Jason Guriel

Canadian Content on Harriet Plummets

With this post, I reach the end of my run at Harriet. Many thanks to the Poetry Foundation for the invitation to blog and to the other bloggers for their comments and to all of the readers. I hope to find more Canadians on Harriet sooner rather than later – or perhaps a portfolio committed to Canadian poetry in some future issue of the print magazine. (At the very least, I predict a good year for Canadians; there are many good collections of poems being published this year, up here, and the Toronto Blue Jays, who are first in the A.L. East, trounced the Yankees soundly last night.)

05.13.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (13)

Jason Guriel

Talismans

Some time ago, in the spirit of good fun, I asked the denizens of Harriet what was on their desks and – perhaps understandably – reaped few responses. What does it matter, the cluttered context in which a writer gets her writing done? Who wants to confess to the favourite Troll doll that stands watch over a keyboard? Nevertheless, I was happy to read the note that trailed a Geoffrey Brock translation, in the April issue of the print magazine:

05.13.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (48)

Jason Guriel

Poetry Is

Recently, over at Slate, John Dickerson posed a challenge to readers: define the game of baseball in 150 words or less. Dickerson had been trying to figure out how to explain baseball to his six year-old son, without losing the son’s attention. He got many responses, which got me thinking: how would one (e.g. a teacher or a parent) define poetry to a six year-old, quickly, without losing the six year-old’s attention?

05.11.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (28)

Jason Guriel

Accidental Poetry and What to Do with the Stuff

Archie: You ain’t yet explained to me what’s all the attraction with the Catholics?
Edith: They have lots of interesting things – like those confessionals right in the church. They’re like telephone booths to God.
Gloria: Ma, that’s very poetic.
Archie: What the hell’s poetic about it, I didn’t hear nothing rhyme?

05.07.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Jason Guriel

Harriet Goes to the Movies

Throughout the month of April, the National Post, a paper up here in Canada (or down here, if you live in Wasilla or something) has been conducting brief E-mail interviews with poets, for its books blog. I thought I would reproduce one of the quirkier questions here: “Novels are always being adapted into movies. What are some poems that deserve the Hollywood treatment?”

(My answer to this question, by the way, was: “Not Beowulf.”)

04.28.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (46)

Jason Guriel

Where Would You Like to Live?: A Reading of a Poem I Like, Plus a Question

Real estate is on a lot of minds these days, but it’s in them, too; isn’t the mind (read: the imagination) a kind of low-rent housing to which we can retreat, however briefly, when we’ve been startled by a sudden scattering of cockroaches or when life, in general, looks grim under its bare bulb? I write “low-rent” because the only price the imagination exacts is our attention to what’s going on around us, in the real world, which is not always very interesting. But why limit ourselves to our own imaginations when we can live comfortably in those of others? This is a question that was prompted by a recently reprinted Don Coles poem:

04.26.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Jason Guriel

What One Can Learn About Poets from Their Acknowledgements: Some Rickety Conclusions

They appear every few years, when poets put out new collections, which is to say: they appear infrequently. Indeed, they often resemble afterthoughts, slipped into the backs of books or shrunk down and very nearly dissolved in the tiny type of copyright pages. And the events they record and acknowledge – the securing of grants, the input of peers, the debuts of poems in magazines – are less meteorological than geological. Acknowledgements summarize the occasional moments of friction and achievement in the otherwise tectonically slow grind of poets’ lives.

04.19.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (84)

Jason Guriel

Do I Dare Disturb the Reader?: Some Thoughts on Horror, Plus Two Brief Readings of Poems I Like

Poetry, we’re assured, is a full-service operation. It makes nothing happen, provides momentary stays against confusion, gives language a good Swiffering, fills time at weddings, kills Time at funerals – it has a full itinerary. But one thing it sometimes seems ill-equipped to do is scare us. I mean really scare the shit out of us, and not just because a particular instance of it is so awful it’s scary. No, I mean scare us or disturb us the way a horror movie scares or disturbs.

04.11.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (19)

Jason Guriel

A Cinch(ing): A Reading of a Poem I Like

At present, Canadian poet Elise Partridge can claim to enjoy a daily audience of many tens of thousands of readers. These aren’t just any old readers; they are those most coveted of literate creatures: general readers. They are also the commuters, myself included, who take public transit in Toronto where Partridge’s poem “Vuillard Interior” has been on display, adjacent to ads for community college and debt management. In other words, I’ve been reading and rereading Partridge’s poem for months now – looking at it, living with it, the way one looks at and lives with a painting.

04.05.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Jason Guriel

Poetry in Motion: A Slightly Awkward Attempt to Figure Out What This Term Means (and Thus Maybe Not the Best Example of the Term); Also, an Excuse to Quote Passages of Poetry about Baseball

Occasionally, when we admire a thing – a particular pastime, say – we claim there’s a certain “poetry” to it. If the thing’s a moving body then we might call it “poetry in motion.” For example, we sometimes claim there’s a certain “poetry” to baseball. Or we describe one of its players as “poetry in motion.” But what exactly do we mean by “poetry” in these boasts? In the former, we probably mean “elegance”; in the latter, something made elegant through its mastery of a certain set of rules, through the nimbleness of its follow through. In general, we probably just mean formal poetry. Bear with me here.

03.31.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)