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 of the Week: Josh Lefkowitz

by Andrew Field September 6, 2013 The Other

Photo by Carolyn Baskis No Use Crying I don’t know who decided that idiom. You wanna cry, cry. What, are we all so wealthy that we can afford to pour milk over granite tabletops and not think about the cost of such behaviors? Do we own and operate dairy farms? No, we don’t – not [...]

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The Spine of Longing

by Joe Weil September 5, 2013 Poetry and Poetics

We could say we long for someone, or we could better say that someone has triggered our longing. Certain mechanisms exist in the human brain that when brushed by a combination of memory and bodily functions, demand interpretation. Feeling is situational interpretation. The same chemicals and hormones, and even, to an extent the same physical [...]

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Poem of the Week: Erin Belieu

by Christine Gelineau August 30, 2013 Poems of the Week

WHEN AT A CERTAIN PARTY IN NYC Wherever you’re from sucks, and wherever you grew up sucks, and everyone here lives in a converted chocolate factory or deconsecrated church without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup in sight, but only carefully edited objets like the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen that looks like [...]

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Poem of the Week: Bruce Bond

by Christine Gelineau August 25, 2013 Poems of the Week

The Delta If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet. You are not you anymore. You are a girl standing in a pool of clouds as they catch fire in the distance. There are laws of heaven and those of place and those who see the sky in the water, angels in [...]

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Poem of the Week: Shara McCallum

by Christine Gelineau August 16, 2013 The Other

Psalm for Kingston _____If I forget thee, O Jerusalem __________~Psalm 137 City of Jack Mandora—mi nuh choose none—of Anancy _____prevailing over Mongoose, Breda Rat, Puss, and Dog, Anancy __________saved by his wits in the midst of chaos and against all odds; _____of bawdy Big Boy stories told by peacock-strutting boys, hush-hush but loud enough to [...]

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Poem of the Week: Neil Shepard

by Christine Gelineau August 9, 2013 Poems of the Week

TOWN GREEN: SOUTH ROYALTON How long has it been since I lazed on a town green? (Wistfulness, beware.) A couple of square acres set with maple and crabapple. (Sprayed, mulched, blooming impossibly early.) Two gazebos, for bandstand and romance. (Amo, amas. Gazebo, gazebae?) Starched white church with a black clock-face. (The time is what unearthly [...]

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Silt & Structure: An Annotation on Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei’s Translations of the Poetry of Jean Daive

by Isaac Linder August 8, 2013 Poems of the Week

These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. –James Joyce, Ulysses [2176] Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, a translator and poetry scholar, has a beautiful essay accompanied by a selection of translations of the Belgian poet Jean Daive in . The sampling of work that Oei addresses all derive from his translation…

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Poem of the Week: Lee Upton

by Christine Gelineau August 2, 2013 Poems of the Week

Crooked I wanted a crooked man. I panned for a crooked man. I tea spooned out trenches until I dug up my crooked man. Now I have a corner on a crooked man, a crooked house. I got crookider And crookider, out of whack. Nakeder than cheese, clothed with nakedness. Tilt and spin, I let [...]

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Waite’s Butch Geography

by Caitlin Mackenzie August 1, 2013 Reviews & Interviews

Butch Geography by Stacey Waite Tupelo Press ISBN: 978-1-937797-25-7 Paperback, $16.95, 72p “God made gender a plaything.”—Stacey Waite Butch Geography is the first full-length book of poetry from Stacey Waite, award-winning author of three chapbooks and assistant professor of gender studies and creative writing at the University of Nebraska. The poems of Butch Geography explore [...]

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Poem of the Week: Rickey Laurentiis

by Adam Fitzgerald July 26, 2013 Poems of the Week

Faggot As when a word lifts unexpectedly ________________________or implodes— you had meant to say maelstrom but now interposed between you and the open world, male storm (no one would think to give a sex to it, so were unready)—that was its arrival, _____________________________fire that didn’t act as one sheet but gathered separately as flames around [...]

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Factory Art: 798 in Beijing

by Jamie Deangelo July 25, 2013 Arts & Society

At Dashanzi 798, also called the Dashanzi Art District, is Beijing’s premier art community. Since it formed in the early 2000s, a number of Western art dealers and corporate entities have set up shop here, and a few of its first tenants, including Ai Wei Wei, have become a powerful force in the art world. [...]

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Poem of the Week: Emily Skillings

by Adam Fitzgerald July 19, 2013 The Other

CANARY I held my canary out for you when you said your canary felt a little droopy. Your canary was a ruby drop in my frosty glass of canary. The canary between us grew for many days. I wanted to fight the canary, but you held me back. The officer shot the unarmed canary on [...]

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Thanks, Mr. Divine Comedy: Gregory Orr and John Smith dual review

by Joe Weil July 11, 2013 Reviews

Gregory Orr is famous and has won major awards. John Smith is a retired high school teacher from New Jersey who is a poet, well respected locally but unknown otherwise. Orr has blurbs from such luminaries as Albert Goldbarth, Ilya Kaminsky, and Naomi Shihab Nyef. John has blurbs from poets who have won grants and [...]

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Poem of the Week: Dorothea Lasky

by Adam Fitzgerald July 5, 2013 The Other

The open sound of French Even the sound of French is open And the children find me very interesting to look at It is as if I am a TV show or supper All my pretty babies who paint the winter chests With red and gold and green It was on the afternoon In the [...]

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Poetry Essay #3: Checking Out Old Loves

by Joe Weil July 3, 2013 Arts & Society

I live in a nation that has three year olds becoming life time members of the NRA, and anti-bullying seminars that force a draconian language of the politically correct so technical and nit-picky as to be a form of bullying in its own right. Guns to the right of me! Jargon to the left of [...]

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Poem of the Week: Dave Roskos

by Emily Vogel June 28, 2013 Poems of the Week

The Food Pantry Don’t have to go to the food pantry anymore. Got a job bringing people to the food pantry. ____________________________________________ Dave Roskos is the editor of Big Hammer Magazine & Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books. He lives in his home state of New Jersey where he works as a Life Skills Specialist in the mental [...]

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