Archive for the ‘Live Readings’ Category
Katie Hartsock
A Glass Glass Factory
Hi again, Harriet! By the way, I’m the media assistant here at the Poetry Foundation. I’ll be posting until the end of the summer, when I’ll leave to begin a PhD program in Comp Lit at Northwestern, where I’ll work on classical and contemporary poetry.
When I began taking poetry workshops in college and forming an inkling of what contemporary poetry was up to, one of the books that most excited me was Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form: not only because I loved its surreal lyric landscapes, but I was dazzled by its use of zeugma, a “yoking” (the Greek translation) of two words modified or governed by one word, although that governing word only makes logical sense with one of the two at a time. Picture a cart with oxen hitched up and pulling on both sides, and compare with how the lines break here, from the beginning of “Paint Your Steps Blue”:
Stephen Burt
the litmag whirl
It is a lucky thing, but also a bit of a melancholy thing, to write about contemporary poetry as I do, as often as I do: having written about living poets– sometimes at length, and sometimes for the sort of periodicals that have dozens of footnotes, and sometimes for the sort of periodicals that actually pay you– since 1994, I now get a lot of poetry books in the mail, from a lot of presses– from perhaps half the US presses (air mail is another matter!) whose books I would try to read anyway. In good weeks I’m simply grateful for the in-flow: surely I could not have bought all those books myself, and one in any given stack is going to have something memorable, exceptional, perhaps by a first-book writer whose name I’ve never heard, or a second-book writer whose volume I would never have seen (this year for some reason they’re most often prose-poem writers: Brian Johnson, Carol Guess, Alison Benis White, among others). But in bad weeks I’m almost overwhelmed: how can I give every one of these books a fair chance? How can I take each one of these books quite as seriously as I would had it been given me by a friend, had I sought it and bought it in an independent store? Of course I can’t— but I can try; and yet the effort, on alternate afternoons, can bring me something close to new-book burnout.
Kwame Dawes
CALABASH DISPATCHES–SUNDAY
As if on cue, Sunday morning of Calabash arrived with overcast skies. The sofa in the wide living room of the suite I was staying in was getting old already. I was waking up quite early each day because of the firm surface of my bed. On the verandah, the sea is a few yards away, and it makes sense to sit there, and watch the light creep into the sky, and pray and think and make mental notes. On Sunday morning, I could feel the muscles in my legs hurting. At first I wondered what had happened to me the day before—I had not been exercising at all, and yet my legs felt as if I had been doing extreme squats all night. Then I realized how little I sat down on Saturday.
Kwame Dawes
CALABASH DISPATCHES 2009
The truth of the matter is that Calabash #9 may not have happened. Why might this be important? Calabash is a literary festival that takes place in a small village in a remote parish on a small island each year, and in the larger scheme of things, the possibility of a nine year old festival not happening may seem unimportant. But Calabash is other things. It is an International Literary Festival, it is free to the public, it brings together some of the best writers from around the world who donate their time and talents to read here, and for many people—several thousand to be exact—Calabash is necessary.
Eileen Myles
THIS IS THAT PLAZA
The exercise in silent poetry rages on. I drove in my truck up to The Hispanic Society on 155 St. on Sunday morning to do a walk through with a few of the future silent performers. I wonder if anyone’s read a great book called The Art of Memory by Frances Fitzgerald. Among other things (I’ve never finished it though I have assigned it to students…) it describes the practice of the study of rhetoric in the ancient world and how one would create a memory house to learn long speeches. To practice you would go to some public plaza at night that had lots of columns and lion statues to basically attach your memory tracks to these items and then when you delivered your speech you would move in your memory through the plaza you’d rehearsed in picking up cues from each staircase and statue you touched as you walked in the night.
Eileen Myles
April 30th – flying to Texas
There’s so much going on today. Kafka’s America, for instance. Jonathan’s panel at the Pen conference in New York. And something else. So much else. Lately I’ve been bumping up a little against Susan Sontag’s diary. I was wondering how a blog is different from a diary. Susan didn’t get paid to write hers, and she had to die first before we could read it.
Camille Dungy
Poetry is making things happen! Installment #2 (Help Him Woo Sarah Silverman)
Can poetry help this man woo the woman of his dreams (and support at-risk youth in the process)?
Forrest Gander
Slovene Invasion
The Slovenes are coming! Five of them, anyway: Tone Škrjanec, Tomaž Šalamun, Gregor Podlogar, Ana Pepelnik, and Primož Čučnik. This could be big trouble (see their bio notes). Catch you unprepared? That’s just what they want! Better click Continue Reading This Entry below.
Tomaž Šalamun at Brown University, 2007
Travis Nichols
Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers
Summer has come slowly to Seattle, but it was fully present last weekend. The audience at Gallery 1412–there to hear Don Mee Choi read her translations of the South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon–arrived sun-dazed and pink-cheeked, with swimming hair, flip flops, and (in my case) ice cream.
We shuffled into the dark makeshift gallery—a rickety retail space taken over by artists— where an old cassette tape recorder had been placed on a folding chair in the middle of the stage. Without much fuss or introduction, Don Mee walked up to the tape recorder, pressed play, and then sat back down as Kim Hyesoon’s voice came hissing out of the speakers.
Travis Nichols
Poetry Reading & Tractor Show in Lewiston, Illinois this Saturday
Lewiston, Illinois, childhood home of Edgar Lee Masters, will hold the 19th annual Masters Day celebration this Saturday.
In honor of the famously cynical poet, local actors in costume will give dramatic readings of Masters’ Spoon River Anthology in the cemetery, the city council will honor local poets for their work, and “members and friends of the South Fulton Antique Tractor Club and Old Iron Club will show their equipment from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. ”
“It used to be kind of a big deal with food and vendors and stuff,” a Lewiston city hall representative said over the phone, “but it’s kind of died out. The tractor people are the only ones left really holding out.”
The Canton Daily Ledger has a full schedule of events here.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian
STAFF WRITERS
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
RECENT COMMENTS
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Michael R. wrote:
>If you’d been reading, you’d realize that the point of that passage is ... MORE »
Kent Johnson | 03.21.10 -
Very cool. I had not heard of Piet Hein, and will look him up. A ... MORE »
LH | 03.21.10 -
Definitely very cool, Craig. Very much liked kari edwards' book and will put this on ... MORE »
Sina Queyras | 03.21.10 -
Yay, Janet! MORE »
Mary Meriam | 03.20.10 -
@Sina:
I have not heard of an opera singing poet,
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
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