This anxiety Walt Whitman has about poetry emerges in the poem “Song of Myself,” as Whitman seeks to establish a taxonomy of poetry, a system classifying what is good poetry, what bad, but the structure he establishes keeps collapsing. The poem is one Whitman’s fullest explanation of his theory of language and poetry, perhaps even more clear than the few prose pieces on the subject that bear his name, and it serves to show and highlight his theoretical conceptions, but also to show how his work pervaded by a fear, a deep anxiety about poetry that inflicts his poems. He works out, in the poem, a three-tiered idea of poetry. The lowest tier, the first level, is the poetry of refinement, and death. It is the poetry that actually goes by the name “poetry” in the poem, and reflects Whitman’s ideas about language, and how language can stagnate, separate from [...]
NOTE: This is the first of a series of posts by Colie Hoffman about her experience while a writer-in-residence at Sangam House, India. It’s only been two weeks since I arrived in India, but already I feel totally at home here. The tiny village where I’m living—beautiful unto itself, with its stone paths and red mud houses—is surrounded by expansive grasslands, palm trees, and wooded dirt roads. I eat delicious, fresh vegetarian meals twice a day, someone takes care of the cooking and laundry, and I get to enjoy the company of six other writers. And while all this is magical, it’s really just a sideshow to the main attraction: For 10 straight weeks, I have all the free time in the world to write, write, write. This paradise is Sangam House, a relatively new international writers’ residency program (in its third year) based in South India. The first two [...]
AN AGREEMENT REQUIRES AN OFFER AND ACCEPTANCE I came here to get you excited. We have an accidental stare-down. No bees, no money. No one says this. I am so frightening. No one is impressed. It’s all, a duck’s quack doesn’t echo and no one knows why. You think you are whispering when you are not. We are experts at distributing distorted information. This is how it might feel, take hold of something between your finger and your thumb and twist it sharply. Make a slight adjustment. A logical consequence appears to arrive, a bar, a partition, a stick. I am hitting rocks with a stick. What do you believe to be important points of convergence? Vegetables. Electricity. The extremely challenging sky. To show adoration with the eyes. To say something necessary. I avoid my eyes. I think I mean it. _____________________________________ Emily Pettit is the author of two chapbooks [...]
I recently learned how to use spreadsheets, and despite my own self-warnings about abstraction and its dangers, the ability to manipulate vast rows of numbers is beguiling to me. Using my newfound ability, I have created a rather uncomplicated formula to get this list of the 10 “most popular” posts in 2010. It’s too simple just to use “hits” or pageviews. Lots of people accidentally surf into a website and surf out as fast as they came (Google giveth and Google taketh away). My formula takes unique hits, time spent on a post, as well as bounce and exit rate all into account. All answers, of course, are functions of the question, so…take this list with a grain of salt. 1. Dorothea Lasky’s Poetry is not a Project or Cutting More Lines in the Cosmic Divide by Ben Fama Dorothea Lasky’s made huge waves when debuted at this years AWP. [...]
To help get my mind around what Synetic Theater was trying to do with their adaptation of Bulgakov’s oppression-defying, faith-affirming romp The Master and Margarita, I turned to Linda Hutcheon’s helpful study of postmodern adaptations, her 2006 book A Theory of Adaptation. For too long, she asserts, we have evaluated adaptations as products, in terms of accuracy, verisimilitude, and the like. But, in true Hutcheon fashion, we should be focusing on the process as well as the product of an adaptation. We can best do that by examining not so much the form of the piece (novel-to-screen, novel-to-stage, etc.), but what she calls “modes of engagement.” There are three types, which are all, as she says, “immersive”: Some media and genres are used to tell stories (for example, novels, short stories); others show them (for instance, all performance media); and still others allow us to interact physically and kinesthetically with [...]
We’ve all justified seeing a particular movie or following a TV show by saying “It’s terrible, but it’s just entertainment/pop/etc.”–I know I have. There’s that niggling feeling that we should not have enjoyed that film/show as much as we did. But this justification is an easy-out, something that is surprisingly accepted among even the most erudite and critically astute circles. Indeed, it seems acceptable even in modern critical discourse about film. For Armond White, this is an indefensible critical blasphemy. And as difficult as the line is to hold (and exhausting, to be honest), I find I must agree with him. I’ll get into that in a few paragraphs, but first I want to look at –which I hope to will serve as the foundation for a general exploration of White’s idea of criticism and argument for why I think White is an important critic. While reading through Keep Moving, [...]
The week before last, Salman Rushdie visited the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue to read from and talk about his new novel Luka and the Fire of Life. It is a sequel to the popular Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written, as its predecessor was for his first son, at the request of his second son. Its hero is Haroun’s younger brother Luka, the second son of the famous storyteller Rashid Khalifa, who must endeavor a similar journey into the Magic World to once again help his father. These books walk and talk like children’s stories, but we should believe Rushdie when he asserts that “we are all children,” and that the appeal of these books, he hopes, is broad. He carried himself with his usual joviality: he congratulated one overzealous fan for her question, telling her that she should publish it; on another occasion, when asked about his [...]
There should be a warning on the cover of Moby-Dick. Beware, it should say, reading this will require blood. Fair warning would only be fair. As it is, the word of caution comes too late. Melville only mentions this cost, this culpability, when one is already hundreds of pages in. It’s only mentioned after we know to call him Ishmael, after we’ve followed, fascinated, behind Queequeg the face-tattooed harpooner who carries his god in his pocket, after we’ve sat through a scary sermon, heard a beggars warning, met the crazy Quaker shipping company owners and boarded the Pequod with Ishmael. It only happens after we’ve watched the waters for whales, watched while the water’s impossibly calm, and after we’ve learned the customs and social structures of whaling ships, after we’ve met everyone and after we’ve seen the one-legged captain with his thumping and his obsession. Then we’re told we’re doomed. [...]
In a word, Jason Schneiderman is a poet of the helix. In his new book, Striking Surface, he turns and returns a fine Merino wool finer. By refrains; bits of anaphora; tonally and topically, he returns to his concerns in cycle after cycle, rending or revising earlier understandings, and leading new ones up new twists. Scattered throughout the book’s three sections are cycles that include “The Children’s Crusade,” “Stalinism,” “Ars Poetica,” “Physics,” “Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha,” and “Hyacinthus.” The middle section of the book is entirely a cycle: an unforgettable family of elegies that address his mother’s death with tenderness and probity, in a casual voice talking through grief without flinching and without sentimentality. From “Elegy I (Work)”: “Whatever dead is, you are, and how you must hate that, / busy fixer of problems, busy stitcher of crafts.” Soon we learn the role crafts played before death—how they were a [...]
Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Heather McHugh’s poem “I Knew I’d Sing.”
Last week we made the exciting announcement that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes podcast was making itself a home at THEthe. In anticipation of the coming podcast, we are reposting the old episodes from the . Today we’re reposting , which features an interview with Joseph Spece. Joseph Spece, Part 1 Joseph Spece, Part 2 Note: The interview takes place at JC’s apt., so here and there you may hear mention of a picture of the Winged Victory in the living room or various trinkets on a counter in his bedroom.
Today we’re featuring two poets who I have an incredible amount of admiration and who I am very excited to share with you today. I did want to write a brief observation about what I believe both these poems–different as they are–share in common: both are built around a relational core of emotions; both poems climax with the impossibility of speech. Both poems, however, do it in very different ways: Colie through image, Maya through syntax. My observations follow the poems (and below that are author bios). The Paper One By Colie Hoffman It helps to understand there were two realities and words were in the paper one. The other was made of clouds and sometimes whatever animals or feelings clouds made with their shapes. The cloud world had giant one-way windows. You couldn’t see inside and it was very, very dark out. Your own face sent out a search [...]
“Not freed / but caught up in what thinking tries to conceal:” that is what spending time with Timothy Donnelly’s poetry feels like, “where to know / is to feel knowledge dissolving. . .” (“Chapter For Breathing Air Among the Waters”). Essentially metaphysical, the poems of , are fueled and refueled by self-critical dueling, a curiosity about being, and a skepticism of being’s significance. The speaker’s craft is self-referential but never heavy-handed. The book is also driven by an inexhaustible love for language; many of these poems are expertly wrought love letters to language itself. It is particularly refreshing to encounter Donnelly’s poems amid the ongoing financial spiral, with politicians posturing at troubleshooting and the generally frustrating vapidity (not to mention downright falseness) flying around like debris in the wind. Though these poems are not overtly political, there is an undercurrent of social and political commentary. Donnelly observes, “the mind [...]
A poem can be utterly concrete in all its details, yet abstract as to its meaning. This abstraction has better words to define it: vague, illusive, non-cognitive, gibberish, wide open to interpretation, etc. I’m sorry they used the word abstract to name such a poem, since, elsewhere, abstraction means to deal with the principle of the thing rather than the thing. Example: “man is prone to evil” rather than “Freddy is prone to evil.” Here’s an example of a form called an “abstract” poem. Personally, I’d prefer “non-representational poem” to the extent that the poem is made out of words which may not refer to any idea, emotion, or agreed upon meaning outside the sequence of words. This is by Roy Campbell, supposedly the foremost practitioner of the “abstract poem”: Of seven hues in white elision, the radii of your silver gyre, are the seven swords of vision that spoked [...]
Why did I – why do we – get into this profession? It’s hard to remember. Maybe they want us to forget. But how could I? Late nights with Dostoevsky, The Tempest at the Globe, Gravity’s Rainbow pre-dawn on the Metro. In a word, love. Or perhaps another, vocation. A few weeks ago I was asked by a professor in the English department to participate in a roundtable with undergraduates to discuss graduate school. How to apply? What’s it like? After discussions of the logistical details, the professor asked if any of the panelists had any last words of wisdom. Her husband, also a tenure-track professor in English, replied simply, “Don’t go.” That is, “Don’t go – unless you must.” This sums up my experience with the all too maddening - and now sadly disillusioning - English PhD program. “Don’t go.” The job market is toast. I actually took a [...]
We’re pleased to announce that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes podcast is going to become the official podcast of THEthe! Scattered Rhymes is a long-form interview podcast in which poets discuss and read their work. Ben Pease has been doing the podcast for several years now and has created a back log of work that THEthe will be reposting over the next month or so in anticipation of Scattered Rhymes’ next installment. From that point on, we hope to make Scattered Rhymes a monthly endeavor. The latest episode will be posted and featured on THEthe and later archived at the . The first featured poet from the Scattered Rhymes podcast is Gail Mazur. Gail Mazur Interview, Part 1 Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version . You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Gail Mazur [...]