ISBN978-0520259263 It’s hard to justify a $50 book nowadays. Unless you’re a scholar looking to pore over every character in an author’s archive, a volume of collected work can easily overwhelm. Is there a non-academic audience for a tome like The Collected Early Poems and Plays by Robert Duncan (University of California Press)? I can’t speak for the market, but as a young poet scrambling through the poems of the past, as well as the growing morass of contemporary offerings, I finished this beast of a volume feeling refreshed. It’s clear that UC Press has a plan for Duncan’s collected works, which are stylistically in tune with The H.D. Book. While poems often share pages, pages rarely feel overwhelmed. Economy of space is understood. This book feels like a chronological collection of published and uncollected works, so we are given a particularly instructive timeline of Duncan’s growth as a poet. [...]
Conscientious Protests –after Julio Cortazar What a conscientious protest: marketing One A Day vitamins to death-row inmates, performing a little Crip Walk when security wands the standing body like a barcode, listening to the bald deputy bad-mouth his own root canal that hasn’t happened yet. What a conscientious protest: naming each bandoleer bullet after the cast of Soap: Jimmy Baio lodged in a Basra watermelon, Diana Canova blew off a man’s wrist in Mosul, Billy Crystal jammed in the barrel and fell out of the muzzle looking like a nickel run over by a combine harvester, Robert Guillaume killed two relatives hugging in Karbala (through his back and out of hers), Richard Mulligan and Katherine Helmond fired into the air together as a warning to nobody. What a conscientious protest: making The Today Show explain itself as a concept, justify its existence as a time passage in the Milky Way [...]
Plato wanted poets expelled from his ideal republic because they did not arrive at truth by methodology, but, according to him and the ancient Greeks, poets came to truth by way of being possessed by a divine afflatus: a god, a demon, the muses. Of course, this truth the poets came by wasn’t always verifiable or reliable, and Plato’s Republic is all about reliability. It’s about truth verified by method and maintained by law and system. Utopias do not change insofar as they are predicated on an ideal, a measure of perfection: measure. We should consider this word before we proceed further. Measure is not only at the center of Plato’s Republic (he allowed music as long as it was march music and kept people in step) but it is also at the center of this wild unpredictable thing known as poetry. So if we were going to see Plato’s [...]
E N T I T L E D LET’S DRINK AND FUCK Lucille Baller, a walking bowel movement. All the pretty girls and the Mardi Gras, too. Bitches go hard. Bitches fat it out, too, when push comes to love. Never let the truth get in the way of your eyes. Paris is burning, and we shan’t be home tonight. You cut me I bleed perfumania. I want a normal happy life, I either wanna wife and children, or I wanna rich and famous, or I wanna be had. Cuz I’m a white privilege, my spirit animal is niggaz, my spirit faggot is the world that ain’t fair. To make some impression, some mark upon the world, all you have. You hit it big, you anal bleach. Paris is burning, and we shan’t be home tonight. Sometimes you prom yourself to sleep. The girl with two heads has also two [...]
The Eggshell Parade brings you an interview with writer Mark Baumer. Related Posts Interview with Minrose Gwin [AUDIO] Interview with Neil Shepard [AUDIO] Interview with Woody Brown [AUDIO] Interview with Marie-Elizabeth Mali [AUDIO] Interview with Emily Vogel [AUDIO]
Elizabethton, Tennessee, 1929 When wages sank and conditions became intolerable, women led a strike of the Glanzstoff Textile Mill. While their menfolk’s anger often erupted in violence, women used laughter and bold defiance of conventional feminine behavior as weapons against a bewildered National Guard, which was made up of their neighbors until backup was called. Though prosecutors branded them “wild” and “disorderly,” the women earned support from their pastor, sheriff, fellow townspeople, and local merchants. Those big companies sprang like arrows into the heart pine of Appalachia, shaking hands with homegrown ambition, eyes popping for our breasted hills, sinewy creeks, and I suppose for what they saw as backward-walking mountain folk. They knew we had few laws to cry for what a man ought give, and no union to guard what no man should take. No woman here lines her closet with pretty things bought in town or strings the [...]
Poems are “instruments for thinking” (Allen Grossman). The object of a poet’s thought, however, is often unstated–especially in lyric poetry. Lyric poetry never speaks to an audience, and so–as it is when we are alone–the speaker does not feel compelled to explicitly state the object of thought but only the thoughts themselves. In this review, I want to try and discern these objects of thought in the works of two poets whose work seem directed at resolving particularly spiritual problems. *** diatomhero: religious poems The primary question about Lisa A Flowers’ work is this: What spiritual universe does her poetry inhabit? What are its rules and how do those govern the assumptions and hence possibilities/ambitions of her work? It seems to be a world in which incarnation is the rule, and yet there is also a kind of Heaven and Hell–locations that suggest some kind of finality. The figure of [...]
The Eggshell Parade brings you an interview with poet Joe Weil. Related Posts Interview with Neil Shepard [AUDIO] Interview with Marie-Elizabeth Mali [AUDIO] Interview with Minrose Gwin [AUDIO] Interview with Emily Vogel [AUDIO] Interview with Kelli Russell Agodon [AUDIO]
JH: Congratulations on your first book diatomhero: religious poems. I treasure how this poetry holds every religion responsible for being authentic and explores exactly what kind of turmoil/freedom of movement (of creed, language, time, space) arises in such a busy atmosphere. I’m thinking specifically of Christianity’s notion of finite resting places (blazing hot or room-temperature) teamed with Buddhist/Hindu reincarnation notions and Greek polytheistic elements. The book is a cream vichyssoise where these ingredients are available to be salted, peppered, and consumed. Could you talk a little about how the book is and is not a supplement to all religious texts? LF: I love the word ‘vichyssoise’. It’s blonde as a Gibson girl in a mint satin evening gown, as per the synesthetic-green letter ‘V’. Definitely a word with the curls of the sun. The title, diatomhero, is an anagram of the bible’s “I am the door”, a statement that comes [...]
_______________________________________ Zayne Turner grew up in the rural High Desert of Oregon. She is the author of the chapbook Memory of My Mouth, available from dancing girl press. She has received grants and fellowships for literary & visual arts from the Arteles Creative Center in Finland, Oregon Arts Commission, Vermont Studio Center and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She also sometimes makes things on Storify.
wig confessional/ the bedroom Winter 1996 Bedtime (I says my name, hoping he will call it out) it is just me (touch me like that velvet zodiac woman) covered in collapsible silence (like the gal I once was) until dawn (singing in church) she clings to me (praying for honor) like moisture in the desert (satin red) on her seed coat. ( even vestiges of clouds hold rain) Then she replaces me (but you gotta pull it from the sky) every time the UPS man arrives (sing it, whistle with your lips, dance) or when down Patton Ave to catch night. (lift up the tawny clouds, find a rhythm) She stuffs me in the back of boxes (push them back) I gasp and rebuff (use your hands) any compliments— I thought (not beyond that) about her hiding swollen pockets (remain there in the quiet) of gray that envelope her (there [...]
The Eggshell Parade brings you a reading and interview from writer Catherine Lacey. Catherine reads
Ko’ dóó łeeschch’iih [Fire and Ashes The red off the far ridge, an eating dragon, slow ______coming down the valley —my mom’s imagination over the phone, ______a quarter-mile of cars ahead. No one has stopped, on their way north or south, to capture Hotshots turning the beast to smolder. Somewhere out in the burn, under dusk, a rattler ______den unfurls fast as brush fire and clenches against the inferno draft ______that blocks entrance and escape. For an instant, or minutes maybe, their unnatural warmth is a comfort beneath the ablaze final day. It’s the shape I’m in. I don’t tell her that I will ______leave, days from this moment, the high, dry mountain we drive towards ______for the ashes of a different monster. _____________________________________ BOJAN LOUIS is a member of the Navajo Nation — Naakaii Dine’é; Ashiihí; Ta’neezahnii; Bilgáana. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Platte Valley Review, [...]
The Eggshell Parade brings you a reading and interview from poet Katharine Coles. Katharine reads . Share this: Related Posts Interview with Michael Homolka [AUDIO] Interview with Michelle Bitting [AUDIO] Interview with Woody Brown [AUDIO]March 7, 2013 Interview with Kelli Russell Agodon [AUDIO] Interview with Neil Shepard [AUDIO]
This for dg okpik ____________________________________________ Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is currently pursuing her MFA at Bard College. She resides in Tsaile, AZ on the Navajo Nation with her husband and daughter and is an adjunct faculty member at Diné College. Her first chapbook of poetry is titled, Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010). Share this: Related Posts Poem of the Week: Emily Vogel Poem of the Week: Christopher Stackhouse Poem of the Week: Margarita Delcheva Poem of the Week: Ocean Vuong February 22, 2013 Poem of the Week: Amy King
When I was 19, I read the Iliad, Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, which I enjoyed, except for the endless lists of boats. Later, I came to realize the Greeks who were listening to this were from the various tribes mentioned, so when their group of ships came up, they were probably shouting out like soccer hoodlums. This didn’t make me enjoy the list, but it gave me a modicum of empathy. A list, structured with rhythm and imagery in mind can be one of the chief structural devices of both epic/bardic poetry and free verse. Whitman has more listings than an anal retentive suburbanite. How many people here have at least one parent who loves his or her to do list as much as they love their children? Whitman is a list nut: Whitman lists. One of the syntactic clues to listing is an excess of participles and gerunds, what we [...]