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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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A Legacy of Lies…
I’ve been contemplating the many lies we’ve all been treated to by the McCain/Palin campaign. These continuing and obviously strategic lies remind me of the Nixon years, when the war in Vietnam was raging. In 1970, in response to Vietnam, Robert Bly wrote what is perhaps the greatest anti-war poem in the language, “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” and one of main threads in the poem is the culture of lies that surrounded and sustained that war.Read More
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Further Adventures of Captain Ron
I have to thank Ron Silliman for his latest blog post, which for the first time has illuminated the chief reasons why his views on poetry get my hackles up. But let me start with what he gets right.Read More
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Linh Dinh on a Roll…
Linh Dinh is on a roll at his blog, Detainees. First, there’s this very rich post on the anima, alchemy, animism, and Betty Boop (including a classic BB cartoon with Cab Calloway singing the chorus to “St. James Infirmary Blues”). Next, there are three related articles (I recommend starting here and reading them in order) all dealing with Israel’s itch to attack Iran. One of the many things I admire about Dinh is his openness to every current out there—aesthetic, political, social, psychological, ecological, economic and more.Read More
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Awakening…
I’ve been contemplating a Bachelard quotation: “The imagination is not, as its etymology suggests, the faculty for forming images of reality; it is the faculty for forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality. […] Primal poetry, poetry that allows us a taste of our inner destiny, is an adherence to the invisible. It give us the sense of youth and youthfulness by constantly replenishing our ability to be amazed.Read More