D.A. Powell : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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In Memoriam: David Bromige

“Poetry is the theory of heartbreak” — David Bromige (October 22, 1933 to June 3, 2009)
Photo by James Garrahan

Endowed with remarkable wit and a prodigious memory, David Bromige was a paragon of poetic virtues. Not only was he a master of both traditional and innovative forms, but, as a teacher, he exhibited enormous erudition and generosity.

David’s output included dozens of books of his own poems, as well as broadsides and chapbooks, collaborations, fiction, essays, plays. He co-wrote songs with Barry Gifford. And he brought to his public readings a true gift for performance and improvisation. His honors included the Western States Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two awards from the Poetry Foundation.

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06.10.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

D.A. Powell

Porno For Poets

Jonathan Mayhew posted the following response to the excerpt of an interview with Philip Levine that I included in a recent blog entry:
“I heard Levine give a reading years back and say he cut his lines in half because the New Yorker paid by the line. He could get paid more for the same poem that way,
just by
doing
this”
I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a criticism or an appreciation. It seems that Mayhew is saying that Levine has altered his art for commercial reasons. To which I respond, “yay, Philip Levine!”

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08.05.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (30)

D.A. Powell

Vast Eternity III

Now let us sport while we may…I love that so many people are commenting on Levine’s distinction between “poetry temporal” and “poetry eternal” and my own volley against using criticism as a staging ground to launch one’s own poetry bottlerocket. It seems, though, that the very dialogue itself is caught up in the temporal rather than the eternal. So, since my time here in the blogosphere is limited, I’d like to change up the dialogue by asking what kinds of poems will be of interest in a thousand years?

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08.01.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)

D.A. Powell

Vast Eternity II

The reason I started musing on the literary version of separation between Church and State—the separation between poet and critic—is because I think more and more we’re getting these hybrids, the poet/critics (or “pitics”) (or “croets”) who feel that they can straddle these two distinct bodies and attempt to satisfy them both, as if the point of studding is the mounting and not the siring. Would that it were so; there would not be nearly as many lame ponies limping about, half-workhorse and half-racer, too thick-boned to run and too delicate to work.

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08.01.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (55)

D.A. Powell

Yonder All Before Us Lie Deserts of Vast Eternity

I was going to call this entry “Why I Am Not a Critic.” But then I realized I’d probably get blasted for that, because, after all, everyone is a critic—and—everyone is a critic. But what I mean to say is that I generally don’t write a whole lot of criticism. The truth is, I don’t much care about criticism. I think it’s wonderful that people are able to write criticism; I read as much of it as I can stand to read, which isn’t that much; and I quote from it when I need to, which is usually when I’ve run out of my own views, as happens more often than I’d like. But most of what I think about contemporary poetry happens at an instinctual level. Let’s call it “feeling” for lack of a more socially acceptable term. I often “feel” things about poems—i.e., whether or not I think the poem is “good” or satisfying or intriguing; whether or not I’d like to read it again; whether or not I’d be moved to put the poem on my wall or show it to a student or set it outside my office in the pile of “free for the taking” stuff (which usually means either I have two too many copies or I have one copy and simply think that one is too many).

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07.31.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

D.A. Powell

All the Young Girls Love Alice

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born 17 July, 1875

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07.17.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

D.A. Powell

Greatest American Hero

Jerry Rubin, born 14 July, 1938
Self-described “orphan of Amerika,” outside agitator, leader of the Youth International Party, indicted co-conspirator in the trial against free speech in the streets and parks of Chicago, sports writer, mayoral candidate, and revolutionary, Jerry Rubin once “liberated” the last few copies of the Declaration of Independence from a John Birch Society Bookstore in order to distribute them to members of Congress.

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07.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

D.A. Powell

Accessible Poetry

By which I mean “easy enough to get there.” Especially from anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This Friday, 18 July, at 7:30 p.m., a stellar line-up of poets will be reading in San Francisco to benefit the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

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07.13.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

D.A. Powell

The Turn of the Thumbscrew

The late William Talcott, editor of Thumbscrew Press, quite infrequently published a magazine called Carbuncle. The magazine was mostly devoted to poetry, along with artwork by poet Mark Neville, and the occasional interview and review.
One of the most provocative pieces of prose I’ve ever read appeared in Carbuncle #3, in 1991. It was a scathing review of a reading by Robert Creeley. Certainly the tone is critical and perhaps even, at times, mean. But the last line of it has stayed with me.
It doesn’t have to be about Creeley. It describes a feeling that so many of us might have had at a poetry reading, at one time or another. Good to remind ourselves that no poet should rest on his or her laurels, and that young poets need for older poets either to inspire them or to encourage them, but they rarely need to be bored (despite recent claims that poetry doesn’t need to make any bid for the attention of the reader).

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06.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (21)

D.A. Powell

Poets Laureate

Travis Nichols’ post on the current conjecture over who will or should be the next Poet Laureate of Britain contained a wonderfully sad story involving John McCain, Robert Pinksy, Charles Simic and an unfortunately bright-but-not-bright-enough man who wanted to illustrate McCain’s ignorance but instead illustrated his own (sidenote: I don’t see what this man’s being from Tennessee had to do with anything—the author of the original article could just have easily said that the man was from the US). The punchline was this: we live in a country where even somebody who seems to care about poetry enough to ask a trivia question about it (let’s call him “man from US”) doesn’t know who the Poet Laureate is. As for McCain, I think that a correct answer on his part—or even an answer on his part—would only have hurt him amongst his supporters; so, in essence, he gave the correct answer as far as likely McCain voters might be concerned.