Poem of the Week: Niina Pollari

by Christopher Phelps May 11, 2012 The Other

[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, [...]

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Camera Stellata

by Lisa A. Flowers May 10, 2012 Reviews

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 [...]

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Pont-consciousness: Reading Arendt and Blake

by Joe Weil May 9, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

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 [...]

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How to Watch a Poem

by Sridala Swami May 7, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

(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 [...]

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Poem of the Week: Daniel Nathan Terry

by Christopher Phelps May 4, 2012 Poems of the Week

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 [...]

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Won’t the Trees Be Tall Again If We Climb Again

by Jeffrey Hecker May 3, 2012 The Other

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 [...]

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Ponts vs. Points: A model for reading

by Joe Weil May 2, 2012 Arts & Society

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. [...]

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Garbage Picking in Eliot’s Waste Land, Part 3

by Tom Bair April 30, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

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 [...]

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Poem of the Week: Sophie Sills

by Sarah Eggers April 27, 2012 Poems of the Week

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 [...]

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Brain vs. heart

by Chris Robinson April 27, 2012 eBooks

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 [...]

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What’s Astonishing: Polina Barskova’s The Zoo in Winter and Austin LaGrone’s Oyster Perpetual

by Sarah V. Schweig April 26, 2012 Reviews

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 [...]

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What do I mean when I call myself a Catholic poet?

by Joe Weil April 25, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

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 [...]

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Poetry Scenes: Portland — OR Stumptown Renaissance: How Portland Learned to Love Poetry (Again)

by Chris Cottrell April 23, 2012 The Other

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 [...]

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Poem of the Week: Phoebe Giannisi

by Sarah Eggers April 20, 2012 Poems of the Week

__________________________________________________________________ Phoebe Giannisi is a poet and architect. She works as an assistant professor at the University of Thessaly in Greece, where she teaches design and poetics related to urban space and landscape. She is interested in the performative and acoustic dimensions of poetry, and she organizes in situ poetic performances in public spaces. In [...]

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Teacher as Midwife

by Joe Weil April 18, 2012 Society

One of the hardest things to do is to get students to notice the world beyond feelings and abstractions. Feelings and abstractions seem significant. A dolphin balancing a ball on its nose is novel, but so what? Dolphins are of the moment, and although our annoying culture drones on that we should live in the [...]

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mUutations: Auden

by Micah Towery April 17, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

This entry is part of a series, mUutations» Warning: mUutations are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. See for more info. The conflict between eternity and time is deeply embedded in the consciousness of human persons. I believe it gives rise to most impulses that [...]

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