Poetry Blog - Part 22

Scattered Rhymes: Dawn Marie Knopf

Dawn Marie Knopf’s poetry feeds off a particularly American mythos: old wives’ tales, Farmer’s Almanacs, the revered stories of American pop heroes before they made it big.

A Language Poet You’ll Enjoy Reading

Add Clark Coolidge to the list of great American poets that nobody is talking about.

Poem of the Week: David Lehman

[Poem in the Manner of Charles Bukowski]

Poetry Fix, Episode 18: More Milosz

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Late Ripeness.”

The Bookshelf

In books rowed up on the shelf you see, for the first time, your own death.

Poem(s) of the Week: Mark Leidner

by Chris Robinson January 24, 2014 The Other

I first encountered Mark Leidner’s poems on in 2007. Those early poems struck me for how they treated absurd corners of cultural ephemera with the utmost seriousness, and in a vernacular language that seamlessly ascended to momentary heights of poetic beauty. And Leidner read them in an incredibly patient and affectless voice. The overall effect: [...]

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Notes from A White Working Class That No Longer Exists (or what I have learned while being in the higher realms)

by Joe Weil January 22, 2014 Arts & Society

I thought since I had to witness a whole bunch of snotty poets dissect the working class poets (or lack thereof) on a thread today, I’d have some fun and brand them as they brand folks like me. First this is the general gist of what they inferred. All white working class people have disappeared. [...]

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Poem of the Week: Jay Thompson

by Chris Robinson January 17, 2014 The Other

I have always admired how Jay Thompson’s poems approach meaning by backing away from it, inhabiting that paradox of quantum observation, that one’s gaze affects reality. In this excerpt from Winter, it is not the superfice, but the essence that is mutable: “day to day only essences change”. A counter-intuitive statement, which perhaps makes more [...]

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My Kind of Tree!

by Joe Weil January 15, 2014 Arts & Society

First tree I met yesterday turned out to be a black cherry–a friend I remembered from working at National Tool and Manufacturing. We had one on the fence border of the factory. Black cherries, originally a tree of the deep forest thickets, loves sunlight, and is what they call a pioneer tree: it will grow [...]

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“What Becomes of Us as We Read?”: Ashbery and Ethical Criticism

by Andrew Field January 13, 2014 The Other

What are some reasons why we read poetry? Why turn to a poem over a novel, a play, a philosophical treatise? In this essay I want to suggest that we turn to poetry out of a fundamental desire to answer the question, How should one live? By making this claim, I am attempting to wonder [...]

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Poem of the Week: Mark Conway

by Chris Robinson January 10, 2014 The Other

From Chris: Mark Conway’s poems refuse to sit still, even when, or perhaps especially when talking about stillness. The double colons and forward slashes that punctuate these lines seem to me to operate like the stutter or dip of a manual transmission shifting into higher gear, propelling the poem forward. The poem below is about [...]

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Tips for Doing a Poetry Reading

by Joe Weil January 9, 2014 The Other

There are poetry workshops, but no reading workshops: how not to go over your time, how to choose a set, how to present yourself to an audience. So the poetry improves, but the presentation of it just keeps getting worse. I’m not speaking of spoken word here: I am talking about all poetry. Poets ought [...]

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Poem of the Week: Rich Armstrong

by Chris Robinson January 3, 2014 The Other

From Chris: Richard Armstrong’s poems attempt to say smart things in dumb ways, to slip under the intellectual scrutiny practiced poetry readers bring to bear on unfamiliar work. I am continually surprised by how he is able to create an emotive impact through sloganeering, through the melding of bro-speak, blue-collar imagery, street slang, and archaic [...]

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Thirteen of the Best Poetry Collections for 2013: Books That Will Sustain a Lifetime and Another and Another

by Sean Thomas Dougherty December 31, 2013 Poetry and Poetics

All the hipsters are making their aggravating lists made of poets from Brooklyn and Amherst with good haircuts, trust funds and irony. Lists where the majority of poets have one book and slept with the writer of the list. I have nothing against poets sleeping with each other but it doesn’t necessarily make for a [...]

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Poem(s) of the Week: Alfred Corn

by Jorge Rodriguez-Miralles December 27, 2013 Poems of the Week

A Note from Jorge: I did not want to make any personal assessments regarding these poets, their poetry or why they were chosen by me. But if you need me to, I will keep it extremely simple. These are four American poets of various ages and backgrounds who published a volume of poems in 2013 [...]

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Krampus Navidad

by Jeffrey Hecker December 24, 2013 Poetry and Poetics

On the thirteenth day of Christmas, your true love returns the partridge in a pear tree, buys cashmere, hires the Cajun she’s philandering to murder you. No two turtle doves coo alike. No two entertain you so, nightly, before dawn enters. No three French hens sleep as sensitive as you. Anyhoo, his orders are to [...]

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Poem(s) of the Week: Kathryn Levy

by Jorge Rodriguez-Miralles December 20, 2013 Poems of the Week

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Yahia Lababidi, Egypt’s “spokesperson of silence” and modern mystic poet

by Sharif Nassef December 19, 2013 Reviews

BARELY THERE: SHORT POEMS BY YAHIA LABABIDI RESOURCE PUBLICATIONS, 2013 ISBN 978-1625642790 When a few fateful re-tweets put me into contact with Egyptian-American poet and ‘seeker’ Yahia Labadidi, I never expected to come across a work with such suave girth. A work of 21st century mysticism grounded in earthly reality, its call directs us not [...]

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In defense of the motley rather than the trans-disciplinary

by Joe Weil December 18, 2013 Arts & Society

For years I was practicing trans-disciplinary methods without anyone telling me, but now that the experts have discovered this sort of pont-consciousness (what I always called building bridges between disciplines). They are already defining it, and making it rule bound and snot-assed for academic consumption. So I am for the motley, and for what I [...]

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Poem(s) of the Week: Kazim Ali

by Jorge Rodriguez-Miralles December 13, 2013 The Other

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The difference between a loose cannon and a free thinker

by Joe Weil December 11, 2013 Arts & Society

I have often been called a loose cannon: disorganized, lacking structure, etc. I don’t think this is true. I think I disrespect power–my own or anyone else’s, and like to circumvent the maze in which they would have me find the cheese, and if that’s a loose cannon, so be it. I always think: trust [...]

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