With the help of Tierra Innovation, we’ve redesigned the site to offer a richer online experience for poetry lovers.  We’ve added to what poetryfoundation.org already does to make great poems available to the online world.

SEARCH and BROWSE

We’ve integrated the Poetry Tool’s function into our enhanced search and browse, so you’ll now be able to look for poems and poets by multiple categories such as birthdate, occasion, and poetic school.  So if you want poems from the New York School or the Augustan age, one click will get you a list of all the New York School or Augustan poems in our 10,000 (and counting!) poem archive.   Or if you want a Mother’s Day poem, a love poem, or, even a nature poem from the Romantic era in England, you can refine your search to get what you need. 

When you like what you find you’ll now be able to “favorite” it and return to it every time you sign into your Poetry Foundation account. Also, if want to read more poems like it, the new Browse Poetry carousel will lead you deeper into the archive.

100 YEARS of POETRY MAGAZINE

Every issue of Poetry magazine—from the first in 1912 to the latest—will now be available.  That’s every poem, every review, every essay, and every letter from the past 100 years.  Pretty exciting!

There are a number of other exciting new features to the site—too many to list here—but we encourage you to explore all poetryfoundation.org has to offer once the site goes live. Stay tuned!

15. Ginsberg’s Howl to Franco’s Ginsberg—D.A. Powell, Rob Epstein, and Jeffrey Friedman

“RE: A lot of the animation was being done in Thailand. The Thai animators kept sending these huge penises.

DP: Well, I wonder if that says something about the difference in cultures.

RE: Yes, they’re very generous people . . .”

14. This Is Your Brain on Poetry—Ange Mlinko and Ian McGilcrhist

“I am not impressed by the trend towards neuroscience in the modern novel—it seems to me bound up with a sense of inferiority, as though, despite the bravado, we accept that our realities are only playacting, while the scientists know what’s really going on. It reminds me a bit of colonial subjects in the bad old days, dressing like the Brits in order to be taken seriously. How it messed up the study of literature, all those university departments that had to prove they were doing something difficult and serious, a form of science! We badly need an antidote to this culture: we should not be concerned with proving ourselves clever, but rejoicing in doing something science could never do on its own, understanding and celebrating experience—otherwise known as life. Poets and all artists take the inside view: as I say in the book, the brain is just the view from the outside. It’s not more real . . .”

13. A Portrait of the Artist Engulfed in Flames—Emily Gould

“In the intervening years, during which I have mentioned Eileen Myles every time anyone has ever asked who my favorite writers are, I have come to the conclusion that Eileen Myles is somehow still not famous. Which: what the fuck? Eileen Myles has been working steadily for 30-plus years, and she has written several brilliant books—prose and poetry and some other stuff that blurs the already-blurry distinction between these types of writing. Maybe the problem is that people don’t know where in the bookstore to stick her, or that she has never been taken up by a mainstream publisher, not even one of the ‘quirky’ ones like Grove. Maybe the problem is her defiant approach to punctuation, her refusal—except when she is mimicking a voice—to ever employ question marks. Maybe it’s because she is never apologetic, especially for being rapaciously sexual and snobby/bitchy about other poets and artists . . .”

12. Are You Smeared with the Juice of Cherries?—Michael Robbins

“When Hass’s pintails and blue-winged teals are lined up in a row, the deftness of his observations almost rivals that of the haiku masters he has so memorably translated: in a restaurant’s tank, ‘coppery lobsters scuttling over lobsters.’ But as the above verse suggests, Hass is also given to pedantic soothsaying, telling the reader how it is in tones that suggest he is just slightly winded from having jogged down the slopes of Parnassus. The poetry takes on the tenor of the lecture hall, the quality of prose statement: Of all the laws that bind us to the past, the names of things are stubbornest. Is this true? Is it even meaningful?”

11. The Voices of Katrina, Part II—Raymond McDaniel

“I was in Florida when Katrina lacerated the Gulf Coast and laid bare the chicanery of the Army Corps of Engineers and much of municipal New Orleans and Louisiana and Mississippi. I’m certain that my reactions were those of anyone familiar with the city and the region, those of anyone with friends and family there. When I returned to Michigan, however, I realized it was foolish to assume uniformity of reaction, because in conversation about the events, a co-worker said that he believed ‘those people knew what they were in for, and if they didn’t like the risk they should have moved’ . . .”

10. Art vs. Laundry—Stephen Burt

“More and more, this year—especially since our second child was born—I’ve come to feel that poetry just can’t be as important as most people who write about it now make it seem: that, as Elizabeth Bishop put it in another connection, ‘Art just isn’t worth that much.’ Sometimes I do not want to read—much less read about, write about, or even write—poetry, because it would take time away from more important things (such as accumulated laundry). More often I feel that I should not give poems the time that they (immoral creatures) seem to demand. If we are judged fairly, if we can ever be judged fairly, the verdict will rest much less on the spark in our line breaks or on the aptness of our adjectives than on whether we live as responsible people: whether we keep our promises, prepare acceptable lunches for our children, return the phone calls we get at odd hours from friends. We will be judged on whether we give other people what we owe them, and whether we can clean up after ourselves . . .”

9. The Great Scorer—John Wooden

“While I never stood on a bench and recited Grantland Rice, I did constantly inject ideas during practice that were ‘poetic.’ If I sensed lagging energy in a player—Bill Walton, perhaps?—I might quickly take him aside and sternly tell him to step it up: ‘Failing to prepare is preparing to fail, Bill!’

On those occasions when I had to remind him to cut his hair or shave his beard before he could come into practice, he might offer the words of his own favorite poet: ‘Coach Wooden, “The times they are a-changin.”‘ Well, they weren’t a-changin’ for those who wanted to be members of the UCLA varsity basketball team . . . “

8. Charles Bukowski, Family Guy—Molly Young

“I opened Bukowski’s Living on Luck because the doodle on the cover was appealing, and I read it because there was a Young, Lafayette entry in the index. There was also, and more excitingly, a Young, Niki entry one millimeter below it. Niki is my mother, Nicole, and a letter dated May 1970 from Bukowski to Lafe includes the injunction to Stay in there Niki. What was my mother, aged 17, supposed to stay in?”

7. The Voices of Hurricane Katrina—Abe Louise Young

“Hurricane Katrina did not happen in a vacuum, in America’s imagination, to everyone, or in general. It happened in a particular geography, a history, an economy, and a field of race and power built to render certain people powerless. When a white person takes the voices of people of color for his own uses, without permission, in the aftermath of a racially charged national disaster, it is vulture work—worse than ventriloquism . . .”

6. This Land is Our Land—David Biespiel

“America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy. Because when I look at American poetry from the perspective of a fellow traveler, I see an art invested in various complex, fascinating, historical, and sometimes shop-worn literary debates. I see a twenty-first-century enterprise that’s thriving in the off-the-beaten-track corners of the nation’s cities and college towns. But at the same time that poetry’s various coteries are consumed with art-affirming debates over poetics and styles, American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political, and public life . . .”

5. Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness—Tony Hoagland

“The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitur. Just look into any new magazine. The most frequently employed poetic mode is the angular juxtaposition of dissonant data, dictions, and tones, without defining relations between them. The poem of non-parallelism—how things, perceptions, thoughts, and words coexist without connecting—is the red wheelbarrow of Now . . .”

4. In a Relationship—Tao Lin

“Out of the poems in this essay I think I would most be interested in a psychology experiment—of which I would also like to be a participant—where one hundred people who have just been ‘dumped’ to emotionally devastating results in the past hour are forced to read this poem then interviewed about their experience, with accompanying brain-scans . . .”

3. Why Live Without Writing—Durs Grünbein

“There are three questions that a poet is always asked once he’s become reasonably well established, i.e., isn’t forever required to spell his name, and his CV is reduced to two or three worn phrases. Never mind the fact that these phrases come out of the platitudinous files of some press department. What matters is that he showed sufficient stamina in the pursuit of his solitary discipline, which might suggest pole vaulting and dashing sprints, but probably has most in common with the monotony of the marathon runner. Whichever, one day finds him standing under the open sky with a few curiosity seekers in front of him. The air is thick with old ideas, fantasies about the poet’s life unchanged since Homer’s day. I’ll bet you anything: they come out in the form of the same three questions. At the end of the reading, there’s not even any hesitation or throat clearing. It’s as if the questions were always there, a kind of diffuse curiosity, a residue of admiration tinged with skepticism and a little bumptiousness . . .”

2. Good Poems About Ugly Things—Molly Young

“Like that of Miller and Bukowski, Seidel’s style is one of incriminating self-exposure coupled with an exacting (and therefore imitable) aesthetic. But here’s a funny thing. Writing a poem about lust, pride, imprudence—about ordering a call girl or staying at ‘literally the most expensive hotel in the world’ or racing a bike at 200 mph—has a way of neutralizing the unpleasantness of that vice. To write a good poem about an ugly thing, as Seidel does often, is not to write an ugly poem . . .”

1. 24/7 Relentless Careerism—Jim Behrle

“Now, you might think that because there are more poets than ever, there might be more opportunities for poets than ever. And you’d be correct. If your fondest wish is to become the next totally obscure minor poet on the block, well, you’re probably already successful at that. This literary landscape has proven itself infinitely capable of absorbing countless interchangeable artists, all doing roughly the same thing in relative anonymity: just happily plucking away until death at the grindstone, making no great cultural headway, bouncing poems off their friends and an audience of about 40 people. A totally fine little life for an artist, to be sure. No grand expectations from the world to sit up and listen. One can live out one’s days quite satisfied to create something enjoyed by a genial cult. But that’s not why any of us are here tonight. We’re here to conquer American Poetry and suck it dry of all glory and juice . . .”

What line or poem do you find yourself sharing again and again?

Here is a poem that my readers found “lyrical and meditative:”

Chùa Kim-Sơn, California

Chập chùng đồi núi nhấp nhô.

Sưong giăng chắn lối, mắt mờ rừng cây.

Bồng lai, tiên cảnh là đây.

Không gian tĩnh lặng, trời mây phiêu bồng.

Ung dung trên đỉnh núi rồng,

Chiều Kim-Sơn tự, rừng xông khói trầm.

Lối về Giác Ngộ, “Vườn Tâm,”

Thoảng hương Cam-lộ, cõi lòng vô ưu.

California:  Kim- Sơn Temple (co-translated with Nancy Arbuthnot)

Mountains beyond mountains.

Misty fog settling on trees.

Tranquility of sky and cloud

On top of the mountain shaped like a dragon.

Kim- Sơn temple, incense

and holy water, scent of dusk.

My heart, free from worries

On this path toward peace.

This poem depicts the spiritual life that is part of my belief.

Can you remember the first poem you read and really liked?

The first poem I remember I heard instead of reading was the lullaby:

Của Chồng, Công Vợ

Thịt heo rừng bóp tái xào lăn.

Rượu tam cúc em đã đậy đằng.

Mời anh lên uống xuống ăn.

Bao nhiêu quần áo, tóc khăn, em trừ.

I Earn It (co-translated with Nancy Arbuthnot)

I’ve prepared a special dish of wild pig.

Enjoy it with wine whenever you want.

I’ve earned, I think,

Those gifts you bought!

It reminds me of my grandmother who first sang it to me. I think it is not only funny but also illustrates part of the Vietnamese culture in the old time where the man worked outside which involved labor and the woman did housework inside. This lullaby is part of Vietnamese folk poetry from 1,000 plus years ago.

A cause you would attach your name to: carrying on a new tradition, empowerment

Many Asian women are still struggling to do things considered normal for most men. For example, it is sad to see any woman who has to give up on her marriage to pursue her dream to become a writer or poet. Although I highly respect Confucian tradition for the most part, its strict rules for women in particular, such as tam tòng, the “three obediences/single obey your father; married obey your husband; widow obey your son,” strike me as belonging to another time and place and inappropriate for our own (although I think one of those obediences would be acceptable if one has a great father as I did).

In sharing my personal experience with younger women Asian-American writers, I hope they can go outside the norm and take “the road less traveled” and be appreciative of the opportunities they have. It takes courage and perseverance to overcome fear, especially living in this new land, where everything seems to be possible. But if you have optimism, you can keep hope alive. I will be honored, if in any small way, my work could inspire my readers to find their dream.

The picture that comes to mind when you hear the word “poetry”:

When I hear the word poetry, I imagine two true friends enjoying a cup of hot, steamy green tea sharing their literary work or discussing other authors’ pieces while the moon shines over them. The poetry discussed would be something soulful, poetic, elegant and rare which is portrayed in their friendship called “tri am, tri ky”  in Vietnamese—only with true friends do voices harmonize.

If forced to quote your own writing, what line or poem would you provide?

During my Malaysia sojourn, to overcome life struggles in the refugee camp I discovered poetry as a form of relaxation—whenever I am challenged by anything I always refer to poetry. Here is a poem I wrote for example:

Đơn Sơ

Lạc loài trên đất tạm dung,
Dựng căn chòi nhỏ bên vùng biển êm.
Bàn tay chai cứng, đá mềm.
Đêm trăng soi bóng bên thềm đọc thơ.
Đong đưa chiếc võng chùng tơ.
Điệu ru ngày cũ à ơ ví dầu.
Chòi sau lắc lẻo nhịp cầu.
Buồm xa thấp thoáng bóng tàu lắc lư.
Bềnh bồng sóng nước vô tư.
Gió ơi, đưa mối sầu dư sang bờ!

Simplicity (co-translated with Nancy Arbuthnot)

Exiled in this strange land

We build our tent-site on sand-

Rocks feel soft to work-hardened hands.

At night when the moon shines

We recite poems. The hammock sways.

A mother’s song, à ơ ví d ầ u, lures her child to peace.
Beyond the monkey-bridge,

A boat rocks with the waves.

Wind, carry my worries

To the other side of the sea!

The metaphor regarding the line above “wind, carry my worries” demonstrates how poetry has helped me along my journey to freedom.

The longest amount of time you’ve gone without writing [creatively]?

I’m working full-time and am not self-disciplined in terms of writing (although I wish I am). So it could be a couple of months during which I do not do anything creatively.

Favorite public figure: No one else but John Balaban, an American celebrated poet who introduced Vietnamese poetic tradition to the Western readers with his acclaimed translations of Vietnamese folk poetry from 1,000 plus years and that of a Vietnamese woman poet, Ho Xuan Huong, of almost three centuries ago. His efforts to preserve the Vietnamese ancient writing system are tremendous.

Favorite literary device: Writing poetry in a metaphorical sense is challenging to me but when I do it with the ability to express the meaning behind it, it is very rewarding.

Bão Tuyết

Mùa xuân trắng ngợp trời.

Người đi rồi, vó ngựa cũng xa xôi.

Tuyết rơi.

Tuyết vẫn rơi trên đường.

Lời anh nói mơ hồ như sương khói.

Bên này, bên kia, cách mấy dòng sông?

Đại dương dập dồn sóng vỗ.

Tình yêu vỡ tung trên từng phiến đá.

Ôi tiếng nấc nghẹn ngào trong tận đáy tim ta.

Gió gào thét, gió than van!

Ngựa dừng chân, ngoảnh mặt.

Lòng ta như cơn lốc điên cuồng…

Tuyết rơi.

Tuyết vẫn rơi trên con đường vắng.

Nụ cười nào rạn vỡ.

Tình yêu bỗng trở thành huyền thoại.

Ôi mùa xuân,

mùa xuân trắng cả một đời…

Snowstorm  (co-translated with Nancy Arbuthnot)

Spring sky: a white curtain flowing—

A rider on horseback riding, riding,

Snow falling,

Still falling on the road.

All sound muffled in mist.

How many rivers flow between our two shores?

Like waves crashing against rock, love explodes.

A quiet cry sinks to the bottom

Of the heart.

How the wind cries! How the wind howls!

Exhausted, my horse stops, turning his head away.

My heart, like a churning wind. . .

Snow falling,

Still falling on the empty road.

Your smile cracks.

Love becomes myth.

Oh, spring,

That whitens my life forever. . .

When I think of Chicago, I think of confusion especially the airport, I missed a connecting flight once.

How would you describe your poetry?

Let me borrow words from my co-translator and friend Nancy Arbuthnot. In the Preface for my second book she wrote:

Waves Beyond Waves chronicles in poetry the physical, literary and spiritual life journey of poet Lê Phạm Lê. Her first bilingual collection of poems, From Where the Wind Blows (The Vietnamese International Poetry Society, 2003), describes the often painful journey from Việt Nam to the Malaysian refugee camp to her new home in the United States. The image of the wind in this first collection functions, in the words of one reader, as “a continuing metaphor that emphasizes the sense of being cast by the winds of fate into a new life.” This new collection of poems, Waves Beyond Waves, which incorporates a few of the earlier poems, elaborates on that journey, particularly with poems that recall Lê’s early life in Việt Nam and with “response poems” to poets of both Việt Nam and America. A metaphor of the sea that both separates and unites pervades the poems in Waves. Lê’s two worlds mingle in these poems, as she brings the ancient traditions of Vietnamese literature and culture to her second home in America, and as she brings to a new generation of young Americans, especially those from immigrant families, an example of how to pursue the American dream. Two other dominant subjects in Lê’s poetry–love and the practice of meditation—offer ways to move beyond the personal self to deeper experience of the world.

John Balaban was the first American audience who recognized my reading style and use the word “sing” to describe my reading style. In fact, when I write my poem it is not considered finished until I can sing it. Finishing a poem is just like putting the finishing touch to a bouquet of flowers with a loop of bear grass curving down.

Today, Poetry managing editor Valerie Jean Johnson grapples with Levin’s question, using the stage as her vehicle for exploration. She conceived of and directed an innovative theatrical interpretation of “Lives of the Dead” that runs through Sunday at Chicago’s Viaduct theatre.

Four actors clad in white long johns and diapers give voice to a dead man. The ensemble transforms the singular voice of the poem into a complex conversation, parsing out meaning through unconventional phrasing and intonation. Cacophonous sounds and jarring movements underscore the unsettling text. “Lives of the Dead” is not a play to seek enjoyment from, but rather to be deeply affected by.

The four-chapter poem chronicles the dead man’s journey deep into darkness, decay, and perpetual disquiet. Macabre as it may sound, the text is full of surprising moments of irony and absurdity. Still, the production will likely elicit more questions than it answers, and the rawness of Levin’s language about decomposition and the afterlife is only emphasized by the visceral nature of the stage. Yet for those who prefer probing poetry that refuses to compromise or placate, there is a defiant beauty to be found in the untidy ending and permanent uncertainty of the “Lives of the Dead.”

Wilson writes:

I wonder too because a large part of art IS appropriation.  Perhaps, in some metaphysical way, all of our words are someone else’s.  But what about a more literal take than that?  Do we have permission to tell the stories of our parents?  Stories involving family situations that we were personally involved in?  Stories of other Americans, and if so, what parts of America count as other cultures?”

The “Voices of Katrina” articles—the first by Abe Louise Young, founder of the “Alive in Truth” oral history project, and the second by Raymond McDaniel, author of Saltwater Empire— have spawned similar questions about the ethics of appropriation, with readers vigorously debating the ethical, legal, and artistic implications of found poetry, flarf, and oral history.

“Lisa” wondered if all artists need to more closely examine the difference between “can” and “should”:

Since Andy Warhol, appropriation for artistic means is considered fair use, as it should be. Found poetry is a necessary, vital tool for artistic expression and often for political/social commentary (and yes, many found poems use text from white poets, from commercially/politically/socially powerful sources, etc.). However, just because we can use any source text, doesn’t mean that we should. Abe Young brings up very important questions about power that apply not only to found poetry but any poetry that seeks to represent or use the image/voice/story of someone with less power than the poet, including the whole body of poetry of witness. As writers we have an obligation to deeply consider the ethics of our process without relying on simplified notions of “stealing” and such. It is possible to ethically and morally use another’s language word- for-word. It is possible to rely solely on our imagination in order to represent an “other” and still end up doing so in an unethical and immoral way. It seems clear to me that both Young and McDaniel have given the idea of appropriation deep thought over the course of their writing lives and I am grateful to both for sharing what brought them to such very different but important, vital approaches.

“LH” echoed other commenters in her defense of the artists:

Why don’t all the poets in the world contact all the people they have ever written a poem about and ask their permission. Then all the novelists in the world should contact every person they have ever even thought about and ask them… This reminds me of my mother, who once threatened to sue me if I ever wrote about her. Where does her story end and my begin, and so on?

And “Brittanica M.” asks if poets too easily excempt themselves from these types of arguments:

The varying arms of literature have subtle differences is what is considered acceptable. Is poetry the one discipline that is immune from challenge, or that is freed from respecting intellectual property laws? If so, why? Does poetry claim, or deserve, an Andy Warhol-esque freedom to reproduce absolutely anything, granted by the conceptual nature of the art form?

There’s much more—in Young’s piece, in McDaniel’s, and in the comments—about what is appropriate appropriation, and what poetry’s role in fair use might, could, and should be.

There is no better way. Enjoy:

What: Sixth Annual Printers’ Ball
Where: The Ludington Building
Columbia College Chicago
1104 South Wabash Avenue
One block west of Michigan Avenue
When: Friday, July 30, 2010 6:00 PM to 11:00 PM
Admission: Free, all ages

More info here.

In this week’s feature story, Stephen Burt discusses things beyond all this fiddle:

More and more, this year—especially since our second child was born—I’ve come to feel that poetry just can’t be as important as most people who write about it now make it seem: that, as Elizabeth Bishop put it in another connection, “Art just isn’t worth that much.” Sometimes I do not want to read—much less read about, write about, or even write—poetry, because it would take time away from more important things (such as accumulated laundry). More often I feel that I should not give poems the time that they (immoral creatures) seem to demand. If we are judged fairly, if we can ever be judged fairly, the verdict will rest much less on the spark in our line breaks or on the aptness of our adjectives than on whether we live as responsible people: whether we keep our promises, prepare acceptable lunches for our children, return the phone calls we get at odd hours from friends. We will be judged on whether we give other people what we owe them, and whether we can clean up after ourselves . . .

Poetry makes any brunch better:

From the Poetry Foundation’s ever-expanding archives, we’ve selected several poems about motherhood. Some are tender, some are funny, some are loving, and some are mournful. Some are about parenting a small child, and some consider motherhood from the vantage of an adult. Though the relationship between a mother and child changes over the course of a life, all of the poems affirm the profound relationship between mother and child . . .

I am late to the post-AWP wrap-up party, I suppose, but nonetheless, I have a few thoughts about my four-and-a-half days in Denver. One thing, I talked to several people, some friends, some just people, who call themselves Denver residents. They all noted that Denver was a dull place to live. I would remark that I live in Iowa City, Iowa, and that things can get pretty dull there, if you know what I mean, and they would say, well, sure, it’s Iowa. But Denver is a big old frontier town next to the mountains, gateway to the West, and yet somehow it’s like a giant newfangled strip mall. How did that happen?

My thinking is that all of the people who made these general kinds of remarks were, in fact, transient residents; most were in school, at various writing programs, or were teaching at various writing programs. And since all of them were writers of some stripe, they were also the kind of residents given to spending some serious time considering. Just considering. In other words, they of course have worked out a position, have articulated a poetics, if you will, of everything, including how Denver as it is today might square with vatic Denver, the Denver that used to be (or probably never was).

But wait, there’s more. I also spent a fair bit of time walking the four blocks between my hotel and the convention center where the AWP book fair was housed. Back and forth, mostly lovely, crisp weather, especially in the morning, when I always underdressed and fairly froze as little mountain wind jags bounced around downtown. I felt like I was experiencing a Rocky Mountain High at those times, when the wind shot through me, and I pulled my pathetically thin windbreaker tighter around me, and I would even stop at times at a corner and consider walking back the one block, now two, now three to put on a warmer jacket, which I had brought, of course, had brought three jackets, because I like to be prepared for all possible weather events wherever I go, and sometimes I would occupy that corner for even five minutes, barely registering the crowds around me shuffling through the crosswalk as the light turned green, then stopping as the light turned red, at this point my bones had begun to hurt, it was that wind, and it would take some cab driver laying on his horn at an old woman who crossed at the wrong time for me to snap out of my contemplation and just walk into the convention center, bracing myself for the other weather inside this enormous building.

Once inside, I saw a lot of very serious people. I felt extremely unserious. I wasn’t on a panel; I wasn’t delivering a reading. I was at the conference thanks to the largesse of The Iowa Review, where I am the poetry editor, and also to support Canarium Books, which I co-edit with the three loveliest people I know. But walking into the airplane hangar-like room that housed the hundreds of presses, organizations, magazines, self-published writers, etc. I felt very small. Mostly because the room was just so big (if I was given to a more lyric kind of writing, I would remark that the experience of seeing the book fair room for the first time was sublime, in the way Wordsworth describes the mountain’s immensity, etc., i.e., one feels at a remove from the din, even if one has to soon proceed forward and attach one’s self (in)to it (yes, it is something like the shadow world in The Matrix, at least in a low-level reading/fantasy kind of way).

Moving forward into the business of this conference, the serious people surface, often stern behind a table or booth, often wearing the death-mask they have had fitted for just such occasions, the occasion of what, exactly? The occasion of pedaling wares, perhaps, or (re)connecting with serious people (Matrix again), or deflecting the stares of less serious people. What is very interesting to me is that I saw and sometimes met serious people all over the place, whether a major literary organization with culture cache, or a tiny press that essentially serves as a vanity press to anyone willing to subvent the publication of their book. The former serious people mostly made sense to me. I used to work for The Poetry Foundation (I forget now if I am supposed to initial cap the “The”) and it is a very serious organization, as is The Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, the NEA, and so forth. But I also, as I mentioned above, invest myself in a small, tiny press and I used to always think that small, tiny presses were, by nature, supposed to be at least sort of unserious. But they often are not.

The reasons are probably legion, but one thing that I noticed this year was that gap between the so-called Haves and Have-nots (the Establishment and the DIY Establishment) has increased (most think the gap is shrinking, because of things like the Internet and Print on Demand and because of things like hybridization and the grotesque and how academia has begun to swallow such things up and so the marginals have arrived, but that’s not true).  I felt a serious disconnect, talking to serious and unserious people, between how the serious feel they are perceived by others and how the unserious desire to be perceived by others. Or rather, that’s the distinction.

The serious people are always, in a context like AWP, “being thought about.” E.g., everyone has an opinion on how The Poetry Foundation should spend its money, or if So and So really should have been awarded a Guggenheim (for that is a lot of money for “a poet whose poems makes me want to punch a donkey immediately after reading.” Actual quote overheard on book fair floor.) But the unserious people spend a lot of time miming the actions of serious people (holding readings in contemporary art museums; sending extensive press releases out whenever they pass wind; publishing their own selected correspondence; sending letters to me when I used to work for The Poetry Foundation, wondering whether I’d be interested in featuring them on poetryfoundation.org, and then after not being featured on poetryfoundation.org, talking some serious trash on poetryfoundation.org for being an evil organization hell-bent on destroying literacy in this country (generally speaking, of course)).

And I have no problem with the latter—the desire for unseriousness to mature into seriousness. From unperceived to perceived. This is like the transition toward the sublime, the overwhelming flattening of the senses and reason, say, before the fact of the mountain. If that’s your thing.

Anyhow, I am going to post once more on AWP, and then let it go. The next post will feature assorted video and audio clips made in and around the conference.

Bonjour mes amis,

This blog post comes with instructions, if you need them.  Copy all of the text, go to Google Translator, and paste into the Translate Text Box.  The below boxes should read “Translate from French” and “Translate to English” respectively.  Then click “Translate.” Viola!

Il est bon de revenir au salon de Mme Monroe blog virtuel. Au moins pour cette première semaine, je serai il drague de Paris. Oui, c’est mon premier voyage à La Ville-Lumière. Mercredi après-midi, Vicki et j’ai pris l’avion à Marseille, un vol Lufthansa brutale que nous étions assis avec un groupe d’élèves du secondaire de Saint-George Academy à New York qui ont souffert d’insomnie, puis après quelques heures de méandres des rues ( comme je l’ai eu du mal à retrouver ma compréhension de la langue française) près de la gare de Marseille-St. Charles avec sa belle descente de l’escalier en son centre-ville, nous avons acheté des billets pour Cassis dans la Côte d’Azur pour aller chercher mon fils Romie.

Cassis est une éblouissante, belle ville portuaire, cependant, nous ne pouvions pas passer beaucoup de temps car nous avions un trajet de trois heures de train nous attend. Que nous a frappés, l’intense, la lumière solaire diffuse de la Côte-d’Azur et l’abondance des platanes avec les branches noueuses qui ressemblait à bras noueux comme si un géant venu et retourné les arbres de plus pour que leurs racines se développer dans tous les sens dans ses branches. Notre voyage en train au crépuscule à Paris était incroyablement belle et nous a permis de voir la campagne française dans toute sa splendeur: des vignes, des arbustes, et de cyprès.

Bon, maintenant, quelque chose de poésie liée: une idée dont le temps est arrivé. Lufthansa Inflight de divertissement comprend une station de radio consacrée exclusivement à la poésie! Channel 29 sur Lufthansa Radio caractéristiques les sélections du mois de ce Elizabeth Barrett Browning et de la poésie Christina Rossetti, exécuté par Dieu-sait-qui, entrecoupés avec des enregistrements de musique classique.

J’ai été un peu suspect quand j’ai lu la description dans le dos de la revue de Lufthansa, mais après hésitation poussant le petit bouton fait pour l’index un enfant sur l’accoudoir, je me suis trouvé être balayée par l’expérience, perdu dans les rythmes métriques de la fin de la poésie victorienne, l’antidote parfait à la forte adolescents dans ma section de la cabine.

Bien sûr, si j’avais mon mot à dire, j’aurais choisi poètes contemporains pour mon appétit audio. Pourtant, j’ai été très satisfait par l’inattendu, puis se demande pourquoi nous n’avons pas encore mis au point à notre époque, une station de radio entièrement consacrée à des lectures de poésie, des interviews et des talk-shows.

Il me semble qu’un tel programme serait très bien sur NPR, si rien d’autre que d’élever le niveau du discours littéraire dans le domaine public tout en augmentant potentiellement les ventes de volumes de poésie et peut-être inverser la tendance des poètes que la lecture des poètes. Nous avons maintenant suffisamment de podcasts en ligne et plus d’un siècle de poésie enregistrée en tirer, non? Eh bien, peut-être un jour prochain. Mais il est clair que la demande existe.

Poetryfoundation Hey! Astuce! Astuce! Rien ne va pas avec Bill Moyers, mais je suis rarement à la maison durant le programme Moyer heure du dîner, des nouvelles, et la récitation Garrison Keiller d’un poème chaque matin sur Almanach de Writer’s est si poli, discret, et petite. Imaginez les possibilités.

S’il vous plaît pardonnez mon carnet de route peu cette semaine. Nous avons l’intention de visiter au cours des jours qui viennent James Baldwin et Countee Cullen résidences parisiennes. Aujourd’hui, sous la pluie, nous avons visité charmante rue Richard Wright et de la plaque. Restez à l’écoute. Au revoir.

At any rate on the way home it occurred to me that the slow demise of the newspaper industry (my old journalism teacher in college, Lee Smith, a by-then-retired former newspaperman used to tell us that tv news really began the work of reducing the citizenry’s reliance on things like multiple editions of papers per day) could kill off the New York Post and I’d have to find another source for terms such as “cheese eating surrender monkeys” to put into poems. I mean, the internet version of the paper is nice and free and all, or mostly free, but I’m less likely to read it as opposed to scanning it as if it were a photograph containing certain points of significance to get loopy with. I learned at an early age to read the newspaper backwards – this, incidentally, led me to instinctively “get” the value of studying any language-based composition from back to front unit by unit (sentence by sentence, clause by clause, word by word, etc) as imparted in instruction manuals for teaching remedial English and comp. – but that pleasure is somewhat negated on-line, though I suppose it’s possible to replicate through some mildly masochistic plodding of course.

Speaking of portals, I have this terrific issue of Callaloo from 1999 (vol. 22 no. 2) that has repeatedly been useful to me through its features on Lorenzo Thomas and Will Alexander along with some very fine essay and interview work by Harryette Mullen. The interview Mullen conducts with Alexander is really great: fluid, funny, searching, and idiosyncratic the way a long conversation between friendly minds might be (Mullen: We all tend to be separated into our various boxes / Alexander: I just want to throw the box away). It’s also especially important to me to have access to an in-person conversation between two poets whose work is radically different from one another and who both openly admire each other’s work. While her essay focuses mainly on Alexander’s book Asia & Haiti, I have recently found Mullen’s descriptive terms vis-à-vis Alexander’s use of hypotaxis (syntactic subordination of one clause or construction to another) to be useful in discussing the title poem from Exobiology as Goddess, a book published five years after the feature in Callaloo.

Mullen muses on WA’s hypotaxis to the point of recasting it as “hyperhypotaxis” and figuring it’s attractive at least in part because it can “accommodate lavishly expansive sentence construction” as well as the many fields of knowledge to which Alexander has access. I started teaching Alexander’s work this year, and while it’s a challenge for me to do so – I tend to feel like his poems know far more than I can convey, for starters, though that should probably be the case for any material one might teach ­– I have found the undergrad writing students I’m working with to be quite open to Alexander’s incantatory ranging from pre-history to post-existence. In fact, we read the poem Exobiology As Goddess, which is fifty pages long, in one sitting a few weeks ago, person-by-person, page-by-page. The poem fuses language from exobiology, geography, Egyptian mythology and paleontology, among other subjects, into a clause-driven swirl that actually has a lot of space in it (double-spaced lines as well as a feeling of an aerial view stretching across the work) and reads fairly quickly once you let yourself go. It does at times feel like one long continuous and insistently rhythmic sentence-as-vehicle.

I’m hesitant to quote from the poem because I’m inclined to believe that you need to take the whole trip and I’m not interested in choosing lines at the moment and when I did begin to I wound up typing up the first five pages of the poem and that’s just not going to work. But there are his poems on this site, as you can find through an author search, and there are recordings of his readings over at Penn Sound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Alexander-Will.php) and that’s plenty. Actually, screw it, have a few lines from the middle:

If I say two poles of wheat

or a series of Minoan grain invictas

none of this projects her mirage

exchanged through fertility by scansion

by evanescent radii

by thought as magnetic migration

say I ignited the earth as a failing covenant of thoughts

Solea would erupt

closing her form

within neutron delay

within vibrational microbe as essence

& because we vibrate

we are odd rotational deltas

as gathered oblivious ice

sparked by summoned meta-concentration

There’s this other bit of his writing in Callaloo that I’m currently fixated on, though: a short personal essay entitled “My Interior Vita” that I’m finding to be valuable and kind (even though I need some of that garish quotidian the way an elm needs to get high). This is the third of seven paragraphs in the piece, and I’ll leave things here:

“For me, language by its very operation is alchemical, mesmeric, totalic in the way that it condenses and at the same time proves capable of leaping the boundaries of genre. Be it the drama, the poem, the essay, the novel, language operates at a level of concentration modulated by the necessity of the character or the circumstance which is speaking. My feeling is that language is capable of creating shifts in the human neural field, capable of transmuting behaviours and judgments. Humans conduct themselves through language, and, when the latter transmutes, the human transmutes. The advertisers know this linkage, but to a superficial degree, so when language is mined at a more seminal depth of poetic strata, chance can take on a more lasting significance. And I do not mean in a didactic manner, but in the way that osmosis transpires, allowing one to see areas of reality that here-to-fore had remained elided or obscured. I’m speaking here of an organic imaginal level which rises far beyond the narrow perspective of up and down, or left side and right side, which is the mind working in the service of mechanical reaction. Rather, I am thinking of magnetic savor, allowing the mind to live at a pitch far beyond the garish modes of the quotidian. One’s life then begins to expand into the quality of nuance naturally superseding a bleak statistical diorama.”

The PEN World Voices conference in 2005, cited this disturbing statistic from an NEA study: “Out of the more than 10,000 works of fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999, only 300 were works in translation.

UNESCO figures showed that while 50 percent of all translations published worldwide are translated from English, only 6 percent are translated into English. “Clearly,” the report concludes, “in the dialogue with the world’s non-English-speaking majority, we are not very good listeners.”

More recent statistics are no more encouraging. The on-line journal Publishing Perspectives predicts that “literature in translation will [face] a drop off this year – as much as 10%.”  The same publication also found that while 117 independent presses published at least one work of fiction or poetry in translation in 2008, only be 95 such presses will translate a literary work in 2009.

Why does this matter — particularly to the United States? Speaking at that same PEN conference, Salman Rushdie put it this way: “It has perhaps never been more important for the world’s voices to be heard in America, never more important for the world’s ideas and dreams to be known and thought about and discussed, never more important for a global dialogue to be fostered. Yet one has the sense of things shutting down, of barriers being erected, of that dialogue being stifled precisely when we should be doing our best to amplify it. The cold war is over, but a stranger war has begun. Alienation has perhaps never been so widespread; all the more reason for getting together and seeing what bridges can be built. “

Or consider this excerpt from a poem called “Under this Same Sky” by Bangaladeshi poet Zia Hyder (translated by Naomi Shihab Nye and Bhabani Sengupta):

There’s an enormous comfort in knowing
we all live under this same sky,
whether in new York or Dhaka
we see the same sun and same moon.

This poem became the title poem for Nye’s beautiful collection of world poetry, Under this Same Sky.  What a small but potent first step it would be if all people recognized each other as co-inhabitants of our planet.  As Nye puts in the book’s final page:  “Don’t ever believe what anyone told you about not talking to strangers.  Talking and listening to ‘strangers’ may be the most important thing you do in life.”

The Obama administration has promised to end an era of political and diplomatic isolation even as it oversees two wars. Has there ever been a better time to open our ears and our hearts to world literature? Is there any better way for every nation to appreciate the full humanity of all the world’s peoples than by sharing each other’s literature?

August is the month for star-gazing, and what better way to prepare for the Perseids than to spend part of this horrid sun-lit day reading about the great Romantic scientists?  In her new article, “Keats in Space,” Molly Young explains that the work of William and Caroline Herschel, Sir Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, and Mungo Park all took inspiriation from the same sense of adventure and awe as Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and the Wordsworths.  Has there ever been–or will there ever be again–such a correspondence between poetry and science?  Read it here and wonder.

The Top Ten Most-Read Articles on poetryfoundation.org

Of all the articles on poetryfoundation.org, these received the most page views:

1. “Show Your Work” by Matthew Zapruder

2. “Going Negative” by Jason Guriel

3. “Poetry Can Be Any Damn Thing it Wants” by Mary Ann Caws

4. “To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not to Yield” by Stephen Burt

5.  “The Hero and the Gunslinger” by Aram Saroyan

6. “Let’s Face It, Nobody in Love is Original” by Jeremy Richards

7. “Only Connect” by Tao Lin

8. “I Blame Blogs” by Allison Glock

9. “Born Digital” by Stephanie Strickland

10. “Sex, Drugs, and Thom Gunn” by Tom Sleigh

The Top Ten Most-Read Posts on Harriet

Of all the posts on Harriet, these received the most page views:

1. “Craig Arnold” by Don Share

2. “It’s Always a Bad Time for Poetry” by Kenneth Goldsmith

3. “I’ve never had a sad cup of coffee” by Nick Twemlow

4. “Plath as a Major Poet: A Thread from WOM-PO” by Annie Finch

5. “The Inaugural Poem” by Travis Nichols

6. “A Few Harriet Statistics” by Catherine Halley

7. “I Hate Poetry” by Eileen Myles

8. “Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry” by Ada Limón

9. “John Updike’s Non-Poetry” by Eileen Myles

10. “No, You Shut Up!” by Travis Nichols

Poetry doesn’t need promotion. People need time. A revolutionary way to promote poetry might be to criminalize capitalism’s theft of people’s time.

It’s an answer that brings to bear the issue of poetry’s place in our wider culture and one which raises lots of terrific questions. Should poetry be something that is sold to consumers just as any other product, or is it indeed something special, something that carves out space in our daily lives, apart from all the buying and selling that seems to occupy us today?

It’s interesting to look at the answers provided by Sharon Olds and Carl Phillips, who were both offered the same question as Hejinian. Olds points to outreach workshops in schools, prisons, etc. as a way to promote poetry, while Phillips notes that poetry should be taught to the young. Both seem to push the “poetry as product” angle. Are these types of answers incommensurable with Hejinian’s push for a more dramatic shift in our society? Or can one attempt to apply both? I’d like to think we can.
With its focus on teaching poetry to people living in marginalized situations (in the hospital, in prison) Olds’s (and to a lesser degree Phillips’s) answer offers a way to have poetry itself apply pressure for the type of cultural change favored by Hejinian. The hope is then that such cultural pressure would not only uplift those who are currently marginalized, but also create an alternative to the ever-present capitalist culture.
Hejinian’s position is especially notable in that it calls on us to not only look for some way to convince the public at large of the value of poetry, but also modify our culture so that it is able to sustain something, such as poetry, separate from the circulation of capital.

I am not saying that a concept — “number,” for example, or “constitutionality” — is literally capable of emotions. What I mean is that there is an emotional tone to the understanding of such things.

An art critic, a writer who specializes in the analysis of mute artworks, who intuits the messages and emotional tenor of physical objects — perhaps such a writer is more comfortable talking about “emotions” in this broad way. But by 1974, when the poem first appeared, Her Majesty Modernismo had already been deposed by poets who said “I wanted to be more myself,” including James Merrill, who went from writing poems such as “The Black Swan” to writing more personal, personable, poems that explored — among many other things, of course — his immediate family. I could never really understand this historic shift.

Carter betrays the fact that he never really said goodbye to Modernism; about poetry as dramatic monologue he says: “the point of a poem is not to present evidence about the poet or anything else. Poetry is not forensic. … A poem puts meaning up for grabs, permanently.” And as poets like Merrill and James Schuyler and Robert Lowell, et al., got chattier, it was they who said goodbye to Modernismo. Or put it up for grabs, permanently. I am sitting on this fence, wondering.
There is this lovely essay “Mozart and the Music of Intrigue” on the website of Caffeine Destiny. Its author writes:

The same nineteenth-century prejudice which charged Mozart with being frivolous upheld an artistic ideal that was the antithesis of Mozart’s. Ever since, art which aims to disclose the “authenticity” of the self has asserted a primacy it has refused to relinquish. Linked to this was an erosion of the idea of music as pleasure, as opposed to the emerging Romantic view of music as “expression.”

This classical taste was characterized by an indifference toward the self, and toward the need for the “improvement” of either the individual or society. As such, aristocratic mores constituted a personal and social danger: the nineteenth-century taste wished to be uplifted and edified, not beguiled or seduced.

I read this about the time I listened to this Poetry Foundation podcast contrasting poems by Stevens (pleasure) and Merrill (expression). The interviewer must speak for many when he says he prefers Merrill’s poem to Stevens’s. So I wonder if the shift from classical to romantic in music is comparable to what happened here between Stevens’s poem from 1950′s and Merrill’s poem from the 1990′s, or between the earliest Stevens and the latest Merrill.
“Why am I so often drawn to glamorously hopeless causes?” Ratcliff remarks, tongue in cheek. I double-starred it. There are stars in my copy on every page. Modernismo lives to dazzle.

2. Seamus Heaney Poem Sold as Construction Bond
Snaking the Drain blog reports that Heaney’s
“Glanmore Sonnet VII” fetched nearly $37,000, enough to build a cultural and arts center in the village of Ashford.

3. The Caffeinated Librarian Loves Creeley
Specifically Creeley’s homage to Robert Duncan

4. Motorcycle LEGO Blog Loves James Dickey
“Hey, it’s my blog, I can quote poetry if I want to…”