] Outside the Lines [ (Free subscription) | yesterday
These have been going 'round the poetry blogosphere a bit, but I had to share a few here. Click for more! Arthur Rimbaud and Thomas Chatterton walk into a bar. They are carded. Sylvia Plath walks into a bar. The bartender says,”What’s cookin’, good lookin’”? Gertrude Stein walks into a bar, thinking it was a bar. But it was a bar. John Ashbery walks into a bar. The bartender...
DWx (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
This year the Community of Writers series sponsored by the Hudson Valley Writers Guild included 3 readings in area public libraries: October 24 at the Albany Public Library, November 5 at the William K. Sanford Town Library (Colonie), & November 22 at the Schenectady County Public Library. The project was made possible in part through Community Art$Grants, a program funded through the State and...
Modern Americans (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
I knew there was a big Poets Theater Anthology on the boil that Kevin Killian and David Brazil are editing for Patrick Durgin’s Kenning Editions. In advance of its Jan. ’10 (‘10!) release, Kenning’s started posting a series of “Previews and Supplements,” along with the full TOC . The book looks incredible—Charles Olson to Nada Gordon, John Ashbery to Theresa...
Isola di Rifiuti (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
Barb’d Wire A YEAR CCCXXI Corvine black up along the running ridge, stench of catfish guts slather’d into the sandy yellow pit, blue’d with fly-shine. Thunder lowering its boom a county away. One caprice of context is to make inert dandyism succumb, plumb formlessness with a fix’d indolence that rebuts its rump basis in raw affinity. Ammonia smell of the rookery making me gag....
SPD TODAY (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
THE COLLECTED POEMS WITH SELECTED DRAWINGS Fairfield Porter $14 | paper | 90 pp. Tibor de Nagy ISBN: 9780922792641 Poetry. Most of the poems and drawings in this volume appear for the first time. With an introduction by John Ashbery. Edited by John Yau with David Kermani. Artist, art critic, and poet Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) is recognized as a major twentieth-century American Intimist painter,...
The Pomlog (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
EDWARD GOREY Born in Chicago in 1925, Edward St. John Gorey reputedly began drawing at the age of eighteen months. Some time later, he was drafted into the army and assigned to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. His job there, he says, was to test poison gas. In 1950, Gorey saw his art in print for the first time--as the September cover for the "Harvard Advocate," his college publication,...
Silliman's Blog (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
Photo by David Highsmith A polished apple for David Melnick § Secret © treaty leaks – & it’s bad § Murdoch’s plan : block Google search § What’s going on in Russian poetry ? § Bolaño, Inc . “ Not a rebel ” Bolaño for beginners § My original 1979 talk on The New Sentence , all 3 hours & 4 minutes of it, or divided...
A Pelt, a shrub, a soil sample (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
In honour of HTMLGIANT celebrating "Ariana Reines Week " I thought I'd post the following. It didn't make the final cut of an essay ("Recent Developments in American Poetry" - and I had to loose 2000 words) to be published in February's Poetry NZ, replying to Lee Posna decrying the amount of so-called bad poetry being published in the States. Thusly: […] Ariana Reines enacts...
RealPoetik (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
A NEW KIND OF POEM for (and after) Arda Collins There is no ocean in your ear to it. What there is is this muffin, left a long time on the granite countertop. It is a kind of decision. You decide to write a new poem. Invent a better equipped kitchen. Stainless steel appliances, a refrigerator whose refusal to hum is both frightening and reconciliatory. It gets quieter. It gets sort of orange. You think...
The Best American Poetry (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
This week we welcome Tom Healy as our guest blogger. A veteran of the New York art world, Tom is the author of What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books), with a cover by John Ashbery. Tom is teaching...
Carrie Etter (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
Thanks to George Ttoouli for his kind remarks on the launch of The Son in Bath last week. And somehow only now have I come across an article published in El Mercurio (according to Tony Frazer it's Chile's equivalent of The Times ) on New Year's Eve in 2004. Tony Frazer translates the passage in which my name is mentioned thus: " As for poetry, the global scene is vast, dynamic, diversified and...
Joe Brainard's Pyjamas (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Some ambiguous event or thought happens in this line and the entity swerves unexpectedly in this line to reveal a "Rachel-and-Decker" memory of something that may or may not have happened, which is then questioned and pompadoured in this line. This new stanza is where the poem starts to feel like ice-fishing, and if you are trying to connect this cartoonish line to the mock-Shakespearean...
The Compass Rose (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
One of my peculiar habits is reading texts out of order. Lots of people who read mysteries will read the last chapter first, to relieve the curiosity and suspense of wondering what the ultimate revelation of the plot is. This is the riddle of detective fiction. The detection genre, which Sherlock Holmes more or less invented. Scientific deduction, etc. In high school, in journalism class, we were taught...
Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
News Article Tape: ( ragline )___ MR Zine: Trance (Langston Hughes: In Translation) ___( ragline )___ Guernica: Bolaño Inc. ___( ragline )___ Radio Free Asia: Late Activist's Writings Saved ___( ragline )___ The Guardian: Siegfried Sassoon: The reluctant hero ___( ragline )___ The Guardian: Siegfried Sassoon archive likely to stay in UK after £550,000 award ___( ragline )___ London Review...
Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Dear Poetry Aficionados, IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags We proceed by looking back this week. Our first link is to an excellent article on Langston Hughes. Then comes a relook at Roberto Bolaño; the saving of Lin Zhao's writings; and the emergence of more of Siegfried Sassoon's. The first of some remarkable poems come in News at Eleven: new ones from Charles Simic and John Ashbery, followed...
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