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My Ashbery Problem
Ange Mlinko’s poetry reviews are very much in the Vendlerian mode: straightforward but erudite, well illustrated with examples from works under discussion, and always incisive. As a result, even when I disagree with her I profit by reading her. A good example is her latest essay on John Ashbery’s latest collection, Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems. Her argument—in a nutshell, that Ashbery’s late work is brilliant and that for it, along with his groundbreaking early poetry, he deserves the Nobel Prize.Read More
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Disappearing Languages
Approximately 7,000 languages are spoken on Earth. One of them disappears every two weeks, on average. And that, of course, is forever. Beyond recognizing the vanishing modes of perception and lost potentialities for expression, there is the sickening realization that these disappearances are among the nasty effects (albeit unintended) of colonial—and now globalist—expansionism.Read More
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Formalities…
A poet friend of mine wrote in an email, “What I’d really like to do is write GOOD (extra special stress on that four-letter word) formal poetry all the time.” This gave me food for thought. I’ve always considered all good poetry to be “formal,” but—while I’ve written my share of poems in traditional forms—I long ago gave up any ambitions in that regard. As a rule I don’t see much poetry in traditional forms that does much for me—current poetry, I mean. The Greats are the Greats and still a delight to read.Read More
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Saying Grace
Musing on the loss of Grace Paley, what better tribute than to say one of her poems aloud? FAMILY My father was briliant embarrassed funny handsomemy mother was plain serious principled kindmy grandmother was intelligent lonesome for her other life her dead children silentmy aunt was beautiful bitter angry loving I fell among these adjectives in earliest childhoodand was nearly buried with opportunitysome of them stuck to me othersfinding me American and smooth slipped away —from Begin Again: Collected PoemsRead More
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Literary Decor
Laila Lalami blogged this observation about her recent move to L.A.: “There’s a café that calls itself ‘literati,’ because it uses book spines as wall decor.” Reminded me of a reception for poets (!) I attended many years ago at rich couple’s house in Denver. I wandered into the “library” and went to pull down what looked like a beautiful edition of Don Quixote, only to find that the bookcase was a wall of fakes. Nothing but ersatz spines of classics. Decoration.Read More
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CD Chapbooks
One of the most interesting features of Bill Knott’s blog is that Knott is using it to make all of his poetry available for free download. In a way this strikes at the heart of Po-Biz, and it’s something we might all consider — especially those of us whose reputations are past saving or just don’t care about “advancement” in the capitalist sense when it comes to our poetry. That said, there’s an approach to publishing poetry that leverages the new technologies in combination with a capitalist model, and it’s something worth taking a look at.Read More
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Atlanta Review’s IRAQ Issue…
The Spring/Summer issue of Dan Veach’s Atlanta Review offers up a collection of beautiful and harrowing Iraqi poetry — the only collection in English that poems written since the U.S. invasion. There are 29 poets (by my count) represented, some writing in exile, others (remarkably) still in-country.Read More
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New Rules (Same as the old rules…)
This from the Canadian poet Alden Nowlan’s book Smoked Glass: THE RULES OF THE GAME Supposedly spoken not by God but by man,specficially western man in the last quarterof the twentieth century. Thou shalt not throw a Molotov cocktailinto a public house nor shalt thou lie in waitfor thine enemy at a bus stop, lestthou meet him face to face.Read More
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GOOD ADVICE
Ran across this in an interview with A. K. Ramanujan, an Indian poet, translator and essayist who died back in 1993: “Inspiration is not only at the beginning of poems and things; the craft has to be inspired contiually. Every little change, every self-criticism you make, has to be a creative act. There is no line between craft and inspiration, no real line between intelligence and imagination. At that point it’s sensibility (I almost said ‘character’) or nothing—all through, in the beginning, the middle, the end. If not, it’ll really show.Read More
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Thomas Smith’s WAKING BEFORE DAWN is now available…
Red Dragonfly Press has Thomas Smith’s wonderful new book available for purchase now.Read More