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Three Million Readers
I’m excited to let you Birders know that a poem of mine, “Winter Sunrise Outside a Café Near Butte, Montana,” just appeared in Ted Kooser’s latest “American Life in Poetry” column. The poem is from Thread of the Real, published last year by Conundrum Press; the poem initially appeared in “The Nebraska Review.” I can’t help but quote from the email I got from the ALP folks last week: “Newspapers carrying the column will download it as a PDF and run it according to their usual print schedules.Read More
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The Condition of Vision: Tom Hennen’s Collected and New Poems
Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems by Tom Hennen My rating: 5 of 5 stars Some French writer when I was a boy said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are, I cannot remember by what argument he proved them even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children.Read More
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Adios, E. G. Burrows
I was saddened by John Latta’s report of the death of E. G. Burrows, whose poems have been quiet but articulate companions for many years now. Our paths crossed (via mail, not in person) back when the small press my friend Gary Schroeder and I operated (Wayland Press) was running an annual chapbook contest. Burrows entered the contest and won in 1989, his manuscript having been chosen by that year’s judge, Ted Kooser. We brought out Handsigns for Rain in short order, and it was frankly among the best works we ever saw into print.Read More
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Kooser Spotlights Smith
Good to see Thomas R. Smith get some wider recognition.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 5
Here is another handful of poems by someone firmly exiled to the so-called “School of Quietude” by Ron Silliman and others of his persuasion: the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser. In the comment stream to one of my previous posts, in which I wrote that William Stafford and Ted Kooser “bring a flush of fury to Ron Silliman’s bearded cheeks.” Silliman replied, “I can’t imagine ever feeling ‘fury’ at Kooser or Stafford. That’s like getting angry at cold oatmeal.” You’ll have to decide for yourself if “cold oatmeal” describes the following poems.Read More
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Poets and Their Audience
Seth Abramson, whose poems I’ve seen here and there and been very impressed by, has a new blog post that extends some previous ruminations on the question of the poet and the audience, although under the rubric of “The State of the Small Presses.” This new post it really doesn’t have much to do with the stated topic, but frankly I think that’s good: we must always begin with the poet/audience equation.Read More
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The Poetic-Critical Complex
This is an expansion of my response to a comment from Reginald Shepherd regarding one of my posts below: I’ve never developed a settled opinion on the relationship between poetic complexity and poetic durability. Do Shakespeare’s sonnets trump Michael Drayton’s because they are more complex? (They are more complex both conceptually and rhetorically.) And if so, are we to value Conrad Aiken above William Carlos Williams, for example, or Louis Zukofsky above Philip Levine? These are ultimately questions involving The Canon and the people in charge of it. I do not mean you and me, of course.Read More
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News Flash: Langpo Relents (Or Does He?)
Ron Silliman’s latest post, a praise-song to Geoffrey Young’s The Riot Act, begins—as do so many of Silliman’s posts—with a sneer. “In one sense, Geoffrey Young is the poet Billy Collins & Ted Kooser both would like to be, writing self-contained works that are narrative marvels and accessible to just about any reader of English.” This fatuous statement is followed by this lucid introduction to one of Young’s poems. “Dig:”, he instructs us from under his cocked beret, the epitome of avant-schmavant cool. Now, I don’t want to sneer at Geoffrey Young.Read More
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Poetic Brutality…
I launched into reading this article with an expectation of yet another clash of fundamentalisms, of the sort that has plagued Bangladeshi poet Taslima Nasrin. The outlines were familiar: a lecturer, one Sanjay M G, is attacked for reciting a poem “with ‘objectionable content….’ ” But it turns out the content involved a slur against a long-deceased political leader, Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire (d. 1680).Read More