Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Eileen Myles
Sickness and Poetry
Let’s face it; it’s an altered state. I started getting sick in San Diego – I felt shivers as I headed to dinner after the reading and I lay in bed at Roddey’s thinking what if I just fly home without even reading in LA. But I got up and felt a little better and did read and sat shaking lightly in a restaurant afterwards with my friends. Now it was just a question of how heavily it would
Eileen Myles
Jim Carroll (1949-2009)
I toured with Jim Carroll in 1990. It was sort of an honor.
He was the exact same age as me but when I came to town in the poetry world he already had everything – a book from a big press with a Larry Rivers cover called Living at the Movies and parts of his Basketball Diaries had been published in Paris Review while he was still a teenager. He came to the Poetry Project when he was in high school to meet the older poets – Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman who themselves were in their 20s then. It was unimaginable to me, Jim’s kind of youth. And that he was famous from then on.
Travis Nichols
Jim Carroll, R.I.P.
Jim Carroll—poet, novelist, musician, diarist, impresario—died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60 years old.
The tributes and reminisces have come in from various sources–from English footballers to New York musicians to everyday readers–all noting what a tremendous presence Carroll was both onstage and off.
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“’I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,’ the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview on Sunday. ‘The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.’
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“Jim had by that time already begun haunting the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in the Bowery Church. He loved the poetry of Frank O’Hara, and writing under a rush of Frank’s influence, at seventeen produced his own first slim chapbook, Organic Trains. Ted Berrigan had taken Jim under his wing. Poetry not basketball was where Jim wanted to go in his life.”
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Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney on NPR:
Travis Nichols
Of Love and Chain Letters (Borderline Ballads)
The New York Post reported yesterday that the Madonna once called on Anne Sexton’s poem “Love Song” to justify her love of a former bodyguard, Jim Albright.
“In a fax dated Dec. 24, 1993, Madonna wrote to Albright: ‘I was the girl of the love letter/ the girl full of talk of dreams and destination . . . the one with her eyes half under the covers/ with her large gun-metal blue eyes/ with the thick vein in the crook of her neck.’ Sexton’s poem read: ‘I was the girl of the chain letter/ the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes . . . the one with her eyes half under her coat/ with her large gun-metal blue eyes/ with the thin vein at the bend of her neck.’
The love fax (!!!) is one of many items up for auction at Gotta Have It Collectibles this week, though presumably the only one related to Anne Sexton (I do envision “Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” scribbled on a Vogue-era cone bra uncovered one day). Sexton’s name has come up with unexpected frequency already this summer, most notably when Ange Mlinko compared her to Frederick Seidel in The Nation.
Joel Brouwer
One of my songs spins backward, while the other plays forward
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.
Travis Nichols
A Braille Hoax and Some Rockabilly Cancer
Ed Park peered into the strange world of David Berman’s drawings for last week’s cover story. Park argued that the drawings collected in the newly released Portable February are cut from the same quirky cloth as Berman’s poetry and music. One ‘rawing that particularly caught the writer’s attention: a billboard/projection stating, “Somehow I had offered to deliver bad news to a maniac.”
“You can even imagine Berman’s deadpan, dead-on singing voice delivering that non-punchline punchline on one of his albums with his band, the Silver Jews,” Park says.
Ah yes. The now-defunct Joos. That monotonic punchline machine that is Berman’s singing voice, delivering zingers over some jangly jangles. It’s amazing how much of my life has been spent humming the following:
Annie Finch
A Toast for the Fathers
Roy Finch at Sarah Lawrence College, mid 1960’s
Father’s day came and went, and I’ve been wanting to say something about my dad, and all my poetic fathers,
Travis Nichols
The Man in the Mirror
As we all know by now, Michael Jackson–who apparently was reading Tagore poems in his last days–is dead.
It is sad and strange, and though it feels a little odd, I wanted to put up a sort of Harriet “open thread” about it here just in case anyone wants to vent over the weekend. Myself, I’ve felt mostly numb about the whole thing, mainly, I think, because the King of Pop had been dead for me twenty years or so, ever since I was eight years old.
Annie Finch
Why I Am a Woman Poet
My Sister-in-Law, Sister, Niece, and Me in My Mother’s Kitchen
Anna Leahy reminds us, in her recent essay “Is Women’s Poetry Passé?” in Legacy, that “in the January 2006 issue of Poetry, the three female poets who had been asked to comment on “women’s poetry” (Meghan O’Rourke, J. Allyn Rosser, and Eleanor Wilner) asserted, “we all concur that we ought to abolish the unpleasant term ‘women’s poetry.” And in the ensuing few years, consensus on this point seems, if anything, to have become wider. Even I, who claimed for myself the name of “poetess” in a 2002 essay, found myself beginning a paragraph in my recent Women’s Work post on Harriet with the caveat that “there may not be such a thing as women’s poetry. . .”
But the more I have thought about it since writing that post, the more I have decided that, whether or not women’s poetry exists, I am a woman poet, for three reasons:
Travis Nichols
The Music of Langston Hughes
While the Roots–everyone’s favorite late night house band–prepare for the West Coast premiere of Ask Your Mama this August, insatiable Langston Hughes fans should check out this week’s cover story: Franklin Bruno’s exploration of the poet’s 1957 Broadway musical comedy Simply Heavenly. The production featured a nearly-forgotten gem sung by Brownie McGhee that I can’t stop humming. Listen:
Bruno’s excellent reporting on the production features UFOs, Pete Seeger, Passing Strange, Sonny Terry, The Defender, and a whole lot more. Check it out here.
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RECENT COMMENTS
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What in sam hell is transcendent immanence? Any half-way tutored Jungian will tell you ... MORE »
Terreson | 11.20.09 -
Hi Annie,
Thought to wonder because you've set up a separate internet space for women, right? ... MORE »
Teri G. | 11.20.09 -
Hi Teri, Do you mean what do I think of the fact that women were ... MORE »
Annie Finch | 11.20.09 -
"Being a famous poet is not the same thing as being famous."
- John Ashbery MORE »
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Doesn't "reclaiming" a racist word just give the racists an excuse to use it against ... MORE »
Jill | 11.20.09
So long and thanks for all the fish + a question... (8)
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