Archive for September, 2009
Fred Sasaki
Transformations
So long September. On this, the last day of the month, have a lasting look at Cathie Bleck’s “Transformations” above, also featured on the current cover of Poetry. Inside, I see a hoof, a hand, and (blush) the distinct influence of Rockwell Kent.
Eileen Myles
Pharmikon
Just read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets which will soon be in a bookstore near you. It’s an uncategorizable piece of writing composed of numbered philosophical statements which consider the color blue, and so much else but in the aftermath of reading Maggie’s “bluets” the fascinating word Pharmikon remains in my mind.
It means drug though “the word in Greek famously refused to designate whether poison or cure.” It’s also variously described as “a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color and paint.” She knocks about trying to link it to love, to fucking. But it doesn’t stick. She brings up the possibility that instead like beauty, Pharmikon radiates. It does not stay still. And finally the written word is called Pharmikon.
Joel Brouwer
What a marvelous pursuit
Today I come to the end of my hitch as a Harrieteer. My thanks to all at the Poetry Foundation for this opportunity, and to all of you for the lively conversations. I leave you with this short prose/poem by Julio Cortazar. I’ve always loved it, but only recently came to understand that it’s really about blogging.
Abigail Deutsch
In memoriam: William Safire, a gem of a wordsmith
Was William Safire a poet?
No.
He was a Nixon speechwriter, a conservative pundit, a four-time novelist, and a funny, fastidious observer of English usage.
But can we detect his influence, however great or small, on such dextrous manipulators of contemporary verse as Matthea Harvey, Heather McHugh, and Paul Muldoon (among others, perhaps including you, dear commenter)?
Yes.
And could anyone encounter a poem about a bartender, say, without recalling Safire’s column on bartenders, barmen, barmaids, barkeeps, innkeepers, and so forth?
I certainly can’t.
Some background:
Eileen Myles
Sickness and Poetry
Let’s face it; it’s an altered state. I started getting sick in San Diego – I felt shivers as I headed to dinner after the reading and I lay in bed at Roddey’s thinking what if I just fly home without even reading in LA. But I got up and felt a little better and did read and sat shaking lightly in a restaurant afterwards with my friends. Now it was just a question of how heavily it would
Rebecca Wolff
This Is The End / FAME
I wanted to relate to you (and you, and you, and you and you and you) the embarrassing, pleasurable (embarrassingly pleasurable) final fragment of my dream the other night. I was at a coffee shop, a sweet hippie-hipster spot somewhere rural-ish, almost a converted barn, and there was one other person at another table, a man, and a young woman serving. She called out “Rebecca” to deliver a cappuccino to whoever had ordered it, and I hadn’t, so I said “I’m Rebecca, but I didn’t order that,” and she said “Rebecca Wolff?” and I said “yes,” and then she and the man began blushing and twittering, kind of communing with each other in relation to me, and saying things like “Wow, I can’t believe we have a famous writer in our coffee shop.” And I said, loudly and distinctly, with sincere modesty but also blushing appreciation, “You jest!” And then the alarm went off and I woke.
Barbara Jane Reyes
A few things about R. Zamora Linmark’s ‘The Evolution of a Sigh’
[R. Zamora Linmark: Photographed by Roger Erickson in Los Angeles. From Out Magazine.]
I wanted to say a few things about R. Zamora Linmark’s energetic collection The Evolution of a Sigh (Hanging Loose Press, 2008) which I’ve read and reread, and which had me cracking up at some of what I enjoy best in Linmark’s work; he mines and dredges that space between languages and all of the weirdness of that space, which facilitates communication and miscommunication. As in his first book, one of my favorites, the novel Rolling the R’s, he writes unapologetically from a place of historically and culturally misused English. This misuse leads to the creation of new sets of definitions, as in the first stanza of “Surviving the Post-American Tropics”:
Abigail Deutsch
“The” “age” “of” “genius”
In a recent Slate article, Ron Rosenbaum explores uses and abuses of the word “genius,” suggesting:
Maybe genius has been, if not democratized, more widely and thinly distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a precious few…. Maybe we no longer live in the kind of romantic age that created Byron, the template of genius.
Or maybe we do.
Tonya Foster
ADFEMPO: Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism
Am just back from the first day of the Belladonna ADFEMPO conference at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The opening plenary got off to a late but energizing start. (It didn’t start so late that I should have arrived home at 2 AM this morning in the back of a police car. But here I am. Not in the police car anymore but at home, in the after burn of that experience. I’d never ridden in a police car before tonight. Can’t say that it’s something I ever imagined doing. Those back seats are surprisingly stiff, collapsible I’m guessing. The officers were kind, gentle even, and took care to get me home after a bullying cab driver met the stubbornness my family often asks me to keep in check. But I work for a living too…)
Barbara Jane Reyes
Filipino American Poetas en San Francisco
Hello all. So I’ve neglected to mention that I co-curate (with poet and editor Edwin Lozada) and host a monthly reading series in San Francisco, for a lovely non-profit organization called the Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. (I am not too thrilled with the “Inc.” part of the name, but the organization itself is very good). For those of you not in the know, the Filipino American artist community in the SF Bay Area majorly overlaps with our activist community. Many of our organizations are homegrown, and have formed completely outside of academic and institutional settings. Poetry for us happens in community centers’ storytelling circles, and the best publicity is word of mouth.
These community centers are multi-disciplinary and multi-purpose spaces. Musical and theater performances, art exhibits, and literary readings take place in the same spaces as meetings to organize political demonstrations for Filipino WWII Veterans’ benefits, and for the tenant rights of this gentrified city’s low income Asian elderly. A couple of our activist and artist hot spots are South of Market (SoMa) and the new I-Hotel rebuilt in our former Manilatown, wedged between the Financial District, Chinatown, and North Beach.
And always, as with most Filipino gatherings, there’s food, and lots of enthusiastic picture taking. The vibe in the place becomes nothing like monotone automaton reading from behind a podium, eyes glaze over literary event; it’s more like a Philippine palengke, or bustling marketplace.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian
STAFF WRITERS
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
RECENT COMMENTS
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Yes, I agree, Joshua. I understand that this is a big motivating factor for poets ... MORE »
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Thank you Henry. MORE »
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So true. ... MORE »
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Glad to be of help with your career - MORE »
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To Sonnet, to Son-net, Tuscon Net (55)
All sides now: a correspondence with Lisa... (4)
Who or what is a poet critic and why is the... (27)
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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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