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Tiny Houses Spacious as Mansions
As with my previous Peter Handke post, I’m sharing enough of this remarkable collection by Samuel Menashe to give a sense of his work without giving away too much. I first encountered Menashe several years ago, when I volunteered to record books for the Colorado Talking Book Library. My first assignment was unenviable: a rather standard textbook focused on reading and interpreting poetry.Read More
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Adios, Richard Wilbur
I’m not sure what kind of knuckle-dragger one would have to be not to enjoy Richard Wilbur’s polished verse, whether or not one thinks its virtues amount to “a little too regular a beauty” [Randall Jarrell, quoted in today’s Guardian obituary]. I too prefer the rough magic of Lowell, Berryman, and Plath—but, as Robert Creeley famously wrote, “Love is dead in us / if we forget / the virtues of an amulet / and quick surprise.” These are the chief virtues of Wilbur’s poetry.Read More
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Tom Montag: A Re-Alert
I occasionally mention Tom Montag. Well, here he is again, out-Williams-ing Williams, out-Cormaning Corman, leaving Creeley in the dust.Read More
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Addendum to the Previous Post
Bill Knott has been thinking along some of the lines mentioned in the previous post, though he’s pondering Creeley-Duncan as opposed to Creeley-and-his-wife’s phone log….Read More
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Poetry News from Harriet and PennSound
Charles Bernstein hails a cab, or perhaps cusses out a cabbiefor failing to stop in response to his hailing. This is a still fromBernstein’s film-in-progress, Hailing a Cab, or How I Learnedto Stop Worrying and Love the Post-Avant. The kind of crap that passes for “poetry news” when you’ve been handed about a billion dollars to promote poetry.Read More
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Who Speaks to You?
I’m rereading Thomas McGrath’s magnificent Letter to an Imaginary Friend, in which he several times mentions Don Gordon. Don Gordon? A poet, it turns out, one of the many I’d never heard of until some other reader (usually another poet—in this case McGrath) brings them to my attention. Now I’ve discovered Don Gordon’s Collected Poems and am waiting for a check or two to clear so I can buy it.Read More
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Solipsist Jottings
There’s a curious and interesting essay by Christopher Rizzo in the new Jacket Magazine. It’s essentially an response to a rather dismissive October 2007 review by Charles Simic of Robert Creeley‘s The Collected Poems (both Volume I, 1945-1975, and Volume II, 1975-2005). Rizzo is clearly a smart person and a fan of Creeley’s poetry and poetics. My admiration for Creeley is strong, but I have to admit it wanes when I read his work from Pieces on.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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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