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A Look-Back at Friday’s Reading
I missed my last Friday Notebook post because I was absorbed in preparing for Friday night’s reading at HearthFire Books. It went well, I think. And I had the opportunity to announce a strange and wonderful streak of good luck. In the space of three weeks bridging 2011 and 2012, I had three new collections of poems accepted for publication. One is The Earth-Boat, picked up by Folded Word for release probably late this year. The second is Thread of the Real, accepted by Conundrum Press for publication sometime in the next 12 months.Read More
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Václav Havel on Recent American Poetry: A Travesty
I was reading along in Václav Havel‘s historic essay “The Power of the Powerless” when I came to a passage that made my poetic antenna hum. I realized that Havel’s analysis of what he called “post-totalitarian” Czechoslovakia, published in October 1978, includes a pretty fair description of American poetry at this moment. I don’t by any stretch of the imagination mean to trivialize Havel’s essay, which galvanized the dissident community and ultimately helped to bring down the Czech regime. That said, I can’t resist.Read More
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The Current Paradigm
New York Quarterly editor Raymond Hammond, in a wide-ranging interview with Anis Shivani, makes these trenchant observations: I have come to believe that workshops are only in part responsible for the uniform, unambitious, minor products of poetry that we see over and over again. There are other elements, an entire paradigm that includes workshops, MFA programs, and contests that contribute to this. And the key in your question is the word minor.Read More
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More of the Old Poet
I especially like this photo becausethe nudes seem to be springingright out of Tom’s head! How long has Tom Montag been working away at his The Old Poet Says series? A couple of years? I can’t remember when I read the first of these poems—but what does that matter? The voice in them comes from very far back, from some resonant paleolithic cavern, though the details are Midwestern contemporary.Read More
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Three Poets: Watson, Thornlyre, Sharma
I had the pleasure last night of hearing three poets read at Hearthfire Books in Evergreen: Padma Thornlyre and Laura Paul Watson, both of whom live within shouting distance, and Yuyutsu RD Sharma, who came to us from Nepal. Actually, Sharma has been teaching at NYU and is winding up his stay in the U.S. with a series of readings, the last one taking him back to New York. This wandering route is typical of Sharma’s life: he spends half of each year traveling around the planet, reading and teaching, and half in Nepal, hiking in the Himalayas.Read More
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Ghettoized…
From Gary Shteyngart‘s conversation with Alex Shephard at Full Stop: It used to be that novelists wanted to entertain. Huckleberry Finn: helluva read. Portnoy’s Complaint, a big monologue aimed at an unsuspecting audience: hilarious. If it wasn’t funny, who gave a shit? Some dude has problems with his mom? Whatever. So that’s always at the basis of what I’m trying to do. I don’t want literature – literary fiction – to be ghettoized, to be this tiny little thing that’s only read by the people who write it.Read More
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Playing Detective
More than a year ago now a visitor to this blog snail-mailed me a poem, and I found it very striking. I set it aside to comment on, with its envelope attached. Well, as is the way of my desk, the envelope got separated from the poem, and since the poem has no name on it I’ve had no way to get in touch with its author. So I’m floating this call for contact out into the aether. If you wrote the poem entitled “Not Quite Nothing,” please shoot me an email.Read More
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New Poets of the American West
Click here for a PDF flyer I’m completely thrilled to have three poems of mine included in New Poets of the American West, a huge (550-page) anthology of poets (250-plus) from eleven western states, edited by Lowell Jaeger and beautifully produced by Many Voices Press. The breadth and depth of this book is frankly amazing, and it’s a privilege to be part of it.Read More