redistributing Poetic... (30)
Women’s History Month: A Salute (3)
RECENT POSTS
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- Graphic Poetry Spotlight: Jai Arun Ravine’s The Spiderboi Files
- On the matter of career
- Who or what is a poet critic and why is the academy so up in Poetry’s face?
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
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