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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.

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09.14.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

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.

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08.09.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (20)

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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07.13.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Alan Gilbert

My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part I)

It’s hard to estimate how many poetry readings I’ve attended in my life, but it must be somewhere in the hundreds and hundreds. If I’ve been going to poetry readings regularly for eighteen years, and I’ve averaged about fifteen to twenty a year, that would put the total at around 300. That doesn’t sound right, especially since I have very little recall of at least 200 of these, but it’s a reasonable ballpark estimate. (I’m guessing I’ve seen double that many gallery and museum shows. Music concerts might be closer to 100.)
So it’s probably ridiculous to try to list my top three (plus a few more) poetry readings ever (and my apologies in advance to any sensitive friends), but here goes (in order of most memorable):

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07.12.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Alan Gilbert

History can be sexy too

In a near impossible coincidence of good fortune, two of my very favorite djs/sound artists/musicians—two of my very favorite artists in general—played in New York City this past weekend: DJ /rupture and Moodymann. Their work has significantly influenced both my poetry and my thinking about poetry, specifically, how to create a moving and directly engaging poetry that also contains a built-in meta-/conceptual component allowing for lots of emotional and intellectual wiggle room. Let’s face it, much of the work lumped under the “conceptual poetics” rubric leaves me—and lots of other people—cold. As a grad-school educated person who participated in a world-renowned Poetics Program during the 1990s, I don’t think it’s a matter of me not “getting it” or not being sympathetic. It probably has more to do with not attending the correct dinner parties.

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06.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Ada Limón

The Fine Art of Mimicry

“I will know my song well, before I start singing”
—Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s Going to Fall
I hope you got out your window yesterday. I did, just for a couple of hours, but it was worth it. My friend M (we’ll call her that) is a young, new poet and she’s learning how to write, and doing quite well. But she worries that she’s trying to copy her favorite writers when she reads them all the time and then writes her own verse. This post is particularly for her.
A dear poet friend of mine is taking me out for a belated birthday dinner tonight (it was almost 2 months ago, but that’s apparently how busy our lives ended up). Afterwards, because it’s a bit of a tradition, we might sing a little karaoke. I hated karaoke until I met her. I sang a bit in school, the national anthem for high school homecoming (which was horrendous), then a bit in college, but for some reason karaoke made me cringe. But then, I learned to pick the songs I really loved. Even if they weren’t popular (usually old standards, some real grandma pleasers). I practiced them, and then I actually learned to be okay at it (not great, but you know, not terrible). Don’t show up and hold me to that, alright?
I bring this up because today, I was having lunch with a fiction writer and we talked about how important mimicry is when you begin delving into your own writing. At least it was very important to me, still is really.

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05.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Reginald Shepherd

He’s the Greatest Dancer (and Britney’s not so bad either)

In my younger and thinner days, I used to go out dancing all the time. In Boston, in Providence (whenever I could get a ride), in Buffalo, in Chicago, I had what might be called “every night fever.”? In Boston, where last call was at two, I rarely got to bed before two or three; in Buffalo and Chicago, where last call was at four, I rarely got to bed before four or five.
I went out all the time because I love to dance and I love music, as the O’Jays sang oh so long ago, though unlike them I don’t like just any kind of music, even if it is groovin’. I also went out because I was bored and lonely and I wanted to get laid, or at least to feel wanted. Though I had more sex than I felt that I was having (does anyone ever have “enough”? sex?), I rarely got to have the sex I wanted with the men I wanted to have it with. But I had the music, and I could spend a good night in a musical trance, almost forgetting that I wanted to have sex. Almost. There were also the nights when I felt so lonely that a sad song would make me sit on the edge of the dance floor and cry. At first I accidentally typed “fly.”? That works too.
For most of my life I have felt very awkward and uncomfortable in my body and in my social presence. I feel better about both now, but still hardly at ease. But when I dance, which is rarely these days, I feel at one with my body. I was a great dancer (no boast, just fact—I rocked the dance floor, and still can) and, a little heavier and out of practice, I’m still damned good. When I’m dancing my movements are graceful and smooth. When I’m dancing I feel attractive, I experience my body as admirable, even masterful, just like Madonna sang in “Vogue.” In the days of my constant clubbing, men who would never have slept with me would compliment me on my dancing, buy me drinks (I always chose soda or orange juice), befriend me, even. Sometimes a man would sleep with me because I danced well (as the old saying goes, if a man can dance that well, imagine how well he can fuck), though the dance floor brought me more friends than lovers.

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02.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Ange Mlinko

Versions of Songs, Versions of Weariness

Alicia’s post in tribute to Edward Thomas’s “The Owl” moved me. Especially so since it came after a terrible experience in a shopping outlet. My four-year-old and I were looking for snow boots and while we shared a sandwich in a packed food court I realized that I was only just starting to hear the pounding music in the backdrop: Christmas carols set to frenzied electronic beats.
My favorite carol this year has been O Holy Night. It’s the music that makes the carol, and I’ve had fun dowloading different versions of it to compare. How to sing the words “Fall on your knees:” with soaring sternness like Bing Crosby, or hushed reverence like Josh Groban? You can chart a Melisma-meter with the versions on offer by Avril LaVigne, LeAnn Rimes, and Cristina Aguilera.
Steve Burt’s quote from Wallace Stevens’s letters (in Alicia’s comments section) also sent me to its source. One of the reasons to go back to a favorite poet’s letters—and Stevens never disappoints in this regard—is to confirm to oneself how uncannily history repeats itself. Or to realize maybe that it’s not history repeating itself, exactly, but our sentiments about history, our relation to it, that remains glumly constant. I had to smile, rereading a passage that I might have written on a sour day:

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12.17.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

A.E. Stallings

Ear Drums

So (as Seamus Heaney might begin this). My husband and I actually went to a concert last night, which we have not done in an age. He had managed to swing tickets to a sold-out Alfred Brendel concert at the Megaron Mousikis, an evening of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart. But we almost didn’t go, because it meant leaving our toddler at home with a raging fever. In the end, his grandmother came over and looked after him, and we guiltily fled for the concert.
Greek audiences are not quiet audiences. They are lively and engaged, even the rather aged, mink-clad dripping-in-Chanel set that is likely to attend a pricey classical concert. Greeks aren’t quiet even in church on the holiest night of the year—there is fidgeting, whispering, the inevitable chirping of cell phones. Still, at a classical concert people know better. Nonetheless, during the first movement of the Haydn, I was actually thinking to myself, you know, this is a pretty fidgety audience (everyone in there seemed to be muffling emphysemic coughs) when Alfred Brendel abruptly stopped playing and announced to the audience that if there was not complete silence, he would not continue.

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12.02.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Major Jackson

Poetry & Influence of the Non-literary Variety

So many strands/strains of the old country and other people’s cultural traditions inform the arts of the Americas, even if we do not readily acknowledge them. Klezmer, Blue-grass, Deep soul, southern Gospel, the Blues: these musical styles embed in me, and I’d be so lucky to exact poems that are their equivalents in spirit and expression.
I am often asked after a poetry reading, maybe too frequently, by some earnest undergraduate, if I listen to music while composing a poem, because, well, my poems sound so rhythmic, “even on the page,” a dubious observation, at best, in my opinion. It’s like saying water is liquid. Probably the query of music listening is 2nd only to “creative process.” (Then, third would be: “What hip-hop artists are you listening to these days.” I wonder if my buddy Billy Collins is posed that question.)

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11.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Lavinia Greenlaw

I am so bored with words

Alan Gilbert

Sylvia Plath—original hip-hop poet

Alan Gilbert

My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part II)

Alan Gilbert

My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part I)

Alan Gilbert

History can be sexy too

Ada Limón

The Fine Art of Mimicry

Reginald Shepherd

He’s the Greatest Dancer (and Britney’s not so bad either)

Ange Mlinko

Versions of Songs, Versions of Weariness

A.E. Stallings

Ear Drums

Major Jackson

Poetry & Influence of the Non-literary Variety

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