The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge University Press, 2011. 791 pp. The temptation to snoop overtakes all of us by moments, and unsought-after opportunity suddenly finds our eyes riveted to letters not meant for us. There have been figures in literary history fully prepared to forgive the intrusion: Madame de Sévigné eventually heard that her letters were being handed around among her admirers but never stopped dashing off her acute and fluent observations about life at the Sun King’s court or in the provinces. We wouldn’t remember the eighteenth-century figure Horace Walpole except for his letters, texts composed with the sort of regard, witty phrasing, and visual detail found only among those who write with one eye towards posterity. Aside from ecclesiastical epistles, collections of letters were not often published before the nineteenth century. During the [...]

In part one, I tried to enforce the idea that folk art is not necessarily superior to commodified art, and most art that we know and is brought to public consciousness, and endures is a combination, a dance so to speak between the genuine and the packaged, You have to cut the hog up to transport it, and a cut up hog can never be a free ranging pig, but it can give you the full flavor of what people in those parts love and have grown up on concerning the pig that ranged. You need to package the genuine in order to carry it to a new audience. One could make a case that the entire folk music scene from which Dylan, country rock, and long, often self indulgent singer-song writer songs emerged was far more in the category of commodity than folk–even as sacred a character as Woody [...]

Poetry and images are no strangers. From ancient illuminated texts, to William Blake, to Lewis Carroll (to name a mere few) illustration is a powerful ally beside poetry. I’m excited by the writer who feels compelled to expand his rapport with the poem by creating art. I think it’s the excitement of language that can bring forth the illustrative in such an electrifying way. So for our third installment on Poetry Comics, we have the stunning images of Mahendra Singh alongside his translations of Jean de La Fontaine. ~Bianca Stone The Stag Upon the Vine (V; 15) A hunted Stag concealed in vines, in this verdant tropic havoc grown riotous thick by fecund luck till hounds and men lose heart, resigns the chase and he’s free again to devour the vine, all decency defy till they hear him, hounds and men they return and set on him to die a [...]

I write for ghosts I write for you, old women who sit at the gates, spin yarn and knit socks for the dead. My every gesture is mirrored by a thousand hands. I carry these faces inside me, on my back, on my feet. The ghosts don’t let me sleep. They gather on windowsills and roofs, in the moon’s breath, and chat with chattering teeth. I write for my father who still hangs on in Skype, to reach him, fill the gap with words. Hang on, Daddy, hang on. Here’s a rope ladder. Here are the words, Daddy. Here’s the blood, the new heart, the straw. Scriu pentru stafii Scriu pentru voi, femei batrane ce stati la porti, toarceti si impletiti ciorapi pentru morti. Fiecare gest mi-e oglindit de o mie de maini. Port aceste fete in mine, pe picioare, in spate. Stafiile nu ma lasa sa dorm. Se strang [...]

X X marked the spot on the blackboard where xenophobia poured in xenial as a bullwhip spine or xanthate printed xylographs in the X rated moonlight xirself perched on a xenolith xebec cuts the fleecy waves aft as we approach in xenon traces to xerox someone else’s wrought iron dreams on Xmas Formerly Excerpt from Pastoral Emergency. .

PAINTED LADY The worst part is how my thumb could erase her body but not the nausea draining her body down to a dull hum, her skin against bone: the scaffolding not around her heart but the movement of her heart wrapped in a cocoon, the way she emerges weeks later, covered in butterfly wings folding and folding in the kerosene sky, finally refusing the kiss, the spark, the mere possibility love could move next door, never cut the grass, not make a big deal when she lets her hair down, I want her to tell me I should leave, tell me loneliness is a compass needle, a pencil tip, that she is just a sketch I trace with my thumb.

In his inimitable fashion, Joe Weil treats the pains of life as joy and the joys of life as pain. This diverse collection ranges from Weil’s classics (“Poem with Lamb and Potatoes”, “Cricket Hour”) to a series of haikus dedicated to a dead groundhog (“Dead Groundhog Lust Haiku”). A short run was made available through the short-lived Press Electrrrric! and is now available online. Click on the book cover for a preview and free download. Related Posts The Cartographer Electric is Dead How to Ransack a Poem for Parts Terms, Truth, Sun Sparrows: A Very Important Lesson from My Father Poem of the Week: Etheridge Knight Ronin Poet: Kalkbrenner’s Foul Feelings

Around ten years ago, at a small dinner party thrown by my friend and mentor, Edie Eustace, I had the pleasure of meeting Sweet Sue Terry, a composer and Jazz saxophonist, who does a rather remarkable thing with poems: she sets them word for word, actually, often syllable for syllable to note values. The word “value” is important here. Sue has both a composer’s sense of structure, and a jazz improviser’s sense of immediate invention, so we are getting a professional composer with major league chops doing a close reading of a poem. In this case, it was “Hurt Hawks” by Robinson Jeffers (A poem you ought to know, and if you don’t shame on you). Sue Terry also reads poetry, writes it occasionally, and came at the poem in a fresh way, unsullied by pretensions as to its purity. She had made copies of Hurt Hawks and handed them [...]

On a recent gloriously sunny afternoon, I had the privilege of sitting down to talk over lunch with the poet Anne Winters, author of two critically acclaimed volumes of poetry and several translations. I was introduced to Ms. Winters’ work in graduate school and, ever since, have been an ardent admirer of her lushly orchestrated, yet intimate and searingly honest poems about the “big issues” that so many contemporary poets seem to shy away from: race, class, poverty, and gender. Or, more to the point, the intersection of these forces playing out in individual lived experiences, including those of the poet. Fittingly for a poet raised in New York City and for whom that city serves as muse, subject and mise en scéne, Ms. Winters chose to meet at Saul’s, a Jewish delicatessen incongruously nestled in the heart of Berkeley, CA, where she now resides. Over outsized latkes and steaming [...]

Anger Managment A man wanted to control his anger, so frightful even grizzly bears feared him. A shaman told him to insult and beat a log with a stick until he was exhausted. When the weary man returned and asked, “What lesson have I learned?” the shaman replied, ______________“Be like the log.” KOHT’AENE TS’AKUT’EH (Literally “The man who gets angry”) Koht’aene ts’akut’eh, tsaani lii koht’aene. C’ededliinen koht’aene yaa nitezet ‘eł tson decen kae sen xał k’e tsaa. Koht’aene na’idyaa ‘eł yaa “Yidi uzadalts’et?” c’ededliinen yaa, ______________“Cic’uunen decen.” _________________________________________ John Elvis Smelcer is one of the founding editors, and poetry editor, of Rosebud magazine, about to release its 50th consecutive quarterly issue in March. Smelcer is a Clifford D. Clark Fellow in English at Binghamton University in upstate New York. Smelcer is one of the last speakers on earth of the Ahtna Athabaskan language, an endangered Alaska Native language. Only 20 [...]

From what I’ve seen of student work, many are fascinated with fantasy/science fiction and what one of students called nerd consciousness–anything but emotional nuance and or engagement with day to day reality. Since few have an adequate template for poetry on fairies, ghosts, and the like, they tend not to write fantasy poems. This leaves love and slam. Slam poetry seems highly invested in the personal as the political: gender and sexuality, cutting, fat acceptance, suicide, drugs, family dysfunction, all tied together by more and more polyglot metaphors and an overly sold voice that makes “pass the salt” sound far more dramatic than it has any right to be. There is a slam voice that goes up in the register (this is usually done by white boy slammers) and sounds almost like a strangled or thwarted gobble. Usually this is reserved for an apostrophic address to some absent but all [...]

“They imagine a future by practicing it.” – Michael Davidson, on the non-democratic and elitist writing communities So, I just got back from attending my first &NOW Festival of New Writing in San Diego. Overall, I enjoyed the balance of panels celebrating experimentation and panels attempting to engage texts or movements more critically. I am writing to document my interactions with Johannes Göransson and Vanessa Place, not because I have a rigid plan to offer, but because we need to find ways to have such difficult and complex conversations, rather than tending to shy away from them feeling relatively justified in the sacred name of our pleasure. Poetry and poetics matter because words create the contours of what we can do. 1. As the main standout, I really liked Johannes Göransson’s talk on the Lion King film and Raul Zurita where he said he was more interested in the artists [...]

Piercings Pierced flesh grows back like graffiti painted over the morning after wounds we carry from the dark show scars we cannot hide in the mirror my piercings are invisible to the naked eye but mark me as a troubled heart nailed to your memory slowly mending _________________________________________ Rob Mustard‘s first ebook of poems, Blue Moon, was published in December. As he writes on his poetry site, www.rhmustard.com, “My poems are about love, death, the power of memory to save us. I am most interested in the unexpected ways words speak to each other, the hidden meaning they reveal about us and the world.” Rob lives in Los Angeles. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Bernadette Mayer Poem of the Week: Peter Kline Poem of the Week: Robert Kelly Poem of the Week: Lizzy McDaniel Poem of the Week: Joan Larkin

Psychoanalysis is a good system for those of us that like structure. Even the unconscious, that vast cauldron of libidinal dreams and desires, is structured like a language as Lacan reminds us. After all, there are but three psychical structures in psychoanalysis: the pervert, the psychotic, and the neurotic. I must admit that I find the psychotic the most interesting when considering the artist. It was after all James Joyce, the psychotic artist par excellence that gave Lacan the material to discover that, “the unconscious is the real”, an insight that foregrounded the symptom as both the source of knowledge and ultimately as that which defies interpretation, as it is always caught within the real.[1] But I don’t wish to look at Joyce. I’m interested in first looking more generally at the idea of the psychotic artist. If we take these structures seriously, we should pause to situate them as [...]

Three poets name their favorite books and poems from the 2011. b bearhart 1. Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (UAPress) edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke Indigenous Americas. Nuff said. (It’s a poet’s wet dream. Can I say that? Cause I just did.) 2. Mad for Meat (Salmon Poetry) by Kevin Simmonds This collection is honest and beautiful. No frills or tricks. Simply fantastic poems by a very talented human. 3. by Tarfia Faizullah Thank god for poet friends. So many people linked this poem on social networking sites. I love the way this poem builds through sound. 4. “The Blue Dress in Mother’s Closet” by Saeed Jones Who is this dude?! This poem is brilliant. Read it. 5. by Melissa Jones This poem is not like my other picks. Or maybe it is and I’m not getting the connection. I like the jarring nature of this poem. It [...]