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Happy Birthday!!!

Some folks didn’t care for our recent commemoration of the centennial of Futurism – like we were endorsing it somehow, sheesh! Well, it’s time to celebrate yet another birthday.

03.25.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

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So Little Depends upon a Little Red Rooster!

Image courtesy of Muhammad Mahdi Karim, www.micro2macro.net

Should poets write poems that describe things (like, say, this silly-looking rooster) … or not?

03.18.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (52)

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Translation and its discontents, part quatre

“When I was reading an anthology of contemporary European poetry, I was struck by how much its poems tended to sound alike: in most cases, I couldn’t really tell what country or language a poetry had come from until I checked.”

02.27.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (27)

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I’ve decided to draw poems…

Jason Guriel recently took a keen-eyed look at the visual poetry we presented in the November 2008 issue of Poetry. One of our readers, Jerry Payne, in Clearwater, Florida, wrote in to say:
“Look, let’s call “visual poetry” what it really is—visual art. Some of us are in love with language and the way in which words—just words—can be put together in relationships that say something. Let’s not continue to water down the concept of poetry any more than it already has been.”
Well, I guess we’ve upped the ante in the February 2009 issue.

02.02.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (45)

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The things people write in books!

I mean literally, the things people scrawl on the flyleaves and in the margins of books. My mother taught me not to deface books, not even to dog-ear them, but tell it to a poet! There’s real treasure in literary marginalia: notes, scribbles, and assorted editorial comments added to books. Take Blake’s famous comment on Francis Bacon – “Philosophy has Destroyd all art & Science.” Blake really had it in for the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, on whose death he scrawled, “Funeral granted to Sir Joshua for having destroyd Art . . . .” Unlike many a lesser poet, though, Blake ordinarily attacked ideas not people, and tried to delete that comment. Coleridge is the most copious of literary marginalia-writers; he even invented the word “marginalia.” Anybody who let him borrow a book would later find reams of cramped, scribbled commentary it it; his essay-like annotations have been collected in a set of six volumes (so far) that contain some eight thousand notes. (Alas, the best-known marginal note isn’t by a poet: Fermat’s “last theorem,” which didn’t even fit in the margins of the book he was defacing; Wikipedia says it’s the most famous solved problem in the history of mathematics.) Other stuff written inside books include doodles, reader’s marks like stars, asterisks, crosses… but also actual poems! So guess what we recently found! Read on after the jump…

01.07.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

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The fist of survival: On childhood and poetry

I wanted to leave everywhere from about the age of nine. This involved delinquency at school and withdrawal from the home scene. I didn’t like grown-ups with the exception of my father and felt uncomfortable with what was given to me as a birthright and what later came to be understood (by me and my culture) as meaning: White.

12.05.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

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Information, Thy Nemesis is Reverie

Quoth Ange Mlinko -
Just three years ago I was sitting in a room of a Madison Avenue office tower, listening to my boss make a pitch to his boss, a hedge fund manager. Normally, during my spotty career as “content specialist” in various capacities, meetings were an opportunity to get hopped up on coffee and doodle. This was not to happen in front of a man whose day was micro-scheduled in fifteen-minute increments. Instead I listened dutifully to a plan to build a mirror site for the hedge fund’s server “outside the blast zone,” in the blueberry fields of New Jersey. At least the information would survive, even if we didn’t.
Information, thy nemesis is reverie. The reverie I used to fall into, for instance, when I didn’t care to listen in meetings. The reverie of great poetry, for another instance. But when I reflect that the most contemporary-sounding poems sound the least lonely, I wonder where reverie, as a mode of poetic thinking, is going. I also wonder if the store of knowledge unique to the poetic tradition of reverie will survive—or if it will morph into something at all recognizable to, say, Sappho…

11.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)