Joel Brouwer : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Author Archive

they go up pretty easy

t2189-memento-mori-jean-morin

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.

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08.18.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (28)

Joel Brouwer

taxidermy fiesta of revolutionary aquatic holidays lost

hurricane-symbol

I never thought about hurricanes very much until I moved to Alabama. Now I think about them a lot. Today’s an important hurricane day: at 5:00 a.m. Atlantic Standard Time, Tropical Storm Bill became Hurricane Bill, the first hurricane of the 2009 season. And, notably, today is the 40th anniversary of Hurricane Camille’s landfall near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Camille came ashore as a full-blown category five storm: 190 mph winds and a 24 foot storm surge. Much of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama gulf coast looked like Dresden the next day. I happened to be driving through Slidell, Louisiana this morning. On August 18, 1969, the road I was driving on was under ten feet of water.

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08.17.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Joel Brouwer

Milhous as King of the Ghosts, by Rachel Loden

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Now and then I think I have something of use to say about poetry as a category, but generally I’m much happier talking about poems. What attracted me to poetry in the first place, I think, was its prizing of instances, its radical recognition that the purse seine of theory inevitably lets slip millions of particular minnows. (And, to tax the metaphor, sometimes catches different fish than those wished for.)

So, without further ado, a poem! By Rachel Loden!

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08.10.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (20)

Joel Brouwer

One of my songs spins backward, while the other plays forward

cat_scratchin

OK, if that GIF is too annoying, just tell me, and I’ll take it down. Would be a shame, tho.

Adrian Matejka’s second book of poems, Mixology, was published as part of last year’s National Poetry Series, and I’ve finally gotten around to picking it up and checking it out. I knew Adrian very briefly when we both lived in Carbondale, Illinois, in 2001. He had a radio show on the local independent station WDBX (then 700 watts; since upgraded to 3000), and he asked me to come on the show and read some poems. I’d done this sort of thing before, on a poetry show on Madison, Wisconsin’s indy station, the venerable WORT. But Adrian’s show was a little different.

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08.04.09 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Joel Brouwer

Renaissance redux?

antony-gormley-terracotta-army

Pop quiz: What do Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Frank McCourt, Art Buchwald, Pete Hamill, Edward Abbey, Elmore Leonard, Mario Puzo, James Dickey, James Wright, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Hara, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons, Paddy Chayevsky, Rod Serling, Aaron Spelling, Terry Southern, Walter Matthau, Robert Duvall, Tony Curtis, Harry Belafonte, Rod Steiger, Gene Hackman, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Rauschenberg, Leo Krikorian, Dan Spiegle, Robert Miles Runyan, Kenneth Noland, LeRoy Nieman, Richard Callner, Ed Rossbach, and Robert Perine have in common?

Answer after the break. Don’t click until you’ve made your guess. One thing you’ve already noticed is that they’re all men. That’s sort of a hint.

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08.01.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (25)

Joel Brouwer

Recent books by Rick Barot, Chris Martin, and Karen Volkman

Unrelated But Endearing Photograph of a Bunny in a Teacup

Hi, Harriet. I’m going to do some more recycling! I wrote this review for some peeps and they never published it. I thought this was a bummer, not only because I’d spent time working on it, but also because I thought these books deserved some notice. I cut-n-paste the review here on Harriet for those reasons, plus the reason of needing things to blawg about from a contractual point of view, plus to say nyah nyah to the aforementioned review-not-printing peeps, plus to satisfy a certain meta-curiosity I’ve been feeling, namely, whether/how/why my writer-writing differs — in tone, substance, form, content, etc. — from my blogger-writing. But ugh, don’t bother yourself too much about that last bit if it’s of no interest; it’s only slightly so to me. Instead read these reviews and let me know a) whether/why you do/n’t find my comments about these books valuable and/or enticing and/or whatever, and b) if you already knew about these books, what did you think of them?

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07.29.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (18)

Joel Brouwer

In the stacks

library_stacks

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the role of the library in your life as a 21st century reader and/or writer. I taught a summer class this past June, and when I needed to mark papers or work on my notes, I often retreated from the summer sun and my always-on computer screen to the basement of Gorgas Library here on the University of Alabama campus. The basement of Gorgas approaches my Platonic ideal of librarity (or librariousness, if you prefer): cool silence, greenish tile floors, flickery yellow fluorescent lights, indestructible but much-graffiti’d wooden and green metal furniture, creaky and ticking pipes crisscrossing the low ceiling, and of course aisle upon aisle of books, many of which (e.g., a 1932 history of Catholicism in Montana) may never be read again, but all of which stand ready, patient, in case you want them. I love it down there. When my mind wandered from my students’ papers, I got to thinking about how my relationship to libraries has changed over time. I wonder how yours has, too.

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07.26.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (37)

Joel Brouwer

What Is a Poet?

Participants in the "What Is a Poet?" symposium at The University of Alabama, October 1984. L-R: Bernstein, Vendler, Jay, Perloff, Altieri, Stern, Ignatow, Simpson, Lazer, Levertov, Burke. Photo by Gay Chow.

No, no, don’t expect an answer from me; I’m just using my Harriet soapbox here to commemorate the 25th anniversary of a unique event in American poetry. In October of 1984, my friend and colleague Hank Lazer gathered together here in Tuscaloosa a sparkling group of poetry and poetics all-stars (Charles Altieri, Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Burke, Donald Hall, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Marjorie Perloff, Louis Simpson, Gerald Stern, and Helen Vendler) for three days of conversations and lectures concerning the aforementioned question. (The lasting result of this meeting was a terrific collection of essays with the same title as this post.) As you might expect, there were disagreements among the symposium participants regarding the nature and function of the poetic act.

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07.21.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (17)

Joel Brouwer

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)

carruthhayden

Last summer, I was asked to write something about Hayden Carruth, and I did, but the folks who had asked me to write the piece never published it. Carruth died in September of last year. He had been an idiosyncratic but pervasive force in American poetry — both as a writer of poems and a critic of poetry — for more than fifty years. Here is a link to his obituary in the New York Times. And below is the appreciation I wrote last summer. It’s lazy of me, recycling old material here, but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to offer this piece for your consideration. Hopefully it will both garner Carruth some new fans and spark good memories for old ones.

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07.17.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (255)