Quasi-unintelligibility (Part 5) April 30, 2013: To repeat: Stevens’s “Man Carrying Thing” kicks off with a clear-cut statement about what a poem “must” do, i.e., “resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” But the statement itself, which is part of a poem, presents no resistance to the intelligence at all—its meaning is “obvious,” to recycle a word from the poem’s [...] by Timothy Donnelly

Roll Over Ezra: Musical Adventures with a Literary Band April 30, 2013: In January, I released two audio chapbooks; Asking for the Moon (Red Glass Books) and Book of Hooks (Kattywompus Press). Both books have CD’s with songs; Book of Hooks is a double CD. There’s around 36 songs between the three disks, with songs that go back as far the early ‘80’s. Thanks to the tech moment we are all living in, most of [...] by Cornelius Eady

Dark Places (Part Two) April 30, 2013: The easy part was posting other people’s answers to the question: “Why Do You Write?” in Part One. Now comes the tricky part: answering the question myself. One of the first poems I ever wrote, at age 5, went like this: I like crackers I like bread Because they’re both dead The companion piece to that poem was [...] by Laura Sims

Useless Wooden Toys April 30, 2013: [caption id="attachment_66233" align="alignright" width="500"] Jeff Grosso, still from Speed Freaks, 1989[/caption] I always dug that title from the New Deal video, aptly taken from Jeff Grosso’s part in Speed Freaks where, laying on a sofa after shaving his eyebrows off says, “…the life of a professional skateboarder, lounge around all [...] by Micah Ballard

Bright Red Words April 30, 2013: [caption id="attachment_66022" align="alignright" width="500"] Louise Bourgeois, I HAD A FLASHBACK OF SOMETHING THAT NEVER EXISTED, 2002, Photo: Christopher Burke, © Louise Bourgeois Trust/VAGA, NY[/caption] Most poets I believe love words as objects in themselves. They seem delicious to me, as if I could just pluck one from an overhanging [...] by Camille Guthrie

I is not a subject: Part 4 of 5 April 30, 2013: This is the fourth part of a five-part paper, a version of which was given April 26, 2013 as the keynote address at the symposium, "Lament of the Makers: Conceptualism and Poetic Freedom," hosted by the Princeton Graduate Colloquium on Contemporary Poetry. Other symposium participants were Timothy Donnelly, Jena Osman, and Kent Johnson. Monica de [...] by Vanessa Place

I is not a subject: Part 3 of 5 April 29, 2013: This is the third part of a five-part paper, a version of which was given April 26, 2013 as the keynote address at the symposium, "Lament of the Makers: Conceptualism and Poetic Freedom," hosted by the Princeton Graduate Colloquium on Contemporary Poetry. Other symposium participants were Timothy Donnelly, Jena Osman, and Kent Johnson. Monica de [...] by Vanessa Place

The 2013 Chapbook Festival! April 29, 2013: It's like a mini (and less overwhelming) AWP, in New York City, right across from the beautiful Empire State Building. There will be so many fabulous presses there, including Argos Books, Factory Hollow Press, Birds LLC, Brooklyn Arts Press, Forklift, Ohio, Ugly Duckling Presse, PSA, my very own Monk Books, and many more. Then there's [...] by Bianca Stone

An Incomplete Guide to the Poetry Books I Currently Have on Tap (or, When and Why Networks Work) April 29, 2013: All the “best of” or “holiday gift” lists come out in December and January, when books that had our attention in the early (still chilly, here in New Jersey) days of spring have gotten buried beneath . . . let’s say autumn leaves and winter snows.  Here’s a quick list of newish poetry books currently or very recently on my mind, for [...] by Evie Shockley

“everything is leaf. . .” April 29, 2013: [caption id="attachment_66089" align="alignright" width="500"] Sketch of Old and New World Vegetation by Goethe[/caption] As did Rousseau, Goethe botanized. At the De l’Allemagne show now up at the Louvre, pages from his herbarium are exhibited alongside more recent ones from Paul Klee. They’re near Goethe’s ink-wash sketches of clouds, a [...] by Lisa Robertson