Category: Poetry and Poetics

I hate when poets are called brave. Gets on my nerves. Fearless is another term I find dubious. Poets win grants. They are professionals. Most poetry festivals are lamer and more sedate than Star Trek conventions. If I pick up a poetry book and see the words “brave” or “fearless” in any of the blurbs, I think twice about buying it. No one is brave or fearless if they live in the suburbs, have tenure, or inhabit parts of Manhattan that have been made safe by the police force. This is not brave. Being fearless in a poem is along the same lines as being an aggressive grandmother expressing road rage in an old Buick sedan. Spare me. Being “brave” in a poem is like those snide one liners people zing you with from the safety of a Facebook comment. But, sometimes, poets write poems that aren’t being considered for [...]

I still have my 4th grade book bag. Alone, at five in the morning, I picked the rusted lock with a paper clip, and discovered the 10-year-old Joe Weil’s first literary efforts, all crumpled up, in my terrible hand writing, but the meters of the poems were perfect. I remembered using that bag as a make shift sleigh, sliding across the parking lot at the acme super market. The entire route to school, and the voices of my friends turned to smoke in the winter’s air, returned to me. The weirdest things survive. I lost my parents and some of those friends also died: Eric, who introduced me to vampire comics and Henry Miller novels, his brother Greg who netted the biggest trout I ever caught, Huey who threw a good fast ball, and liked jamming with me on the piano. I found a poem in which I’d written about [...]

Etheridge Knight wrote some of the only haiku I can stand in the American idiom. In addition to that, his ear was impeccable, and he was liable to go just about anywhere in a poem so that he invigorates the tradition of the conversational lyric and does so by using mixed registers of speech while avoiding both the political correctness and formulaic “Non-academic” traditions of spoken word. The list in second part of this poem shows how a poet can still use cursing and invective to maximum rhythmical advantage. This is a list, worthy of Whitman. Knight is not an “unschooled poet.” His training is in the whole array of American speech from the reflective, almost introverted poet, to the raucous street preacher. “All Fucked Up” represents true spoken word–not a slam formula. Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and [...]

Unlike the anthologies of traditional Chinese poetry translated by Burton Watson and Stephen Owen, , compiled and translated by Keming Liu and some other writers and poets, is in bilingual format for the first time. The collection aims at “the attention of English-speaking readers a comprehensive and focused selection of contemporary Chinese poetry in translation.” More than 40 poems by 20 poets are chosen in the translated anthology. Generally speaking, the poets whose poems are chosen in the book were born in 1970s and 1980s. Many are cynical of the modern Chinese society, showcasing the negative aspects in their poems. In fact, the translators–perhaps influenced by critical ideology–have mostly selected poems for translation which tell the Western readers about one side of current realities in Chinese society, which are no doubt worthy of attention today. Particularly highlighted are the problems from China’s recent economic development: the pollution, the thieves, the [...]

James Copeland is a tall man, who rides a tall bike, drinks tall drinks, and writes tall poetry. To My Plants is a tallish, stiff chapbook of words arranged by James, printed on cellulose by James, and containing a DVD of a short film shot by a friend of James, from which the still photographs interspersed throughout the chapbook originate. The cover is two-sided, both unassuming, without any words to indicate title or author. You get clouds and mountainous valleys at first glance, but the sleuthy reader will check under the flap and be delighted, or maybe teased, with a string of automobiles as silent as any natural wonder. You’re right, I’m stalling, but only because To My Plants already says everything that needs to be said about itself. It’s a book that delights in a cat-like batting about of your preconceptions: Plants, oh, James is a hippie, or: “Science [...]

Carolyn Kizer’s poetry pleases me in many of the same ways May Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Alice Fulton please me: enormous intelligence and observation as a form of passion, as deep engagement with the thing made out of words. She is not interested in using the natural world to enter realms of spiritual transport. There is no fuzziness, no maudlin sense of the “sublime” clinging to her observation. This is her poem on seeing a Great Blue Heron. It is also a powerful tribute to her mother. She has an even better one on seeing a bat, and in that poem, her mother also figures as a partner in the event, but I would hope a reader enjoys this poem and goes hunting for the bat. Unlike Mary Oliver, she would never declare “you do not have to be good.” Her Heron, unlike Oliver’s goose is no excuse for a [...]

Thin Kimono is a book of mistaken identities: a hallucinogenic wandering through a cocktail party the night before the invention of the internet. The party is populated with individuals you may or may not know. Your wife is a slightly altered version of herself. There are horses, but even they have become something else. Michael Earl Craig’s acupuncturist is here too. She tells us her “speakers are hidden in the jade plant” (The Bad Clown) We get the sense she is struggling not to become evil. We know there must be separate rooms, separate poem-rooms, but even with titles, often the only sense of demarcation comes from the turning of pages. This is particularly true in the book’s second and smallest section, which is reminiscent of Matthew Rohrer’s “A Plate of Chicken” in that the section is comprised of short 8-line segments separated by asterisks (“A Plate of Chicken” is [...]

This entry is part of a series, Ur Poems» The first poem I ever loved was The Raven. Specifically, one line from the poem haunted me when I was young, and still does: “The silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.” Writers today might say that the line isn’t a very good one, now that it has become the fashion of writing workshops to balk at any overuse of adjectives. But in this line the words used to describe this minute detail suggest that the mind perceiving the rustling curtain (the mind that is obsessed by the loss of Lenore) is frantic to most accurately describe and interpret the fleeting details of his life. A world that is indifferent to our sorrows and our ecstasies produces these details, but we can’t help but infuse them with our own meanings. These details are what the mind attaches itself to, are [...]

dearest, they told me a surgeon sat down in the hospital morgue next to your body. He yelled at the aide to get out. His two sons had been your students. –me, too, little-knowing– Anyhow. I’m always, my young fathers, out in the air, loving you. Water to water. ____________________________________________ Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book,Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, just out from Copper Canyon Press. Her previous collection, Little Boat was published by Wesleyan in 2007. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Joan Larkin Poem of the Week: Sharon Olds [...]

What inspires us to write poetry? I would think that the commonly accepted assumption about poets is that if one is a poet, he or she has always been a poet. The obvious question which should follow this then is “Can someone be a poet without having any knowledge of poetry?” “Are we born poets?” Let’s begin with this: Most primary, intermediate, and secondary schools include some study of poetry in their curriculums, and yet for the majority of these schools, this is not the primary focus, nor is it rendered a very crucial one. I suppose my first encounter with poetry was a poem written in a photo album of my formative years by my father and mother: “I drop, you catch,/ I cry, you fetch,/I kvetch, you kvetch” (cleverly scrawled next to a picture of me, naked, crawling along the carpet). Of course, this isn’t Pulitzer worthy by [...]

Packing Her Things And I could nearly stand it—the stained blouses; the nubs of drying lipsticks with their botched nose jobs; the undershirts; the bras; the slips; the books. I packed them away, like a dutiful child. I did it dry-eyed, thinking, I could spend a day like this in hell, and then at the back of the closet I found her cache of gift bags—pretty foil bags; tiny starred ones; slick big bags with cabbage roses— the way we both squirrel them away. I never knew, the way I cried when I saw her paintings for the first time, or her secret collection of beaded purses. Which part of the soul is handed down? Which part is its own? Then I sank down on the bed and howled. I wept like an orphaned child. ___________________________________________ Liz Rosenberg is the author of the novel Home Repair and five books of [...]

NOTE: In this new series, THEthe writers share their first experiences with poetry or discuss the first poems they ever loved. ~~~ My first sense of poetry was music, songs my mother told me taught me, as they say. My father loved to scream Milton at me, so my first memory of my father is: Hurled headlong flaming! Or Disemboweled (the word alone). He also loved to say: Bah Humbug! Or Latin poems: Non amo te nec possum dicere quarere hoc tantum scio. I do not like thee Doctor Fell–my mother read poetry to me at night and my father had the family recite Shakespeare: Be not afeard the isle is full of strange noises. My father and my uncle the pianist were best friends in high school and they both loved to write poems. My uncle was often in the NY Times with a sonnet–my father would test us [...]

I don’t usually have an idea in mind when I begin to write. Today, a student looked at me and said: “you haven’t been writing lately, have you?” She was right; at least I have not written poetry. It made me angry that she was right, then oddly comforted because the jig was up and I realized that I didn’t feel much like writing. I felt like watching people catch fish on a winter pier while I wore a long camel’s hair coat and kept my hands in my pockets. I always thought that one of the few reasons I wanted to be tall was because tall people look better in camel’s hair coats. I wanted to look attractively gaunt. Seagulls hovered over head as fisherman threw their remaining bait to them. This desire to be on a fishing pier in winter first came to me as I watched a [...]

This entry is part of a series, Paintings of Poets» Entries in this series: Painting Larry Fagin (Plus a Fagin Poem!) Share this: Related Posts The Lost Painting

A tenth grade student of mine recently commented that he felt anaphora to be a crutch weaker writers use. He didn’t see the point of repeating a word or phrase over and over again, especially if he didn’t agree with that word overall. I couldn’t really agree with him out loud since the entire lesson was built around anaphora, but I didn’t exactly disagree either. Like most poetic devices, anaphora’s strength lies in how its use draws something out of the writer that she might not have otherwise have drawn. In that way I can see how something like anaphora can be seen as a crutch, a way to trick one’s self into writing because they have nothing to write about. Of course, to a young writer like this student, with so much to say about his world, the idea that someone might need to be self-coaxed into introspection might [...]