Planisphere: John Ashbery

Planisphere: New Poems
John Ashbery Due out: December 1, 2009

EXCERPTS:

Breathlike

Just as the day could use another hour,
I need another idea. Not a concept
or a slogan. Something more like a rut
made thousands of years ago by one of the first

Read rest of poem @ Harper Collins.

Also: “Planisphere” and “He Who Loves and Runs Away:” … two poems from Ashbery’s forthcoming collection: Planisphere: New Poems … @ Pursued Bear

REVIEWS AND WHAT-NOT:

LAUREATE EX MACHINA: How John Ashbery composes poetry
By Christopher Robinson, 10/21/2009 Flatmancooked

“…the book is rubbish. True enough, there are some edible morsels (the titular poem almost-quite-nearly makes one feel) but one must be able to stomach the smell of the garbage heap to find them.”

Poetry and Project Runway

Poetry and Project Runway: Should book critics take their cues from Tim Gunn?
BY STEPHEN BURT -Poetry Foundation – November 2009

Inside almost all good books, and all first books, lurk disasters: to judge the books rightly—to find out whether they reward sustained attention—you have to decide what might count as their best poems, and even consider ignoring the rest. (I don’t mean reviewers should always ignore the bad lines, but that we should ask, if we bring them up, why we brought them up, and what they show about the book overall.) W. H. Auden, the best judge the Yale Younger Poets contest ever had, said he “regard[ed] a manuscript as meriting publication if I like a third of its contents”: it didn’t much matter how dodgy the other poems were.

New Poetry Collections 11/8-11/30

November 15:

The Skiers: Selected Poems – Jill Bialosky – Arc Publications

Fathers in the Snow
by Jill Bialosky

2.

After father died
the love was all through the house
untamed and sometimes violent.

Read rest of poem @ Poets.org

November 17

Yeshiva Boys: Poems – David Lehman – Scribner

On Purpose

“What is the purpose of your poems?”
I’m glad you asked me that
as I stand here in Mr. Ferry’s eleventh-grade English class
in Lake Forest High School

Read rest of excerpt @ Simon & Schuster

November 23

Names: Poems – Marilyn Hacker – W.W. Norton & Co.

Ghazal: Waiting

What follows when imagination’s not inspired by waiting,
body and spirit rendered sick and tired by waiting?

Wrinkles, stock market losses, abcessed teeth, rejection slips:
some of the benefits acquired by waiting.

Read rest of poem @ Poetry Daily

November 28

Rumor Pimone Triplett – Triquarterly

More Scenes from a Body

As for that field, mud-rutted, a stammer
of leaves let go, its center
hollowed for skateboards to ride

Read rest of poem (from her book The Price of Light [No excerpt yet available from Rumor) @ Poetry Daily

Poetry world is a self-licking ice cream cone

Goodbye to All Them: The life of a poet in New York means recognizing the important appellations and knowing when to take the (grant) money and run. DANIEL NESTER recalls life before leaving. – The Morning News September 23, 2009

Unlike with painting or music, the poetry world’s changes occur entirely outside anything that resembles the forces of reception or reading. In New York, it is a self-licking ice cream cone that depends on untalented poets to keep the system going. The more paranoid poets regarded their skills as a threat to those toward the bottom of the Ponzi scheme, whose worship of higher-ups were not adequate enough to rise a level on the Poetry Chain of Being.

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Also:

literary gatherings: a schmoozer’s guide – ABIGAIL DEUTSCH -”harriet” Poetry Foundation 11/3/09

The literati are like aliens. Some are cute. Some are hostile. All talk funny, and all require diplomatic outreach.

American Life in Poetry: Column 241

American Life in Poetry: Column 241

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

I love poems in which the central metaphors are fresh and original, and here’s a marvelous, coiny description of autumn by Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck, who lives in Illinois.

Like Coins, November

We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold
as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees

were tossed like coins against the sky. Stunned gold
and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes:

some copper bright, a few dull brown and, now
and then, the shock of one so steeled with frost

it glittered like a dime. The autumn boughs
and blackened branches wore a somber gloss

that whispered tails to me, not heads. I read
memorial columns in their trunks; their leaves

spelled UNUM, cent; and yours, the only head . . .
in penny profile, Lincoln-like (one sleeve,

one eye) but even it was turning tails
as russet leaves lay spent across the trails.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck. Reprinted from The Spoon River Poetry Review, Vol. XXXIII, no. 1, 2008, by permission of Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

How Keats Really Spoke

Keats Speaks – CALEB CRAIN – New York Times – October 29, 2009

Indeed, after reading Keats’s letters, I wondered if Campion should have let her hero talk a little goofier. He had a weakness for puns, especially dirty ones, and he loved slang….Campion’s greatest misrepresentation, however, is of Keats’s poetic delivery. “You know how badly he reads his own poetry,” one of his friends once complained to another. On this point, Whishaw is completely unfaithful.

Language poets use the personal “I”

 

 

 

I was not being influenced by the Language poets when they were against the personal “I,” because I actually think that they use the personal “I,” especially when they say they don’t anyway.  -CAConrad

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
Human. Animal. Gay. Straight. Poetry.
CA CONRAD INTERVIEWED BY EILEEN MYLES
Poetry Foundation October 2009

 

from FRANK
by CAConrad

Frank’s sister grew long blue feathers

she said it was worse than cutting teeth

she spent a month screaming in the cave
pushing them out

Frank would lie in bed at night
touching his own back

Read rest of poem @ The Jargon Society.

Failures of the Imagination

FAILURES OF THE IMAGINATION OLIVIA CRONK Bookslut November 2009 –

The point is this: contemporary poetry, as the massive and unwieldy thing it is, should be encouraged to re-shape our realities. Why bother consuming information that simply reinforces the things we already know and feel? I am not arguing for canon-negligence or firmly placed camps (if “Narrative” and “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” are the only options available to readers and writers, then there is a serious problem). I understand that straight language and plainsong and the telling of stories in poems can provide edifying experiences, but I am not sure why we can’t also think aggressively (intellectually, imaginatively) about what is “serious” poetry (a notion I think I am stealing from Susan Sontag) and what my aforementioned friend calls “prose broken into lines.”

New poetry collections Nov. 1-Nov. 7 2009

November 1:

Incident Light: poems by H. L. Hix – Etruscan Press

[If the Lena River courses north...]

If the Lena River courses north
farther than the Mississippi south,
draining Yablonovyy mountain snow
into the ice-laced Laptev Sea, then

Read rest of poem @ Poetry Daily

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems by Karyna McGlynn – Sarabande Books

…& the Southern Cross slid below the belt

this was before our time: coals in a jewelbox
stars in a coalsack

something flagged it down

Read rest of poem @ La Petit Zine.

The Fugitive Self: New and Selected Poems by John Wheatcroft – Etruscan Press

(no excerpt yet available)

Flinch of Song: Poems by Jennifer Militello – Tupelo Press

The Museum of Being Born

I remember now. Something was chasing
blackbirds from my mouth. My hands
were willows or their speechless wives.

Read rest of poem @ Verse Daily

Bristol Bay: and Other Poems by Gary Lemons – Red Hen Press

END GAME

1

In the beginning the earth was alone.
It had no language. Did not speak. Nothing
Disturbed the blue work of its dreaming.

Read rest of poem @ Rattle

 

November 2:

 

Beauty Breaks In by Mary Ann Samyn – New Issues Poetry & Prose

Clarity, 1.2

—Considering The Despair of St. Thomas.

(Tame it.)

—Considering Lion and Cage: wire, yarn, etc.

Read rest of poem @ Verse Daily

Why Paul Muldoon publishes John Ashbery in The New Yorker

Paul Muldoon on Nicholson Baker (10/30/2009) The New Yorker

The New Yorker: … John MacDougall writes in from Stanhope, Prince Edward Island:

Adam Kirsch, in his essay collection The Modern Element, says of John Ashbery’s work, “Yet there is something unimpressive about this kind of writing. It is too easy; too much is permitted; it is evidence of a skill that is finally worthless. For the communication of meaning is, along with the manipulation of form, one of the natural bounds of poetry. It is in the negotiation of these two demands, meaning and form, sense and rhythm, that poetic beauty is created.” What is your rationale for accepting Ashbery’s poetry for publication in the magazine?

Paul Muldoon: Adam Kirsch does say that the “communication of meaning is, along with the manipulation of form, one of the natural bounds of poetry” . He allows that it might only be one of a number of “bounds”. In fact, his own comment on Ashbery is virtually meaningless. The communication of meaning is something with which politicians rather than poets should be involved. Form in poetry is not generally thought to be manipulated other than by people who’ve never experienced it. And, finally, poetry has no “natural bounds”. Many of John Ashbery’s poems deal with some of these very issues but in a far less mean and, ultimately,more meaningful way. The best of Ashbery’s poems are equal to their moment in the way that Merce Cunningham and John Cage are equal to theirs.

Close reading is courtship

Ten Poems I Love to Teach: Surefire poetry hits for the classroom and beyond – Eric Selinger – Poetry Foundation

Some poems you love, and some you love to teach. What’s the difference? The teachable ones do half the work for you: the questions they raise and the pleasures they offer show that close reading is not, despite its chilly reputation, academia’s way of “beating it [the poem] with a hose / to find out what it really means” (Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”). Quite the contrary: close reading is courtship, a passionate, delicate way to find out what makes this particular poem worth a second date (that is, writing a paper about) or maybe worth spending the rest of your life with (that is, memorizing).

PUBLICATIONS CALL FOR POEMS ON THE FOLLOWING THEMES:

EARTH’S DAUGHTERS Issue #77 Flesh & the Spirit. Your interpretation of our theme—figurative or literal—from body and mind to meat and alcohol or anything in between. No more than 3 poems

RATTLE seeks submissions of humorous poetry for the Summer 2010 issue. No rules, just make us laugh. Deadline: February 1, 2010

TERRAIN.ORG: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments—an award-winning international online publication—seeks poetry, essays, fiction, articles, and reviews for upcoming theme-based issues: “Virtually There” and “The Signal in the Noise.”

Find more information at Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Thema, the theme-related journal, is currently looking for work on the following themes:

Math & music (November 1, 2009)
The trip not taken (March 1, 2010)
About two miles down the road (July 1, 2010)

More information
___________

The Splinter Generation is currently accepting submissions until Nov. 1st from writers who were born between 1973 and 1993 for an ongoing online generational literary compilation. We are looking for the best poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction these writers have to offer. In particular, we’re looking for work that captures what it is to be a member of our generation in a way that is moving and not didactic.

U.S. anthology seeks poetry and prose poems about the loss of a mother — from raw grief to the uplifting. Poetry: 100 lines max.

CALL FOR POEMS: 21st Century Howlers: A New Generation Jazz and Blues Anthology: As we quickly approach the centennial of Jazz and Blues, this anthology seeks to gather the voices of a new generation of Howlers: those poets whose work embodies or addresses the musical traditions of Jazz and Blues, and who began actively publishing no earlier than 1995.

Read more @ the Hayden’s Ferry Review blog
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The American Diversity Report seeks short stories and poetry on holidays, religious or secular.

City Works Press seeks poetry, fiction, prose and art on motherhood and/or fatherhood for our upcoming anthology. Jan 4

Indiana Review is looking for art, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for a special feature on Blue in our Summer 2010 issue.

Puerto del Sol poetry, prose, shorts, reviews, criticism, drama, etc. esp on theme Film & Pop Culture. Mar 31.

Read more at New Pages

Easy Poet Costume Ideas from Poets.org

Easy Poet Costume Ideas Poets.org October 2009

Emily Dickinson costume:

You Will Need
An old-school nightgown or simple white cotton dress
A ribbon
Hair pulled back in a modest bun
A fascicle (a small bundle of folded poems)

Extra Credit

Hand out plastic flies while reciting the immortal line: “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died…”

“Formalism” & “formaldehyde” are very close

The World is Fundamentally a Great Wonder: a conversation with Richard Wilbur Littoral Posted by Arlo Haskell on October 21, 2009

…It seems to me that formalism is a dreadful title for what I do. It sounds very glum-making, doesn’t it? I was just pointing out to a friend of mine that, in the dictionary, “formalism” and “formaldehyde” are very close; and I’m afraid a lot of people think of form that way. I have no interest at all, really, in meter, per se, or in rhyme patterns, or in received forms. It’s all in what you do with them, or indeed against them. The great poets have always been violators of meter.

NEW POETRY COLLECTIONS 10/25-10/31

Sunday 10/25:

Hol Art Books

Nostalgia’s Thread: Ten Poems on Norman Rockwell Paintings – Randall R. Freisinger – Hol Art Books

THE RUNAWAY (1958)

In the restaurant, a man excuses himself
from his wife, his friends, his rack
of lamb, the drinks that have finally begun
to plane smooth the day’s splintered edges.

Read rest of poem @ Scribd
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Tuesday 10/27:

If I Were Another: Poems – Mahmoud Darwish (Author), Fady Joudah (Translator) – Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I Didn’t Apologize to the Well
by Mahmoud Darwish – Translated by Fady Joudah (from Butterfly’s Burden)

I didn’t apologize to the well when I passed the well,
I borrowed from the ancient pine tree a cloud
and squeezed it like an orange, then waited for a gazelle
white and legendary. And I ordered my heart to be patient:

Read rest of poem @ Poets.org

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King of a Hundred Horsemen: Poems – Marie Etienne (Author), Marilyn Hacker (Translator) – Farrar, Straus and Giroux

1. Ocean / Emotion

2. I could tell you how for a long time I thought my memory was paralyzed: twenty years passed outside France and what have I left of it?
- Take a good look, said my father, take a good look, we’re going through the Suez Canal!
I was seven years old, we were standing on the bridge of the boat that was returning from Cochin China, the water below was far away, I felt lost, perched like a bird, minuscule.
I have forgotten Suez, the significant canal, I’ve only kept the command, which was not to forget, the sensation of my height above the sea, the uneasiness. How not to fall?
I hold on to images.

Read rest of poem by Marie Étienne, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker, @ Poetry Daily

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The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems Bill Holm – Milkweed Editions

A Retired Farmer Working as A Greeter at Wal-Mart
Bill Horn

The store went up last year outside of town.
There was a cornfield where I’m standing now,
smiling, saying hello, and handing out ads
for plastic purses, towels, and microwaves.
The job doesn’t pay much, but neither did farming.

Read rest of poem @ the “Friends of the Northfield Public Library” website

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Friday 10/30:

The Certainty Dream -Kate Hall – Coach House Press

Dream in Which I Am Allowed 12 Items
Kate Hall

let me keep this shell and
line it with mucus
hung over the abalone walls
let me call abalone a house and

Read rest of poem @ Jubilat

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0, 0: Poems – Amit Majmudar – Triquarterly

The Miscarriage
Amit Majmudar

Some species can crack pavement with their shoots
to get their share of sun some species lay
a purple froth of eggs and leave it there
to sprinkle tidepools with tadpole confetti

Read rest of poem @ The Poetry Foundation.

A poet’s bad lines

The sovereign ghost of Wallace Stevens
by William Logan New Criterion October 2009
On the poet’s place in the American Pantheon & the new Selected Poems, edited by John N. Serio.

To love Stevens, you have to love his deformities and even his monstrosities, as you do the wretched, self-conscious lines in Whitman. (A poet’s bad lines are sometimes those he feels he has to write in order to call himself a poet—and occasionally just the lunatic edge of an imagination that under similar anxieties produces a masterpiece). The poems are diminished and even ruined by such oddities, but without the arterial energies they solicit and unleash, the better poems might be nothing. The license of exaggeration and exorbitance is the guilty evidence of the pressure of imagination elsewhere.

“As literature is edged out of more traditional curricula….”

The CPR Interview: Rachel Hadas – Contemporary Poetry Review October, 2009

Here’s a general observation to which there are surely many exceptions, but here goes: as literature is edged out of more traditional curricula, it’s popping up in other places. I have in mind the very striking literature and medicine movement, for example, whereby many medical schools require their students to study works of literature and sometimes to write themselves.

Baby Boom Poetry and the New Zeitgeist

Baby Boom Poetry and the New Zeitgeist
by Dorothy Barresi
from Prairie Schooner, Fall 2009
Reprinted at Poetry Daily

Like many poets born between 1946 and 1964, I have written as though iconic nostalgia were my birthright—part of what marked my poems as special. Simultaneously hip and told as unreconstructed yearning, iconic nostalgia rejects the constraints of prior social constructions (Sinatra, Monroe) while remaining half in love with their dashed glamour, and then it inserts Jimi Hendrix or Pol Pot (and always ourselves) at the center of an ever-more-distant galaxy of shared historical experiences and long-drawn-out sighs, even as we reassert our cool. No, no—I’m still relevant!

Beginning again

Starting up Choriamb again, now that I’ve settled into a new apartment w/my Journalist-Man and my life has gotten calmer + I’m more on-track w/my own writing. I think I’m going to only post on WordPress now instead of both here and Livejournal, although I think there might be a way to automatically post to both…. -Tanya

Why do poets still bother writing long poems?

The Monstrosity of the Long Poem – by Nerys Williams – from Poetry Wales, Autumn 2009
Reprinted @ Poetry Daily

It might seem that the longer modern work is doomed to failure, fraught with ambitions which for a vein of Anglo-American modernism are complicated by specific political and cultural agendas. So is the long poem a monstrosity? Can the long poem be a test of the poet’s sincerity and the reader’s patience? Are long poems now anti-epics eschewing ideas of cultural programming for an embrace of failure, error and discontinuity? Why indeed do poets still bother writing long poems?

The commitment of writers to truth-telling can destroy friendships

Powell’s

Circle of literary friends Irish Times October 17, 2009 – DENNIS O’DRISCOLL reviews The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships Edited by Robert B Silvers and Barbara Epstein New York Review Books, pp 298, £14.99

The principled commitment of writers to truth-telling, so integral to their art, can itself be destructive of friendships. Randall Jarrell “could be very tender and gracious, but often he seemed tone-deaf to the amenities and dishonesties that make human relations tolerable”. If urged to show caution, Mary McCarthy (whose memoirs recount “more than scrupulosity demands”) would “look puzzled and answer: But it’s the truth”.

Found: Dorothy Parker poem

amazon.co.uk

Previously published anonymously in an obscure magazine owned by a friend, Pollyanna Gets The Air can now be attributed to the socialite, said Stuart Silverstein, editor of a newly updated anthology of her poetry. It is the only piece of writing by Parker about the affair [with Charles MacArthur], which had a lasting impact on her life

Found: Dorothy Parker poem reveals pain of rejection
Dorothy Parker had much to say about the romantic misfortunes of others but the celebrated wit was curiously silent about her own doomed love affair.
Tom Leonard Telegraph 10.21.2009

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W.S. Merwin wins 2009 Pulitzer Prize

The Shadow of Sirius
W.S. Merwin – Copper Canyon Press

The Laughing Thrush

O nameless joy of the morning

tumbling upward note by note out of the night
and the hush of the dark valley
and out of whatever has not been there

Read rest of poem @ Verse Daily.

W. S. Merwin: The ‘Sirius’ Side Of Poetry NPR

Fresh Air from WHYY, April 21, 2009 · W.S. Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry on April 20 for The Shadow Of Sirius.

In a 2008 interview, Merwin read a few of his poems and talked about memory, mortality and acceptance in his poetry.

Posting

Posting here will only be occasional for the next couple of months–I’m in the middle of moving. I’ll begin posting regularly again once my life gets settled.

-Tanya

a poem should float

Kay Ryan Reflects on Role as Nation’s Poet Laureate Online NewHour 3/25/09

Jeffrey Brown asks Kay Ryan whether she makes “a conscious effort to get [her poetry] down to an essence,” or whether that’s just the way she thinks:

KAY RYAN: It’s apparently the way I think. I would like to say that, if a poem feels really dense, it isn’t good. I mean, if you put it in your hand and it falls through your hand, that’s no good. It’s got to float.

If you have this idea of compressed language, it gives people a sense that it’s going to be dense and kind of oppressive, whereas I would like to think that it can be highly selected, but not make you feel that you’ve just had a vitamin pill.

We have no minor poets

“Curiously, it is almost impossible to find…modest assessments when one turns to contemporary poetry. Indeed, the problem of neglect or insignificance evaporates in a situation in which, in spite of the vast numbers writing (800 to 1,000 books of poetry are published in the United States per year; thousands of other poets publish in journals and quarterlies), we have no minor poets. Everyone today, like those above-average children of Lake Wobegon, is brilliant and sui generis.”

Poet’s Puffery JEFFREY H. GRAY Chronicle of Higher Education February 27, 2009

Bob Dylan is one of our best poets

Tangled Up In School: Teaching Dylan In Boston NPR March 21, 2009

“I think that [Bob Dylan is] one of the best contemporary American poets, even if you just look at the lyrics stripped of the music. He’s been an important link between some of the great poets behind him, like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and in turn he’s been an inspiration and subject for poets like Paul Muldoon and [Allen] Ginsberg.”
-Kevin Barents

A-Z Hyperguide to British Poets

We Brits: An A-Z hyperguide to the multicultural poets, publishers, and performers changing the face of UK poetry.

by Karen McCarthy, Poetry Foundation

An Overview of Past Poet Laureates

‘Oh God, the Royal poem!!’ Adam Newey Guardian 3.21.09

The historical list of laureates provides an odd mix of proper poets and political placemen who, regardless of talent, have almost always proved an irresistible target for the barbs of their peers.

Why the Plath Legacy Lives

Why the Plath Legacy Lives
March 24, 2009 – New York Times
Joyce Carol Oates, Peter D. Kramer, Erica Jong, Andrew Solomon, Elaine Showalter

New Books by Natal, Lemmon

Memory and Rain
by Jim Natal – Red Hen Press (February 15, 2009)

BLUR

Out east on the desert freeway,
after the rain blowing in from the coast
had been blocked by the mountains doing their work,
the sky was fearless and the sun, half arisen now,

Read rest of poem @ Conflux Press.
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Saint Nobody
by Amy Lemmon – Red Hen Press; 1 edition (February 15, 2009)

Disclaimer

If you are reading this
it is due to an error,
an oversight, or some otherwise
unprecedented act on the part
of the Management.

Read rest of poem @ Ars Poetica. (Previously published in Prairie Schooner)

Andrew Motion’s one regret

“I wish … that someone had flown me to Iraq and Afghanistan and encouraged me to write about the wars in those places.”

‘No writing is as hard as this’ – poet laureate’s parting shot Stephen Bates
The Guardian, Saturday 21 March 2009

Son of Sylvia Plath Commits Suicide

Son of Sylvia Plath Commits Suicide
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
New York Times March 23, 2009

“Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poet and novelist Sylvia Plath and the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, killed himself at his home in Alaska, nearly a half-century after his mother and stepmother took their own lives, according to a statement from his sister.”

How strained can a rhyme be?

Good interview w/Andrew Hudgins:

From worse to verse: Quirks of behavior provoke rhymes from professor BILL EICHENBERGER – THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH – 3/15/08

Q: How strained can a rhyme be before it’s too strained?

A: Ogden Nash made a career and a lot of funny poems out of pushing rhymes just a hair too far. (“Parsley/Is gharsley”!) For Nash, going too far is the point – and it’s what makes us laugh. But rhymes are a bit like puns. Some please us with their exactness or their surprise or their stretches, while others leave us cold, or actually make us turn up our noses. Me, I love all sorts of puns, the worse the better.

Q: You actually found a rhyme for the word “scrotum.” Is that the poet’s equivalent of scaling Mt. Everest?

A: It’s more like a kid’s finding the perfect snowball to throw at a top hat. Then happening, in this day and age, to find an old gentleman walking down your street wearing a top hat. Then hoping that your aim is good enough to hit the hat. “Factotum” is worth thinking about. “Totem”? “Float ‘em”?

Also see: Poets on Process: An Interview with Andrew Hudgins 11/20/2008 by Frank Giampietro The Southeast Review

Got poems about Little Red Riding Hood?

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: The Red Issue
Fairy Tale Review

Writing poetry is like sitting in your Honda

Knopf, February 10, 2009

“The poet’s task is both to dramatize our most intimate and intense feelings, and at the same time give us a perspective on them. Stonington’s great poet James Merrill once compared the process to sitting in your Honda while it goes through the car wash. Calmly inside, you watch a virtual storm of lashing torrents and winds. That’s it exactly!”

Five Questions With J.D. McClatchy: J.D. McClatchy on poets, poetry and his newest collection, ‘Mercury Dressing’
By Kenton Robinson The Day 3/15/2009

Mercury Dressing
J.D. McClatchy

To steal a glance and, anxious, see
Him slipping into transparency—
The feathered helmet already in place,
Its shadow fallen across his face

Read rest of poem @ The New Yorker, 4.23.07

An Examination of the Poet in Time of War

“‘The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry,’ said Virginia Woolf after the First World War. This phenomenon has repeated itself. Following September 11 and, subsequently, following the most recent invasion of Iraq, people who weren’t ordinarily interested in poetry suddenly read poems. Poets who didn’t ordinarily pay attention to public events suddenly wrote poems responding to them. And while it’s easy to welcome anything that increases the audience of an ancient art, that welcome may disguise perennially intractable questions. What is a desire to read poetry in a time of social crisis really a desire for? Should a poet feel that by writing a poem he has truly fulfilled a social responsibility? Should a reader feel that a poem responding to calamitous events is a better poem than a poem about shop windows?”

An Examination of the Poet in Time of War
by James Longenbach
from The Antioch Review, Winter 2009
Reprinted at Poetry Daily

New books by White, Douglas, Gray

  Bone Light Orlando White – Red Hen Press – February 15, 2009

UNWRITTEN

Enough to reveal part of what covers a skull, to scrape out its ink with a trowel: a loop of an unfinished alphabet, a C bent to an incomplete circle. Language is not vacant only quiet and nameless, unwritten in the depths of the page, an unclothed sound.

Read rest of poem + two others by White @ Reading Between A & B

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cooling board: a long playing poem Mitchell L.H. Douglas – Red Hen Press – February 15, 2009

The Battle of New Orleans

The body is no stranger to water,
but all that is inside, undercover.
When water swallows

Read rest of poem @ Affrilachian Poets

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Photographing Eden by Jason Gray – Ohio University Press – February 3, 2009

THE SNOW LEOPARD

                In the Metro Toronto Zoo

He pads on grassy banks behind a fence,

          with measured paces slow and tense.

Read rest of poem @ the Poetry Foundation
 

 

Be negative

Going Negative: A “necessary skeptic” says what he really thinks about new books by Jane Mead, D.A. Powell, and John Poch.
Poetry March 2009 BY JASON GURIEL

“But negativity, I’m starting to think, needs to be the poetry reviewer’s natural posture, the default position she assumes before scanning a single line. Because really, approaching every new book with an open mind is as well-meaning but ultimately exhausting as approaching every stranger on the street with open arms; you’ll meet some nice people, sure, but your charming generosity won’t be reciprocated most of the time. What’s worse, a tack-sharp taste, dinged by so much sheer dullness, will in time become blunted (into blurb-writing, no doubt). When braving any new book of poems—particularly by an author you’re not too familiar with—it’s best to brace yourself and expect the worst. This needn’t involve cynicism. Indeed, you probably shouldn’t be opening the book in the first place if you aren’t, on some deep level, already hoping for the best—that is, the discovery of a great poem. But hope should remain on that deep level, well-protected, until the shell that shields it is genuinely jarred.”

“Poet’s Choice” becomes Web-only

“EVOLUTION” AT POET’S CHOICE

“With its change to a Web-only feature, Poet’s Choice is evolving. We’ll be asking a different poet each week to share with us a poem he or she has written. Mary Karr, who has been our eloquent columnist since March 2008, starts us off on this new format.”

Washington Post March 8, 2009