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WaPo Intern Pokes Poetry, Concludes It Is No Longer Living
On her aptly titled ComPost blog, Harvard grad and erstwhile pundit/humorist Alexandra Petri uses Richard Blanco as a footstool (much as Marlowe‘s Tamburlaine did the Emperor of the Turks) and from that elevation declaims her negative opinion of American poetry.Read More
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Adios, Louis Simpson
It was saddening to read this morning of Louis Simpson’s death. His sensibility was Cheever-esque, arising from the vexed heart of suburban America, that spiritually islanded life so similar to the one he’d lived as a youth in Jamaica. Louis Simpson My favorite anecdote about Simpson, the truth of which I can’t swear to, comes from his early years of teaching at Berkley. He’d earned a Ph.D at Columbia and was quietly ensconced in the English Department, where he was glad to lead a semi-reclusive existence.Read More
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Scrape and Replace
Wisdom from Gregory Corso (GC) and Allen Ginsberg (AG). Corso and Ginsberg have just discovered that their Naropa students (in 1975) aren’t familiar with Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”, which occasions the following exchange: AG: “The Ode to the West Wind” — when I was going to high school that was standard. GC: Standard AG: Everybody would get that in the ’40’s. They didn’t teach that in high school? What are they teaching? Student: Your stuff. AG: In high school? Student: Sure, in high school, that’s what they’re teaching. AG: That’s a degeneration.Read More
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The More Things Change…
Every New Year, this mood of melancholy doggedness… the And here, in a similar register, what strikes me as the best Occupy Writers poem so far, by D. A.Read More
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(Untitled)
Allen Ginsberg in a 1994 BBC interview. Wow! Remember: 17 years ago…. [I]n America it’s only 22 people who run..who own.. 80 percent of the mass-media, so that the.. it would be very difficult for a poem … for a poet … to overcome that barrage of bullshit. On the other hand, poetry is the only place where you get an individual person telling his subjective truth, what he really thinks, as distinct from what he wants people to think he thinks, like a politician or someone preparing an editorial in a dignified newspaper.Read More
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Friday Notebook 11.04.11
There is little in my notebook this week beyond a few stray quotes drawn from my reading and a raw reaction to one of Conrad DiDiodato’s most intriguing blog posts, which needs fleshing out. Let me post my notes on Conrad first: I reread Frank Samperi’s trilogy a few months ago, and it produced a kind of seething in my mind which I recognize in Conrad. His post suffers from a conflation of Language poetry (in the person of Silliman) and the Occupy Movement.Read More
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The Path of Poetic Memes
The coolest political graphic ever. It’s interactive, so go the Guardian site to see it work. I’m posting it here in the hope of inspiring some poetry/computer genius to craft such a thing to track the spread of some poetic meme.Read More
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Oratory vs. Conversation
Thanks to Andrew Shields for his post dealing with Elizabeth Alexander and the question of the oratorical vs. what I would call the conversational style of reading aloud most poets use. No one programmatically teaches poets to read this way, I think, but the style is certainly entrenched. Only “performance poets” dissent from it—although Naropa preserves Ginsberg’s exalted hipster oratory in the supercharged person of Anne Waldman. Note also Andrew’s link to a thoughtful, humane post by Reb Livingston…. Here, by the way, is Alexander’s poem with the correct lineation.Read More
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Mexico Books 2008: Installment 1
I’m finally getting around to mentioning some of the books I read in Mexico back in May. Please indulge me. Just thinking about them brings back the thrash and occasional boom of blue green Caribbean waves on that raw sugar sand…. What?: 108 Zen Poems, by Ko Un. Foreword by Allen Ginsberg. Introduction by Thich Nhat Hanh. The Korean poet and former Buddhist monk Ko Un is one of the great masters of the playful insight.Read More
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Spontaneous Allen
Dig it. A tantalizing excerpt from a Village Voice interview with Allen Ginsberg, published October 15, 1958. Ginsberg was 32 at the time.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
