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American Society: What Poets See
I’m happy to say that I have three poems in a new anthology from FutureCycle Press called American Society: What Poets See. It’s cleverly put together: Poets appear alphabetically with all their poems together; but a secondary table of contents groups poems by theme, and using it yields the heady experience of hopscotching through the collection. (I can’t wield that word without a nod to the great Julio Cortázar, whose Hopscotch broke this structural ground in 1963.) Here are the groups the editors, David Chorlton and Robert S.Read More
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One Reading of Linda Hogan’s Indios
One characteristic of great writing is that it offers layers of richness that invite contemplation and inspire not only self-examination but an impulse to reach beyond the text. In the case of Linda Hogan‘s compelling new book, Indios, the text takes the form of a harrowing and luminous poetic monologue. It is a psychological, cultural, and spiritual tour de force, written in verse that is musical and direct, tactful (in the sense of “adroit and sensitive”), and free of the empty cleverness one finds in so much American poetry these days.Read More
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Adios, Aunt Betty
Betty Hill—Rest in Peace Readers of this blog know that we lost my Uncle Bill last November. Now his dear wife Betty is gone as well. She suffered from Parkinsons, the progress of which accelerated in the months after Bill’s death. Her passing is sad for those of us who loved her gentle spirit, her generosity and good humor. Pondering the sheer unfairness of her condition sometime back, I remembered this strangely comforting poem by Goethe: SONG OF THE TRAVELER AT EVENING Over all the hills now, Repose. In all the trees now Shows Barely a breath.Read More
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Working Man’s Blues
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Thinking (as in the Just-Previous Post) of Kenny G.
Karl Shapiro | newyorktimes.com Lower the standard: that’s my motto. Somebody is always putting the food out of reach. We’re tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can’t paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money. Lower the standards. Let’s all play poetry. Down with ideals, flags, convention buttons, morals, the scrambled eggs on the admiral’s hat. I’m talking sense. Lower the standards. Sabotage the stylistic approach. Let weeds grow in the subdivision. Putty up the incisions in the library façade, those names that frighten grade-school teachers, those names whose U’s are cut like V’s.Read More
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A Taste of Róbert Gál’s Signs & Symptoms
I discovered Róbert Gál through the anthology New European Poets, edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer, and bought his Signs & Symptoms because of what I’d read there. I don’t know if Gál is, in fact, a poet; he is certainly an aphorist, but he comes at the practice, it seems to me, with a philosopher’s spirit, not a poet’s. I don’t know if I can be clear about that distinction, but let me give it a try.Read More
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Friday Notebook 03.18.2011
Reading Karl Shapiro‘s last book,Coda: Last Poems, pisses me off. Errors galore, half-assed typesetting (a bulbous typeface with too little leading, the last words of long, overrun lines dropped against the left margins as if they were new lines. Shit—Shapiro deserves better! Deserves a Complete Shapiro, for one thing, with tiresome variorum notes and two prefaces, one by a scholar of Ovid (who knew about classical standards and personal rage), and a second by the ghost of Henry Miller writing via Ouija board from some hedonistic paradise.Read More
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Dean Young Is in Need of a Heart Transplant – Message from Tony Hoagland
Thanks to Kent Johnson for alerting me to this letter from Tony Hoagland: Dear Friends, If you are reading this, you are probably a friend of Dean Young and/or a friend of poetry. And you may have heard that our friend is in a precarious position. Dean needs a heart transplant now. He also needs your assistance now. Over the past 10 or 15 years, Dean has lived with a degenerative heart condition–congestive heart failure due to idiopathic hypotropic cardiomyopathy.Read More
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Nothing Is Truer than Truth (UPDATE)
Regarding my earlier post regarding the documentary film-in-progress on the subject of the real person who wrote under the pseudonym of “Shakespeare” … I just received this happy news: “Shakespeare” and Edward de Vere Dear friends: As a postscript to the last email Bulletin, I would like to extend a note of thanks to the 84 donors (and counting!) to the “Shakespeare” By Another Name-inspired documentary (Shakespeare in Venice: Nothing Is Truer Than Truth). As of 12:20 p.m.Read More
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Creating the Possible
“There is something Chinese about Ausonius,” Helen Waddell writes of the late-late Roman poet (c. 310-c. 395 CE) in The Wandering Scholars, and then compares him to Po Chü-i. She quotes from one of Ausonius’s poems, “Fields of the Sorrowful Lovers”: They wander in deep woods, in mournful light, Amid long reeds and drowsy-headed poppies, And lakes where no water laps, and voiceless streams, Along whose banks in the dim light grow old Flowers that were once bewailèd names of Kings.Read More