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A New Type of Creativity
I kid you not…. “The old type of creativity really isn’t very interesting,” Goldsmith said. “So by being uncreative, you form a new type of creativity.” […] [Kenneth] Goldsmith is the author of 10 books of poetry. His most recent work is unofficially titled American Trilogy. It consists of “The Weather, Traffic and Sports,” which are respective transcriptions of a year’s worth of radio weather reports, a 24-hour traffic cycle and the radio broadcast of a Yankees game with the ads included.Read More
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Göransson and Blatny and Tics, Oh My!
Back on March 22 Johannes Göransson posted a poem by Ivan Blatny*, a Czech poet who defected to the West when the communists took over in 1948. Blatny lived from then on in England, until his death in 1990. Göransson posted the Blatny poem by way of recommending The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny, issued in 2007 by Ugly Duckling Presse; he declared the poem an example of the poet’s “greatness.” I read the poem and couldn’t fathom by what standard it could be called “great,” and said so.Read More
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But the List, and My List!
On his blog about 10 days back, Javier Huerta floated this idea: List “20 poetry books (if there are twenty) that made you fall in love with poetry, the books that made you think: I want to do this, I need to do this.Read More
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Hybridization…
Here’s an excellent post by Mark Wallace on the concept of “hybrid poetry“.Read More
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Ron’s On
If you haven’t picked up a copy of Ron Silliman’s 1000-page L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E adventure The Alphabet, written over a period of 30 years, you can get a taste of it here. I’ve never heard him read in person, but person who has (Al Filreis) says, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him read so well. He was on,” and I have to agree.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 8
I’ll never forget the evening I first encountered Robert Bly. He’d come to read at the University of Northern Colorado, where I was an undergrad English major with poetic pretensions. I’d heard of him but never read his poems. The event took place in one of those featureless industrial classrooms with accordion partitions, and the audience was large enough to fill the second room, so Bly ended up reading into a long narrow space awash in humming fluorescence.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 7
James Wright is one of my favorite poets, a man for whom poetry was “the grace of pain” (to quote my earlier quote from Breyten Breytenbach) and whose openness was not a poetic strategy but the fruit of long spiritual/artistic struggle. I chose the following poems from Wright’s Above the River: The Complete Poems, attempting to steer clear of his more widely anthologized work. One magnificent quality of Wright’s work is that one never doubts there is a human being behind it, as opposed (let’s say) to some Flarfist bot wandering cyberspace like a nihilistic spider.Read More
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300-Year-Old News….
I just cashed in a book store gift card from Christmas (thanks, Joe and Esther!), picking up a copy of Basho: The Complete Haiku, translated by Jane Reichhold.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 6
A couple of readers have wondered what happened by my posting of so-called School of Quietude poems. Well, here’s another batch, all drawn from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, by William Stafford. This little selection was hard to arrive at because Stafford wrote so many poems, even the weakest of which carry fragments of brilliance.Read More
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Poetic Cleansing
I want to recommend the experience of reading and comparing two essays, a brief one by D. A. Powell and a longish one by Ron Silliman. The two pieces have similar titles — respectively, “Unburying Amy Lowell” and “Unerasing Early Levertov“* — but they couldn’t be more different in their aims and impacts. Powell offers a genuinely appreciative reappraisal of Amy Lowell as a poet; Silliman focuses on Levertov’s career, focusing on her strong but derivative early work to explain how she ended up in what, for him, is paradigm-shifting anthology (Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry).Read More