Joel Brouwer

Hoodoo You Love

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens was the fourth book of poetry I ever bought, with a gift certificate to Schuler Books in Grand Rapids I’d been given for a birthday, probably my sixteenth or so. Why that book? I’m not entirely sure.

08.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (17)

Rebecca Wolff

On the Road

I met my neighbor on the road this morning, a childhood friend I haven’t seen since childhood, except on Facebook, which is where he saw the news of my new book. “Selling lots of copies?” he inquired cheerfully, and when I mentioned that books of poems don’t really figure in that way in the American consciousness he and I then shared a few moments laughingly comparing the obscurity of our respective art forms: He is an opera singer, it turns out, though from his Facebook friends I had construed him as an architect. But this is not a post about Facebook.

08.22.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Travis Nichols

This Is the Week That Is

Jason Conger, Rodrigo Toscano, Riva Roller, Clare Alexa Sammons (photo by Laura Elrick)

Meet the Radical:  Jason Boog, GalleyCat impresario and freelance video essayist, explores the life and work of Rodrigo Toscano for this week’s cover story.  A taste:

“Frustrated by his formal education, Toscano skipped college altogether, moving to San Francisco in the early 1990s. There, poetry and activism became intimately intertwined in his adult life. Toscano’s self-made syllabus sampled a wide range of poets—Leslie Scalapino, Fanny Howe, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles Bernstein—as well as political thinkers such as Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Herbert Marcuse. In the mid-1990s, he helped organize the Labor Party in San Francisco and published his first collection, Arbiter (Parenthesis, 1995).”

Read the whole fascinating story of this labor activist, poet, and playwright here.

Welcome:  We’re pleased to announce that Barbara Jane Reyes, author of Poeta en San Francisco and Gravities of Center, has joined us at Harriet.  Welcome to the conversation, Barbara!

Topping the Charts: The number 1 book on the contemporary best seller list this week is Slamming Open the Door, Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno’s harrowing series of poems about her daughter’s murder.  Bonanno’s book edges out W.S. Merwin’s Shadow of Sirius and Mary Oliver’s Evidence for the top spot.

UPDATE:  While “How Forrest Gander is like Megadeth” is pretty good, the headline of the week (so far) goes to “Shocker: Robin Williams’s poetry teacher character is unlikable, ‘needs to grow up’ says director.”  That one really does have it all, doesn’t it?  Even better?  The director is Bobcat Goldthwait.

Read each and every bit of news fit to print over at the news page (Thanks, as always, to Cate and Abby for stellar puns and cub reporter skill-sets).

08.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Eileen Myles

The Group

 We’re turning the corner into fall and it seems to me 2009 was a fast summer. I sprained my ankle hiking with one group at the beginning of it and as the chill infiltrates the air as many mornings as not when I wake up it’s still x@#$$% swollen. I lived at MacDowell for a month this summer with a strangely shifting group. There were people I met at the end of their stay – and others began to arrive in the last week I was

08.19.09 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Joel Brouwer

they go up pretty easy

How many passwords does Sharon Olds have? How many passwords does Seamus Heaney have? Does anyone other than them know what they are?

The TIME Magazine in the dentist’s office is wondering what happens to your cloud-borne data when you’re dead. A relevant question for all of us who a) compute and b) are mortal. (Indeed, it recently occurred to me that I might oughta swap passwords with my dad, just in case one of us unexpectedly needs to execute the other’s “estate,” such as they are. (We’re Dutch; we enjoy planning.)) But it seems like this must be a particularly vexing issue for readers and scholars of literature, since, for better or worse, people are going to want to write dissertations about Olds and Heaney (and Gary Snyder and C. D. Wright and Lyn Hejinian and Robert Pinsky and Charles Bernstein and Adrienne Rich etc.), and some of these folks, and certainly many more of the generations which follow them, must be conducting their correspondence increasingly online, and that information lies behind a login screen.

08.18.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (28)