Category: Poetry and Poetics

The other day, I posted a poem of Pablo Medina’s which I published in my second issue of Black Swan back in 1989. I put the magazine out with money from income tax returns. It was an act of love, an act of madness, and four issues went forth into the world before money prohibited my doing anything out of love. Many of the poets were friends of mine, others friends of friends. In 1990, I published a language poetry issue—probably the only poetry mag in Jersey that did so back in 1990. was my guest editor for that one, and layout and design went to the , then under . Aljira later came into a shit load of grant money. Back then, they were fairly new. For that issue gave us a poem. I look back now and realize I published some good poets and fiction writers who later [...]

In , Mathews lets the loose cohesion of his poems suggest profundities that seem unlikely coming from often mundane subjects. His poems are cohesive because of formal structure and theme, but it is a deliberately incoherent kind of cohesion. The effect is delicate and oblique, and it is growing on me. Mathews likes wandering off the topic (or, really, having no real topic, no subject of discourse), a familiar strategy of and other New York : For me the identification of trees has always been a puzzle, one not really made easier by consulting the tree book inside my house, where no trees are. I can certainly remember the caramel color of beech leaves in fall, the cropped silhouettes of plan trees along the highway . . . the purpled boughs of Judas trees where no swallow ever perches. But do swallows ever perch? It seems that every swallow I’ve [...]

We live in the paradox that life is change, but that change taken to the ultimate is death. Early signs of the great alteration shape our expanding or contracting limbs and are inscribed expressly on the face. When the young woman of twenty-five notices faint lines around the mouth or tiny crowsfeet at the corner of her eyes, something even more intimate than vanity makes her stop to reflect. The script for her very own mortality play, written on the finest parchment, has begun to develop, nor does she need any special clairvoyance to divine the final act from the first. La Rochefoucauld says that neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily. That’s the reason we avoid long or frequent exposure to the black rays of the mirror—unless we have the temperament of those medieval monks who kept brightly polished skulls in their cells as a handy [...]

There is a specifically poetic shape to the anxieties visible in Walt Whitman’s poetry. Looking at Whitman’s theory of language and how that theory works out in the poems, the shape of the anxiety becomes apparent. He had this Transcendentalist idea of language, detailed by Tyler Hoffman in his essay, by C. Carroll Hollis in his crucial work, and by Mark Bauerlein in Walt Whiman and the American Idiom. This idea of language is one where “words are emanations of reality and truth,” Hoffman says, and for Whitman “language is not just a system of signs we humans have at hand to express ourselves; rather, it stands as a cultural complex, one that registers our deepest beliefs as a people and a nation.” Whitman rejected the empiricists’ claims about the arbitrariness of signs, that language is basically a convention that only happens to have the grammatical structure and phonetic sounds [...]

Whatever people might say in the world about Newark is wrong. Newark, like Queens and Jersey City, is ethnic, race, and class diverse beyond anywhere else I know on the planet, with a wider variety of socio-economic classes freely intermingling, especially among its artists. This latter fact cheers me. As a working class white guy from Elizabeth, I often feel uncomfortable on art scenes. The food is in the not-much-spice, brown rice, wok, pita wrap, veggie, hummus spectrum where I do not flourish. Food is not made important among the white artistic class, no matter how much they insist they know about food. It all tastes too bland to me. I know they are right. I know their food is healthier and allows them to be thin and to have smaller, more shapely asses, but it makes me sad. It makes me think of psychotic men and women milling about [...]

Poem In Which Spring Returns (or French peasants who are really from Cobble Hill) Melissa Sheppard Spring comes or maybe it doesn’t, or I come—a sort of spring, painful shoots sticking out of the ground— a woman of shoots, and each one painful. This is the tulip song I sing to my daughter. I say daughter: tulips must break soil. Twiggy stuff pokes the ground from below, while sun spikes the ground from above: it’s all a spiky operation— just as you drew in your first grade class! A world of piercings! things piercing and being pierced— that is as good a theory as any other— out of being: a sort of ongoing power point demonstration: Poke the pertinent facts! Say: grass! tree! Woman bending over in imitation of a peasant in France. She is not in France. She is in Cobble Hill. She is not a peasant. She is [...]

Poets are limited if they read nothing but their own poetry and spend the rest of their time reading novels or thrillers. Most of my beginning students have never purchased a book of poems. They wish to write poetry, but they do not wish to read it. They read fantasy fiction mostly. So the first thing I do is give them books, a couple hundred or so, none of which are fantasy, and then I tell them to send me an e mail, quote an excerpt from the book, and riff off of it. I then riff back, and, very often, my prompt for them arises from the e-mail they’ve written or the excerpt they’ve quoted. This accomplishes five goals: 1. They are now in a relationship to a book, adding a sort of ongoing marginalia to it. 2. Their reading life and their writing life are being connected, in [...]

My dad gave me some hard line rules to live by: never cross a picket line. Be good to old ladies. Know that any job, no matter how prestigious, is just a job. And when all else fails, never cross a picket line or rat someone out. These are some hard line rules for readers of poetry: 1. If you are reading in an open, do not, not ever, not on pain of death read more than your time allotted. It smacks of conceit and disregard for others. It’s garbage. There are very few people I want to shoot, but I would shoot a conceited poet and not have trouble sleeping. Dealing with assholes is part of a host’s job. Don’t make them work any harder. 2. If you are a feature, don’t ever complain about whether you are first or last. If you are that good and they put [...]

Episode 4 now available on YouTube. Wallace Stevens’s poem “.” Related Posts Poetry Fix Episode 3: Pablo Neruda Poetry Fix Episode 1: Robert Hass.June 25, 2010 Poetry Fix Episode 2: ArchilochosJune 28, 2010 TheThe Roger Scruton on Beauty

Hey friends, Mary Karr and I have started a YouTube video series called Poetry Fix. . Twice a week on Mondays and Fridays we’ll upload a 2-4 minute video where we read a poem and briefly discuss it. We’re trying to pimp poetry for average humans. Any feedback is appreciated. We hope you enjoy. And if you do, consider joining and (@marykarrlit) for more updates. Also, please forward and spread the word! Share this: Related Posts Poetry Fix Episode 1: Robert Hass. June 25, 2010 Poetry Fix Episode 2: Archilochos June 28, 2010 Roger Scruton on Beauty Herman Melville Drinks Your Milkshake “While I was masturbating, more rainforest disappeared”

Poetry Fix Episode 9: Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” Related posts: Poetry Fix Episode 8: Nicanor Parra Poetry Fix Episode 5: Louise Gluck Poetry Fix Episode 7: Robert Frost Poetry Fix Episode 6: Miroslav Holub Poetry Fix Episode 3: Pablo Neruda

In a recent post, I based a discussion about the relationship between the poetic line and print culture on some of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas. I was recently listening to the below lecture by McLuhan and he discussed the effects of the phonetic alphabet. He said that the phonetic alphabet divorced the visual sense from the other senses by emphasizing it above the others. This separation creates the possibility of linearity, the space for “logicians, analysts, classifiers, the individualist pattern of Greek life.” The phoenecian alphabet made possible Euclid, who revealed that visual space is continuous and connected and homogeneous and static. All the other spaces created by the other senses–of touch, acoustics, kinesthesial–all these other senses are discontinuous, resonant and dynamic.” He gives an interesting example to demonstrate this. A boy is on his first flight and asks his dad, “When do we get small?” The “canopy” of the plane [...]

I don’t feel bad when poets are forgotten. We are highly forgettable beings. Very often, the children of poets try to forget them and fail. Poets can be pains in the ass. I once dreamed that poets became discarded shoes without a match when they died—the kind of shoes you often encounter while walking down a street or by the rail road tracks. Sometimes, these shoes are still in good shape, and are your size, but they are always missing their partner. Oh Alas! If we lived in a world where it was ok to wear unmatched shoes, I might value poets more. But, putting this aside, discarding it like a three inch “fuck me” pump, I will say that I get very sad when good poems are forgotten. And so, I want to remember a good poem by a poet who was once prominent, and who is now seldom [...]

Preamble of questions Is there such a thing as “poetic language?” For example, which of the following words are poetic: Splat, emptiness, selvage, corporatization, loom, sequester, actually, rooster, surmise, demonstrate, fart, interpretation, destiny, tooth, ineluctable, meme, vector, duplicity, comma, consequence, drive, chant, teeter, tumult, fragrant, flounder, forget, suspend? Pick four words of five words from this list you think are most “poetic” and write a four line free verse or rhymed poem, using them. Example one: The shadows of trees are a (loom) On which you (sequester) your fear, Containing it through the (ineluctable) (chant) of days, through the weave, and thread of (tumult). Example two: (Drive) South on routes 1 and 9, Forsake (corporatization), and the rotting (tooth) of conscience.. Oh love, (suspend) your adorations until further notice! Example three: The lions (fart) in the sun. (Fragrant) with longing, I think of them: Those noble cats, ( teeter) on [...]

Related Posts Poetry Fix Episode 1: Robert Hass.June 25, 2010