Puisi-poesy (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
Here's a take, or, at least, an informal but very interesting, interpretation of Rae Armantrout's poem New, by somebody called Steven Fama (no profile available). Rae Armantrout is one of the finalists for the US National Book Award. New If yellow is the new black, the new you is a cartoon spokesman who blows his lines around bumptious 3-D Hondas, apologizes often, and remains cheerful.
A Compulsive Reader (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
From Third Factory comes the 2009 version of Attention Span. 60 contributors listed 663 ‘things’–books, chapbooks, songs, films, &c. &c. This is quite the who’s who of both selectors and selectees. Among the selectees are ACR favorites G.C. Waldrep, Rae Armantrout (Poem of the Week X), Kit Robinson, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Among many others. The [...]
TED BURKE, like it or not (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
The urge to convert the unruly undulations of our collectivized speech into a hard, condensed verbal thing that makes the dull, if loud noise of lazy inference has crept it's way into a few poet's habit of phrase. We come to Wyn Cooper's poem in Slate, Daily Threads . I liken this to the way my younger brother treated radios, battery powered toys and alarm clocks when he were both the ages of 7 and...
to the sound (Free subscription) | 11/14/2009
University of Denver’s Word + Image archive. Some recordings of recent readings and guest lectures available on the site: Robin Blaser Alice Notley Eileen Myles Rae Armantrout In the near future, recordings of Renee Gladman, Tomaz Salamun, and many others will be available.
TED BURKE, like it or not (Free subscription) | 11/12/2009
Ginsberg and Ashbery are post modernists,but they are also many other things. Ginsberg is a romantic, sure, but he was the one in the 20Th century, confronted with mass-media, A bombs, televised unpopular wars, the whole 60s shot, and his response to these accelerated times had to push the hackneyed envelope. If he trusted his sensibilities to make sense of the world, apart from the mind of God guiding...
The Wooden Spoon (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
At Jezebel , Anna North considers a good question: is it time to stop the Top Book Lists, such as the recent Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of 2009? As has been noticed in such outlets as The New York Times , there is not a single female author on the list, raising questions about long-held critical biases against women's fiction. Of course, it's possible that the top books of the year were without...
The Perpetual Bird (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
I've tried off and on for years to enjoy Alice Notley's poetry. (It comes highly recommended by poets I admire—Rae Armantrout, Andrei Codrescu, Anne Waldman and others. I've tried to find it interesting on a basic level and I've looked for reasons to think it profound. In fact, I snapped up a copy of her Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005 in the hope that an extensive but
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
The sixty contributors to Attention Span 2009 are: Leonard Schwartz, Bill Berkson, Meredith Quartermain, Allyssa Wolf, Cedar Sigo, Rae Armantrout, Elizabeth Treadwell, Jessica Smith, Stephen Cope, G.C. Waldrep, Brandon Brown, Philip Metres, Michael Scharf, Stan Apps, Charles Alexander, Don Share, Joel Bettridge, John Palattella, Suzanne Stein, Patrick Pritchett, Thomas Devaney, Pam Brown, Keith Tuma,...
the Whole Garden Will Bow (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
Presto “Breaking Anna Nicole news as she buries her son.” * “What do you want to be?” Skeleton suits and Superman outfits - inappropriate touching on drugstore racks. * Presto! Paris of flies re-tie the old knot mid-air. * Blonde wigs and wizard caps. “I want to go back!” Invisible knot. I want to be that!
Silliman's Blog (Free subscription) | 10/27/2009
Rae Armantrout’s poetry Entertainment Weekly on the National Book Award § Eileen Myles talks with CA Conrad § Rachel Zolf : the MFA as an institution within larger state apparatuses Tendencies begins Oct. 29 @ CUNY with Zolf, Robert Glück & Trish Salah § Paul Vangelisti talks with Mary de Rachelwiltz § Federal Trade Commission identifies a threat: book bloggers §...
Nothing to Say & Saying It (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
I’ve been a fan of Rae Amantrout’s poetry for years, so I was excited to see Versed as a finalist for the National Book Award. I’ve had a close relationship with this book this year, as I was starting to write a review of it for Jacket, when Rae Armantrout chose my poems for the Boston Review contest. My friends told me it wouldn’t do her book service to have me publish a review...
Silliman's Blog (Free subscription) | 10/20/2009
Burying Mr. Poe Poe sites in Bal’more Poe house & museum § Rosmarie Waldrop on the two directions of American poetry, metaphor & metonymy § Nov. 12 in NYC: Wittgenstein’s Voice with Rosmarie Waldrop, Marjorie Perloff, Tom Pepper, Sissi Tax, moderated by Jean-Michel Rabate § The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis § Charlotte Mandell , reading her translation...
[helix] (Free subscription) | 10/19/2009
The shortlists have been announced! NATIONAL BOOK AWARD (United States) The finalists in poetry are (drum roll): Rae Armantrout , Versed (Wesleyan University Press) Ann Lauterbach , Or to Begin Again (Penguin Books) Carl Phillips , Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon , Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press) Keith Waldrop , Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University...
LEMON HOUND (Free subscription) | 10/18/2009
From a piece in the New York Times last week about "How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect," in which the author offers statistics that support a fact long argued by poets, that disjunction as found in poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Rae Armantrout and Erin Moure, is actually a very useful poetic, that like the uncanny, makes the mind leap in interesting ways, opening up...
Nothing to Say & Saying It (Free subscription) | 10/16/2009
Well, I’ve not made it very far at all into my pile of books, and yikes, in comes another huge batch. Here’s the second batch below. One more batch, I think, to go, and then I’m going to go back to not having any money for books for a long, long time. For this one moment in time, though, I can pretend to be well-read. As you can see, I’m trying to plug some holes that go back...
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