Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Annie Finch
Happy Mother’s Day, to Foremothers, Poet-Moms, and Maggie
Today I went to visit my mother, Margaret Rockwell Finch, who turned 88 a few weeks ago. As always lately, she showed me a new poem. Maggie was my first model of a
Margaret Rockwell Finch, 1961
Javier Huerta
¡El que no brinque es migra!
My first creative attempts as a child were narcocorridos. Influenced by movies and songs like La Banda del Carro Rojo, my friends, cousins, brothers, and I played “narcotraficantes,” a game that always ended in the heroic tragic death of the narcos. As we lay on the ground, I composed corridos that narrated the events of our role-play. My father made it his goal in life to become notorious enough to have a narcocorrido written about him, preferably by Los Cadetes de Linares. His exploits didn’t land him a song; no, they landed him in a Jalisco prison for the last two decades. Perhaps the desire to write that song for my father is what drove me to write poetry in the first place. With the special role that the corrido has played in my life, you can understand why when my friend Oscar Bermeo alerted me to the news that the Border Patrol is now in the business of producing corridos I felt as if something essential had been stolen from me.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Tune thy music to thy heart
In Berlin this week, I wandered into a dark room next to this building site and found myself not in a silent disco but a silent singalong.
‘Tune thy music to thy heart,’ Thomas Campion proposed. These people sure did.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Silent disco
Have we entered a version of silent disco in which the primary experience of the poem is as received signals rather than noise?
For a poem to operate as a poem must it now be concentrated on the idea of itself, must it appear to be either the square root of poem or hardly a poem at all?
What’s a disco? asked my American penpal in 1974. She also sought clarification on ‘jumble sale’ and ‘youth club’.
Silent disco: I thought it was the most miserable thing I’d ever heard of (a room full of people with headphones on, dancing alone and in silence) until one night a year ago in Nova Scotia when there was well and truly nothing else to do. Someone described me as looking joyful. It’s not often I get called that.
Forrest Gander
What Some New York Poets Are Up To: Anne Waldman
It’s as if people have ceded both their destinies and their imaginations to “a hopeless gray area of defeat and despair,” Anne Waldman comments in the introduction to the anthology Civil Disobedience: Poetics & Politics in Action
(Coffee House Press, 2004). Few other American writers have responded to that malaise with as much joy, ferocity and irrepressible charge as Anne Waldman.
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Javier Huerta
Oakland: The There There
When he first introduced the current group of Harriet bloggers, Nick T. mentioned that I was in Berkeley. This is only partly correct. I study (or whatever it is that PhD students do) in/at Berkeley, but I live and write in Oakland.
(from Oaklandish)
Forrest Gander
Singer-Songwriters and Poetry
Any of us can get into a good fight arguing over singer-songwriters whose poetic lyrics we champion. And some singers, Leonard Cohen or David Berman (of The Silver Jews) for instance, publish books of their own poetry. In the seventies, a number of singer-songwriters made references to poets: Bob Dylan to Dante, Verlaine & Rimbaud, Patti Smith to Rimbaud, Lou Reed to Delmore Schwartz, and, um, Aerosmith quoted from “Hamlet.” But who are some of the younger singer-songwriters referencing poems by other poets? (Steve Burt, who will know them all, is limited to two responses).
For two of the best, click continue reading this entry, below.
Palace Music Bonus Disc
Lavinia Greenlaw
I am so bored with words
Those who understand what went on inside a tunnel in Switzerland last Wednesday have been struggling to explain it to the rest of us. The picture above is of what physicists believe the thing they are searching for might behave like if it does in fact exist.
While the world might think it doesn’t need poetry, it sure needs metaphor. The trouble is words get tiring and boring.
Alan Gilbert
Sylvia Plath—original hip-hop poet
I know that a primary root of hip-hop is Jamaican toasters delivering rhymes and declamations over portable sound systems in the 1960s, and that a version of this was introduced to the Bronx by the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc, an early pioneer of hip-hop. I also realize that the Last Poets are important figures in the genre’s birth. More generally, hip-hop is part of the African-diaspora derived “signifyin’” practices Henry Louis Gates, Jr., so famously wrote about. This is all very true. But I’d like to make the case that Sylvia Plath is one of the original hip-hop poets.
Alan Gilbert
My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part II)
So my second favorite poetry reading is one I never would have predicted: Clayton Eshleman reading the entirety of his translation of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. There was a reading series in the late ’90s held in a gallery in New York City at the corner of Broadway and Houston that was dedicated to a single poet reading from her or his work for an hour or more. The series lasted for a couple years, although I can’t remember who ran it, and the only other poet I recall reading in it was Bernadette Mayer.
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Señor Smith to you. (1)
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