THEthe Poetry and are teaming up to share poems across the oceans. This collaboration introduces new audiences to the works of emerging and established poets from America and Australia. Weekly installments of poems, interviews and artworks will celebrate poetic observations from Brooklyn to Sydney and places between. The Red Room Company is a not-for-profit poetry organisation founded in 2003 and based in Sydney. Their mission is to provide professional commission opportunities to contemporary Australian poets, particularly emerging voices. They present poetry to the wider community in engaging, unusual ways involving film, audio and installation. Since 2007, The Red Room Company has delivered Papercuts, their national poetry education program for primary and secondary schools. In 2010 the poetry education program was extended to Correctional Centres. Related Posts On Gene Tanta’s “Critical Introduction to Unusual Woods.” Why Poetic Collaboration Matters And the James Patterson of Contemporary Poetry is… THEthe Poetry: 2010 Year [...]

This entry is part of a series, Garbage Picking in The Waste Land» Still, the close reading. Fine. You will have your blasted close reading. However, I will conduct this reading on my own terms. I will shuffle, and play the cards at my whim, sometimes to my detriment. First though, a word on why and how I’ve resisted the close reading. “The Waste Land” begs a different criticism. My initial interest in the poem sprung from the seeming impossibility for anything clever to be said about the poem, and yet everyone went on assigning it, sometimes with a tone of reverence normally associated with religiosity: “You don’t get it? None of us do, it’s a mystery! Work toward it though, it has its rewards!” That Eliot can be enjoyed without thorough understanding is entirely true. The danger, of course, is that Eliot may or may not be part of [...]

[Then there is this dream with its other bright edges] Then there is this dream with its other bright edges, a piece of paper spread over the flowering field, thin as a reflection. You know what’s wound tight there, wanting to undo. Even when you don’t look, it is still there, all brazen and sting, all blast-net of stars: a single-walled room that is eating itself, one big hole of hallway, pale and crustacean. And inside it, the milk-film bristles with light. Inside, you keep filling with water, and the water keeps filling with copies of you. _____________________________________________________ Niina Pollari wrote two chapbooks of poetry, Fabulous Essential (Birds of Lace 2009) and Book Four (Hyacinth Girl 2011). With Judy Berman, she is editing the essay collection It’s Complicated: Feminists Write about the Misogynist Art We Love.

One of the most dreamily sinister images in Dana Curtis’ Camera Stellata appears in the poem The Final Amnesia, which features an abandoned Eden drifting in space with hanged gardeners who “have decided to die/to give the roses/wings/the mint/dominion.” In the void of such lawlessness, “God’s Rapist” has begotten a miscellany of stars, planets, illegitimate black holes, and feminine “iconoclast[s] awhirl in stasis”…”each attempt to abort” drying their hair to thorns: the streams running from Christ’s crown those of Mary’s menses, or miscarriage: a kind of cosmic Handmaid’s Tale interspersed over Biblical prophecy. Female voices cycle through the narration, some truculent and young, recalling coming-of-age visions of “blood, vomit, loud sex in asparagus fields”, some sorrowful as Russian mothers striding among bombed-out ruins as chemical fires flicker on the horizon. Flames (as in war, as in zodiac, as in mythical salamander, as in creation and regeneration of the solar system) [...]

In my last post, I modeled a way of holding a conversation with a text. I call this “pont-consciousness.” Pont means bridge in Latin. It is the genesis both of pontiff and pontificate. Used as a verb we make a bridge between disparate texts or things, trusting that the bridge may then be shorn up with the necessary research and attention to the main text. Universities always want you to use the latest research on a topic, just as lawyers site the latest precedents to make a case. If you’re bibliography does not cite anything but old books, old papers or essays, your grade will suffer. This is the myth of “progress” rearing its ugly head. It makes total sense in terms of science and historical research where empirical data builds on incremental discovery and findings, but it is falsely applied to literary theory since, here, the new is not [...]

(This post was to begin with a quote that I remember as having been said by the filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard: “You don’t read a film; you watch it”. While trying to chase down the quote, though, I found it had disappeared so effectively that I began to doubt both the words and the person to whom I was attributing it. Regardless of who said it and whether they said it that way, here it is, the quote as epigraph:) You don’t read a film; you watch it. A poem, like a film, is a different beast. It is both an event and an object; which it to say, it occurs in time and it occupies space. It is music and it is drawing. It may not be both things at once, but it has the potential to be either. And both (though not necessarily, of course, at once. See previous [...]

The 8th of May: A Vow Made for the 7th of May Upon seeing a video of a man in North Carolina firing his rifle into a sign asking citizens to Vote Against NC Amendment One. There are oaks that remember what we would forget—the burn of the rope, how a body takes on more weight the moment it breathes its last, how the earth below shoeless feet grows hungry for the slaughtered. There are rooms where paint has been rolled over blood, where the body’s salt has been vacuumed into bags of dust, where the veneer of a nightstand still bears the imprint of a living hand’s last message. Ghosts of children and men and women hang from fences, linger in the corners of dorm rooms, courtrooms, churches. This is how we deal with it around here, he said, after emptying his gun into a plea for equality, and [...]

I see your movement flashing like a knife, Reeling my senses, drunk upon the hues Of motion, the eternal rainbow wheel… –Claude McKay Claude was referring specifically to the hustling city of Barcelona, mostly because he’d just abandoned the Harlem Renaissance & his friends wouldn’t talk to him anymore. This is not a problem for Tim Seibles. He manages to keep both ambidextrous hands flexed upon an operating lever that activates & deactivates a bicameral fog-machine. Fast Animal—the poet’s seventh collection—is poetry that accomplishes the following laundry list (plus whatever numbered attributes you choose to affix after purchasing & camping out with the work many times over): 1. Seibles hijacks classic forms to croon Blues. I’ll let the powerful odes “Ode to My Hands”, “Ode to Sleep”, and “Ode to This for That” speak for themselves—to retain the hoodoo. There are also villanelles aplenty, one in each of four sections: [...]

This entry is part of a series, Pont-consciousness» I was sitting on the throne a few minutes ago, reading Hannah Arendt’s Vita Activa, specifically the part called “The Location of Human Activities” and, as I was reading, I realized no one suggests to students how to converse with a book while they are reading it. We “receive” the information, highlight what we think is important (which I suppose is analogous to culling the herd) and re-read what we do not understand. But there is another way to read a book, and that is by allowing other texts we have read to intrude, to interrupt the text at hand, to gather the force of our past readings, and to hold a conversation with the work before us. This is somewhat how Coleridge read, his mind leaping between texts, and thoughts, and contexts–reading as a sort of extroverted comedy of manners. I [...]

This entry is part of a series, Garbage Picking in The Waste Land» Like Eliot’s “East Coker,” the second part of this dumpster dive ended in its beginning. In Part 2 of “Garbage Picking in Eliot’s Waste Land” I resolved the mystery of “The Waste Land” with such ferocity and acuity that the fan-mail I’ve received for my accomplishment has been rather demeaning. In fact, I’ve received no fan-mail at all. No one has even mentioned this study to me, and so I’ve been forced to write myself several letters, letting me know how I am coming along, and how I am faring. Here are three examples: 1. “It does not seem like you believe what you are asserting about ‘The Waste Land.’ Part 1: Eliot is the most American poet? The poetics of nerd-dom? These arguments are sweeping gestures and are unsubstantiated, if they can be proven at all. [...]

The Meaning Comes Close All the cognates. This knowledge we’ve invented. Refracted by motion. Disguised as the moon. Built of shells. All the stranger. And without a word for. Materiality has a fulcrum. Where these narratives move. As functions of the wind. _________________________________________________________ Sophie Sills‘ full length book of poetry, Elemental Perceptions: A Panorama was released from BlazeVOX Books in the winter of 2010. Her poems and literary criticism have appeared in various journals. She lives in Los Angeles and publishes the Peacock Online Review. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Wallace Stevens Poem of the Week: Emily Pettit Would you like a Signed Copy of Mark Strand’s New Book? Poem of the Week: Bernadette Mayer Poem(s) of the Week: M.A. Vizsolyi

You’re in love. The problem is, you haven’t told the girl, and your brain and your heart have different ideas about how to proceed. Brain vs. heartis a dialog between the brain and the heart of one man as he attempts to “make the move.” Both indulgently prosaic and absurdly poetic, with plenty of in-jokes for computer nerds and literature nerds alike, this beautiful chapbook will make you laugh, cry, and/or hate the authors. LO-RES Chap MED-RES Chap HI-RES Chap: Coming Soon This book is also available in print (at cost). Though this digital chapbook is free, you may want to… About the authors… Christopher Robinson is a writer, teacher, and translator (And illustrator? This is his first stab at it) currently living in the wind. He earned his MA in poetry from Boston University and his MFA from Hunter College. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Alaska [...]

The best way to gain time is to change place. —Proust Any review of literature in translation is also a review of the translation. And in this act, the review is also, in part, a comment on the endeavor of translation itself. , a selection of Polina Barksova’s poetry translated by Boris Dralyuk and David Stromberg, often addresses this issue of translatability head on. For Barskova, language shapes both perceptions of and expressions of interior identity and exterior reality, writing, “how could one describe in Russian/ The grand and small (goddamn) details/ Of need, so that the martyr’s crooked body/ Would not be crooked more painfully,/ So that, as it had once, it should desire/ Purposeless days in place of rueful days?” In her work, Barskova doesn’t shy from explicitly stating her concerns as a writer, a woman, and a Russian living in the U.S., writing, “most of all I’m [...]

Photo by . I often call myself a Catholic poet. I was raised Irish Catholic working class in a mixed neighborhood where almost everybody was Catholic, including the African American families who came from the Bayou. Henry Rountree was Catholic. The Sampsons were Catholic. I didn’t know anything else except for Jewish people who I liked because, like us, they walked to church. A child gets some strange notions–at least I had some strange notions. I thought the best job you could have was as a garbage man because it gave you muscles and you could sing and throw cans around while you followed a truck. As a little kid I would follow the garbage men and sing with them. They tolerated me. Occasionally, they even let me “help” them throw a can or two into the maw of the truck. There was still a rag man in those days, [...]

Portland just feels different. That can seem like an unfortunate statement to anyone already living here, because the rent spikes another forty bucks every time it’s uttered, but that doesn’t make those four words any less true. They seem especially true now to those of us in the local literary community, because everything that has made Portland a Mecca for musicians and visual artists for the last decade or so is here in earnest for the poets, too. “Community” is an important word. While it feels like there have been small pockets scattered around the city of close friends, or trusted confidants, who write together, offer feedback, and support each other’s efforts, bringing those groups together into a larger, more diverse local presence never seemed quite possible until recently. There have been some touchstone figures and organizations working in the literary spectrum this whole time, to be sure—Kevin Sampsell, small [...]