Archive for the ‘Poems’ Category
Joel Brouwer
What Is a Poet?
Participants in the "What Is a Poet?" symposium at The University of Alabama, October 1984. L-R: Bernstein, Vendler, Jay, Perloff, Altieri, Stern, Ignatow, Simpson, Lazer, Levertov, Burke. Photo by Gay Chow.
No, no, don’t expect an answer from me; I’m just using my Harriet soapbox here to commemorate the 25th anniversary of a unique event in American poetry. In October of 1984, my friend and colleague Hank Lazer gathered together here in Tuscaloosa a sparkling group of poetry and poetics all-stars (Charles Altieri, Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Burke, Donald Hall, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Marjorie Perloff, Louis Simpson, Gerald Stern, and Helen Vendler) for three days of conversations and lectures concerning the aforementioned question. (The lasting result of this meeting was a terrific collection of essays with the same title as this post.) As you might expect, there were disagreements among the symposium participants regarding the nature and function of the poetic act.
Joel Brouwer
Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
Last summer, I was asked to write something about Hayden Carruth, and I did, but the folks who had asked me to write the piece never published it. Carruth died in September of last year. He had been an idiosyncratic but pervasive force in American poetry — both as a writer of poems and a critic of poetry — for more than fifty years. Here is a link to his obituary in the New York Times. And below is the appreciation I wrote last summer. It’s lazy of me, recycling old material here, but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to offer this piece for your consideration. Hopefully it will both garner Carruth some new fans and spark good memories for old ones.
Joel Brouwer
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
“The questions—why there is no poetic drama to-day, how the stage has lost all hold on literary art, why so many poetic plays are written which can only be read, and read, if at all, without pleasure—have become insipid, almost academic.”
So wrote T. S. Eliot in “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama,” published in The Sacred Wood (1922). Some fourscore years on, how has the situation of poetic drama changed?
Well, if there was no poetic drama then, I guess there’s something like less than none now. You could argue that between then and now we’ve seen dramatists whose language has bent more toward the poetical–Beckett’s monologues, the folk songs in Brecht, even the blank verse which lurks beneath much of Mamet’s dialogue–but why are so few poets interested in writing–and not just writing but producing–plays in verse?
I’m sure some will argue that verse drama is very much alive, pointing to Glyn Maxwell, Verse Theater Manhattan, Christopher Logue, and other authors and organizations. All very true; I’m not saying the form is extinct. But even if we postulate for the sake of argument that there are dozens, if not hundreds of verse dramas being written this minute, I think we can still agree that verse drama is not well represented in print or on the stage. When did you last go to see a play? When did you last go to see a verse play? When did you last see a verse play by a living writer?
Catherine Halley
Poem I Love: “For Julia, In the Deep Water” by John N. Morris
The first real live poem I ever remember hearing aloud is “For Julia, In the Deep Water” by John N. Morris. It’s about my friend Julia. Her dad was a poet, which was weird when you were a kid. If memory serves, Dr. Morris came to school and read this poem to our sixth grade class. The poem was first published in the New Yorker in 1976 and later in the volume “The Glass Houses”, after which I thought Billy Joel named his album. Although Morris published quite a bit in Poetry, he’s not in our online archive yet.
For Julia, In the Deep Water
The instructor we hire
because she does not love you
Leads you into the deep water,
The deep end
Where the water is darker—
Her open, encouraging arms
That never get nearer
Are merciless for your sake.
You will dream this water always
Where nothing draws nearer,
Wasting your valuable breath
You will scream for your mother—
Only your mother is drowning
Forever in the thin air
Down at the deep end.
She is doing nothing,
She never did anything harder.
And I am beside her.
I am beside her in this imagination.
We are waiting
Where the water is darker.
You are over your head,
Screaming, you are learning
Your way toward us,
You are learning how
In the helpless water
It is with our skill
We live in what kills us.
—John N. Morris
Joel Brouwer
Keep the spot sore!
Ahoy hoy! Sibilance! Sibilance!
The editors of Harriet have kindly invited me to join their merry band, and I’m honored to be here. Scared, too, though, that I won’t have much of interest to say. I guess we’ll find out. I may be posting snapshots of my tomato plants before my hitch is up.
Earlier this week was Sovereignty Day, and today is Independence Day. To celebrate, please turn off your computer and go eat some ice cream in a park. Come back and read the rest of this tomorrow.
Camille Dungy
Not finished yet
Harvey Milk Plaza, San Francisco, 6/28/09 (photo: C. Dungy)
The street sweepers have passed, and the crowd control fences have been carried away. Pride, for some, is over and done. But for many, the persistent resistance that Pride weekend celebrates still thrives. Thank goodness. In honor of Pride and, moreover, in honor of the spirit of resistance and persistence of the Stonewall rebellion and the movements it spawned, (and also in a sort of answer to a question Catherine Halley posed some time ago), I’m going to share a few poems by a small sample of writers from the West Coast LBGT community.
Camille Dungy
The Fish
Once or twice a year I shut off my cell phone and computer and spend a stretch of time in the great wide open. Or in some approximation of the great wide open. I always get plenty of juice out there, and I come back refreshed and full of ideas. That’s where I’ve been the last couple weeks, Harriet, running out in the great wide open. (Cue sound clip for open breeze.) This summer’s trip took me to the Monterey Bay, site of North American’s largest underwater canyon (think the Grand Canyon, submarine style), the Monterey Bay Aquarium, more Steinbeck placards than even I, an avid placard reader, could read, and a fish or two. All the fish, fishers, and fishing boats got me to thinking of my favorite fish poems. Now that I’m plugged in again, I thought I’d share a few. As ever, I’d love to hear what fish poems strike you, too.
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.
Camille Dungy
green, yellow, grey: go!
I’m heading to Oregon tomorrow, and I can’t get Bob Kaufman out of my head.
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
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