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Legions of the Sun—Now Available
The companion anthology to “War of Words” is now available.Read More
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Legions of the Sun
Good news! The companion anthology to “War of Words,” Legions of the Sun, has arrived just in time for you to purchase it at the event! The book includes all the poems performed in “War of Words” as well as poems about WWI but written later. The latter section includes work from the immediate post-war (Jeffers, Pound, Eliot, Cummings and more) along with poems about the war by more recent poets, ranging from Louise Bogan, Archibald MacLeish, and Yehuda Amichai to Thomas Lux, Nicholas Samaras, Robert Cooperman, and Kierstin Bridger.Read More
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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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DiDiodato in Mexico
Conrad and Friend (perhapsa member of the Redwood Nation) Mexico, where we go (on the Caribbean coast of Yucatán), inspires concentration. We’re usually there in April or early May, around my sweetie’s Yoga Fiesta—and where we stay (where we’ve stayed for 17 years now) is a quite, “boutique” hotel with a pool, a bar, a lending library, and hammocks scattered here and there in palapa shade and the shade of palm and almond trees.Read More
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Folderol Stew
Ever wonder why even the best American poetry draws so little attention from the public at large? There are lots of reasons, of course, but today’s sermon deals with just one: the dreadful quality of writing about poetry. Compare the 11,000 words Susan M. Schultz lavishes on Charles Bernstein here with the 3,850 words James Salter devotes here to Paul Hendrickson‘s new book on the last 27 years of Ernest Hemingway‘s life. Salter beguiles; he makes me want not only to read Hendrickson but to reread Hemingway.Read More
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On Baker’s Stone Girl E-Pic
I’ve been struggling—let me admit it—to find a way to write about Ed Baker’s Stone Girl E-Pic. It’s a 515-page poetic adventure, the reading of which is like watching sparks thrown off by a fire: the fire’s below the rim of the firepit, so you can’t see it directly, but the climbing sparks, the waves of light and heat under a skyful of stars—this is the sensation Stone Girl produces.Read More
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Adios, Dizzy
We’ve had to let go of our 12-year-old Dalmatian, the second of two Dals—Mingus and Dizzy (after Charles and Gillespie)—that we rescued 11 years back. Mingus we said adios to three years ago; Dizzy, younger (by how much we don’t know) and more rambunctious, moved on this morning.Read More
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Resonances and Hiddenness
“Life shakes like a drum and would discover resonances of what it loves in its own beat, the old man wetting and heating the head of the drum until it answerd the tone he sought that sought him.” —Robert Duncan, “Reflections,” Bending the Bow I’m re-reading all of Duncan’s poetry in my library to prepare for reading The H.D. Book, which just arrived in the mail.Read More
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In Key with the Times
Donald Hall Seth Abramson One can only feel grateful for Seth Abramson’s “myth-busting” posts at The Huffington Post (see here and here). They constitute a reply to Donald Hall and his statements about “the McPoem,” set forth in his influential essay “Poetry and Ambition” (1983). “The workshop schools us to produce the McPoem,” Hall wrote, “which is ‘a mold in plaster, / Made with no loss of time,’ with no waste of effort, with no strenuous questioning as to merit.” This is false, according to my own experience, but that doesn’t matter.Read More
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Apropos of the Previous Post
Walter Russell Mead touches on the same concerns: In literature, critics and theoreticians erect increasingly complex structures of interpretation and reflection – while the general audience for good literature diminishes from year to year. We are moving towards a society in which a tiny but very well credentialed minority obsessively produces arcane and self referential (but carefully peer reviewed) theory about texts that nobody reads.Read More