Merely Draff (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
A head-to-desk moment from Louis Simpson, reviewing Gwendolyn Brooks's Selected Poems in the New York Herald Tribune Book Week , 1963 (and pulled by me from Hoyt Fuller's essay, "Toward a Black Aesthetic" (1968), whose language surrounds the quote): the Chicago poet's book of poems "contains some lively pictures of Negro life," an ambiguous enough opener which did not necessarily...
Sylvia Plath Info (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Recently published is Jane Hedley's I Made You to Find Me: The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet and the Politics of Poetic Address (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009). In this work is an essay titled, "Sylvia Plath's Ekphrastic Impulse" (pgs 71-102). Other poets examined in I Made You to Find Me are Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich and Gwendolyn Brooks. The chapter on Plath appears...
Professor VJ (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Now that the comprehensive exhibition in Athens is well underway, it's time for some serious name-dropping in another direction: What do John Ashberry, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Robert Creeley. my old undergrad teacher Harry Crews, Louise Erdich, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Ted Mooney, my old undergrad teacher Alain Robbe-Grillet, Salman Rushdie,...
Shadow of Diogenes (Free subscription) | 10/20/2009
We bad. Sittin' on tha corner. We flashin' sign. We Sellin' that rock. We Run the 'hood. We Do As we damn well please. We Gonna be gone soon.
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