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...
Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
hide-and-go-seek than is [Philip] Levine; both are betting, but the two poets' wagers are different. Levine doubles down on his sense of justice and hopes that the relative simplicity of his writing and the single-mindedness of his passion for commemoration won't drive the reader away. On the other hand, Lazer risks alienating the reader through his syntactical complexities and unorthodox opinions...
Poetry & Popular Culture (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
In his essay "Business and Poetry," Dana Gioia wonders why "[t]here have been many important American poets who supported themselves—either by necessity or choice—by working in business, but none of them has seen it as an experience fit to write about." T.S. Eliot didn't write about Lloyd's Bank of London. Wallace Stevens didn't write much about insurance. A.R. Ammons...
Holy Land (Free subscription) | 10/08/2009
a note from Oberlin College: Dear OC Press Listserv Member: My sincere apologies for an inadvertent forwarding of a message meant for internal use yesterday. Kindly disregard it and thank you for your patient understanding. I’ll take this opportunity, though, to let you know that the fall issue of FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics will be mailed the last week of October. This fall’s...
Little Epic Against Oblivion (Free subscription) | 09/25/2009
I've been thinking about these two Levis poems all week, particularly the lines in "Boy in Video Arcade," "So Death blows his little fucking trumpet, Big Deal, says the boy. / I don’t see anything at the end of it except an endlessness," and the image of the gray conveyor belt in "The Poem Returning as an Invisible Wren to the World." I have more to say about these...
the blog poetic (Free subscription) | 09/24/2009
I’m reading this little book called Talking with Poets edited by Harry Thomas. Below are some priceless quotes from an interview with Philip Levine. I can’t tell from the editor’s intro when these interviews took place (it was over the course of several years), but the book was published in ‘02. Ever since I began writing [...]
The Mark on the Wall (Free subscription) | 09/04/2009
Mid-American Review accepting submissions for 30th Anniversary double issue. From their website: "Mid-American Review is an international literary journal dedicated to our mission of publishing the best contemporary fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and translations. MAR is proud of its tradition of featuring the work of both new and established artists. Writers such as Carl Dennis, Rita Dove, Stephen...
Pokin' Around (Free subscription) | 08/02/2009
To books, that is. I am in the process of cleaning--mass cleaning, organizing, throwing away, giving away--the many many things in my house that I no longer use or need. So when I decided to hit the bookshelf, I began sorting. There are books I cannot part with, books I may need for pedagogy, books that changed my life, books by friends, Suzanne Somers ' book, Touch Me -- and these are just the poetry...
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