From the category archives:

Poets & Writers

Poetry Fix Episode 9: Seamus Heaney

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Poetry Fix Episode 9: Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.”

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In the Kingdom of Unmatched Shoes

Thumbnail image for In the Kingdom of Unmatched Shoes July 19, 2010

I met him once. Laura runs a reading series out of a Barnes and Noble in New Jersey. I could not believe love could get a true second generation New York poet who had been widely anthologized and published by Wesleyen to come out to a Barnes and Noble in Jersey, but love has some strange powers. There he was, like a rare European bird blown off his migration route by a fierce ocean storm and perching on the neighbor’s satellite dish.

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Poetry Fix Episode 8: Nicanor Parra

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Episode 8 of Poetry Fix now available.

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Poetry Fix Episode 7: Robert Frost

Thumbnail image for Poetry Fix Episode 7: Robert Frost July 16, 2010

Episode 7 of Poetry Fix: Robert Frosts’s “Once by the Pacific.”

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Thoughts on “Mock Orange” and Minimalism

Thumbnail image for Thoughts on “Mock Orange” and Minimalism July 14, 2010

Minimalism is not about powerful messages about the nihilism or poverty of the human condition (though it’s certainly easy to think so!). Instead, minimalist art creates a framework through which you view the world. It gives you the bones of the skeleton and then you fill out the flesh. But watch out! The minimalist artist still controls the bones (and hence the body that you have put on them). Minimalism is as silent as the movie frame.

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“Minor” Poets and Imagery

Thumbnail image for “Minor” Poets and Imagery July 13, 2010

Literary theorists use literature as an excuse for ontological truths (or gender, or sexual, or identity issues). This is a legitimate way to ransack texts, but it will not teach you how to write. Ontology begins with detail selection—in terms of word choice, verbal relationships, rhythm. A theorist wouldn’t know what to do with this poem, unless the theorist started to write a book on kinetics in terms of verbal constructs and the cultural bias of admiring athletes as per one’s gender, or class. Minor may only mean a theorist can’t find much to theorize about.

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Poetry Fix Episode 6: Miroslav Holub

Thumbnail image for Poetry Fix Episode 6: Miroslav Holub July 13, 2010

Episode 6 of Poetry Fix. Miroslav Holub’s “Ode to Joy.”

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In Memory of Harvey Pekar

Thumbnail image for In Memory of Harvey Pekar July 12, 2010

Here was a guy with the same ability, in American vernacular prose, to make a drab world come alive–the same ability to make magic from the ordinary that Japanese poets showed in haiku. Harvey gave the urban rust belt, and its daily triumphs and frustrations, a reality, a comic, deadpan glamor. No fiction writers or poets of that time approached. Long before Seinfeld, Harvey Pekar was doing his own small version of Flaubert’s book about nothing.

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More about McLuhan and the Poetic Line

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When McLuhan described linearity (I think he actually used the term lineality…not sure if there’s a difference? Spell check doesn’t recognize the latter, if that means anything!), I couldn’t help but think about the poetic line and the way it is changing. As print culture (and hence the divorce made by the phonetic alphabet) ends, we move from the line, back to the field, back to non-linear, acoustic space.

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Poetry Fix Episode 5: Louise Gluck, “Mock Orange”

Thumbnail image for Poetry Fix Episode 5: Louise Gluck, “Mock Orange” July 9, 2010

Episode 5 of Poetry Fix! Louise Gluck’s “Mock Orange.”

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