RAE’S POEM November 8, 2011: I like when Rae tells us in a reading that her poem has sections that are separated by numbers but she’s not going to read them.  I mean there’s a world of information in that remark about how a poem appears on the page and what we don’t need to think about when we are hearing it. What’s implied I think is how much more we do get – [...] by Eileen Myles

ROSA’S POEM October 31, 2011: I was just looking at this poem by Rosa Alcala called “Pedagogy.” It’s a poem about a woman looking at another woman and each of them is a woman of “another” generation and “another” race so the narrator’s looking (perhaps) across an enormous divide. Yet looking is the place where all these distances meet. This looking happens [...] by Eileen Myles

ANSELM’S POEM October 25, 2011: Anselm Berrigan’s poem is sixty five pages long. It ambles, it shrugs, it generally has an only stoic relationship to meaning. Like meaning might be someone he has a working relationship with. They always nod when they see one other. Yet I wouldn’t describe Notes from Irrelevancy as a poem that is opposed to meaning. No it’s just a [...] by Eileen Myles

RICKEY’S POEM October 17, 2011: Rickey Laurentiis’s poem is one of the great ones. A poem that upon hearing aloud at a deliberately queer reading at AWP instantly became part of my vocabulary and I wanted to hear more and have and yet I keep helplessly returning to this one, called “Black Iris” with a dedication: “for Georgia O’Keefe.” I apologize, cornily, and I [...] by Eileen Myles

ARIANA’S POEM October 11, 2011: I think of poetry mostly as something that trails off a little bit. I think of poetry as something that doesn’t happen in the page at all, and not in the reading either, but a little bit in all of those places. But on the other hand there is this thing – the crappy little poem. I know that the cardinal sin of my generation is to say that [...] by Eileen Myles

SINCERELY, BRUCE CONNER: A Final Work-in-Progress? June 29, 2011: As has often happened in my encounters with great artists, I had no idea who Bruce Conner was the first time I met him in the mid-’90s. I’d driven an art critic I knew to Conner’s house in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco for an interview and just ran the tape recorder while Conner told stories stretching back to the first [...] by Garrett Caples

The Poet and the Means of Production June 22, 2011: For a brief period, around 1992, I brewed beer, which in retrospect amazes me, because I’m not a handy fella, nor do I like to cook, and but for the fact the end product was 5 gallons of delicious intoxicant, I wouldn’t today believe I undertook so labor-intensive a project. I mention this because it occasioned my first encounter with [...] by Garrett Caples

The Art of Doing Other Shit: Harry Smith, Brian Lucas June 15, 2011: I remember, not exactly when, but the feeling of when I first realized the Harry Smith behind the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) was also the Harry Smith who made Early Abstractions (1964) and other avant-garde films. Then I remember having the feeling again when I went to the James Cohen Gallery in NY in 2002 to see a show of his [...] by Garrett Caples

Becoming Visible: City Lights Spotlight June 7, 2011: [Note: I’ve been trying to blog about the new City Lights poetry series, City Lights Spotlight, but am dissatisfied with the results. Fortunately, however, Patrick James Dunagan, author of A GUSTONBOOK (Post-Apollo Press, 2011), recently proposed interviewing me on the subject, which seems like a far more congenial approach. Many thanks to [...] by Garrett Caples

The Maestro: David Meltzer, Part II May 31, 2011: Prior to helping him assemble the collection that became When I Was a Poet, I knew little about David Meltzer or his work. Right before we met, however, I picked up a copy of The Agency Trilogy, a trio of pornographic novels written in 1968 for Essex House, the same outfit in L.A. that published the original edition of Bukowski’s Notes of a [...] by Garrett Caples