When I first saw , I looked at the boy’s picture. I was in my office here at Binghamton, and I could not stop crying. It brought back my own brutal mocking when I was in high school at St. Mary of the Assumption High. I once had 100 students in an assembly sing the “Scruvy Joe” song while I sat, defenseless. No teacher ever told them to stop mocking me. They were told simply to stop making noise. I was not gay. I was clumsy, and depressed, and different than others, and I was an easy target for kids who, under other circumstances, would be considered really nice. We are not much different than chickens. We see a bleeding chicken and peck it to death. I did not kill myself, but I also did not survive. No one survives the irrational contempt and disdain, and meanness of a mob, [...]

Brooks Lampe reviews Andrew Joron’s What a desperate trance!—The skyboat resembles a flying vulva; the city, the arc of an abandoned soliloquy. Andrew Joron represents a small, almost indistinguishable enclave of contemporary poets who know (and appreciate that) they have been influenced by surrealism. Versus the rest of the contemporary poets who do not know they have. Surrealism has been a controversial topic in recent decades, and there have been few poets or scholars willing (or courageous enough?) to acknowledge their indebtedness to the movement. (But not Thank God.) The biggest problem, supposedly, is one of identification and definition. Suffice it to say, in broad strokes, surrealist poetry demonstrates: Radically disjunctive imagery (usually through mismatching terms from unrelated semantic fields) An analogical vision of reality, wherein irreconcilable things are conceived in relations and thus are (potentially) made reconcilable Undertones of Hegelian dialectic, Marxism, revolution and utopianism At its heart, surrealism [...]

We live in the paradox that life is change, but that change taken to the ultimate is death. Early signs of the great alteration shape our expanding or contracting limbs and are inscribed expressly on the face. When the young woman of twenty-five notices faint lines around the mouth or tiny crowsfeet at the corner of her eyes, something even more intimate than vanity makes her stop to reflect. The script for her very own mortality play, written on the finest parchment, has begun to develop, nor does she need any special clairvoyance to divine the final act from the first. La Rochefoucauld says that neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily. That’s the reason we avoid long or frequent exposure to the black rays of the mirror—unless we have the temperament of those medieval monks who kept brightly polished skulls in their cells as a handy [...]

There is a specifically poetic shape to the anxieties visible in Walt Whitman’s poetry. Looking at Whitman’s theory of language and how that theory works out in the poems, the shape of the anxiety becomes apparent. He had this Transcendentalist idea of language, detailed by Tyler Hoffman in his essay, by C. Carroll Hollis in his crucial work, and by Mark Bauerlein in Walt Whiman and the American Idiom. This idea of language is one where “words are emanations of reality and truth,” Hoffman says, and for Whitman “language is not just a system of signs we humans have at hand to express ourselves; rather, it stands as a cultural complex, one that registers our deepest beliefs as a people and a nation.” Whitman rejected the empiricists’ claims about the arbitrariness of signs, that language is basically a convention that only happens to have the grammatical structure and phonetic sounds [...]

Whatever people might say in the world about Newark is wrong. Newark, like Queens and Jersey City, is ethnic, race, and class diverse beyond anywhere else I know on the planet, with a wider variety of socio-economic classes freely intermingling, especially among its artists. This latter fact cheers me. As a working class white guy from Elizabeth, I often feel uncomfortable on art scenes. The food is in the not-much-spice, brown rice, wok, pita wrap, veggie, hummus spectrum where I do not flourish. Food is not made important among the white artistic class, no matter how much they insist they know about food. It all tastes too bland to me. I know they are right. I know their food is healthier and allows them to be thin and to have smaller, more shapely asses, but it makes me sad. It makes me think of psychotic men and women milling about [...]

I’m sure many of you read Stanley Fish’s articles on the topic ? from a year or so ago. I came from the “great tradition” tradition, the Mortimer J. Adler mindset of reading all the great books in the Western canon. I also got my dose of composition advice, much of coming from the slightly pushy Strunk & White. Some of my professors knew Strunk & White so well that they would underline sentences and cite the pages from the revered style book that I needed to consult in order to fix my sentence. Thus I followed Strunk religiously until I read , and in recent years I have reconsidered my devotion. First I should say that Strunk & White definitely made a difference in my writing for the better. But what has improved my writing even more has been teaching it in the last year or so. Not just [...]

We were a bit behind on posting the latest Poetry Fix. Now we’re up to date! Episode 13: Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson briefly discuss Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese.” Episode 14: Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson briefly discuss John Keats’ poem “This Living Hand.”

There is an inwardness so vast, so total, that it has a true integrity—not the pretentiousness of artistic temper, not the vanity of professional mysticism, not the neurosis of social anxiety disorder, but a forthrightness, an honorable, hourly withdrawal from the world that seems, for lack of a better word—ecstatic. Emily Dickinson’s passes this test fro me so that, beyond her artistic temper, and beyond her neurotic social anxiety, and beyond her “Bride of calvary” routine, her retreat seems legitimate, necessary, vital. It shames me. It makes me want to be a better man, though not enough to change my life. Dickinson’s gate keepers make me vomit. Her worshipers make me want to kick them in the shins. Her poems have the same effect upon me as the transports of saints. Before them I want to droop my head, and surrender like the unicorn, and let the little tough guys [...]

Poem In Which Spring Returns (or French peasants who are really from Cobble Hill) Melissa Sheppard Spring comes or maybe it doesn’t, or I come—a sort of spring, painful shoots sticking out of the ground— a woman of shoots, and each one painful. This is the tulip song I sing to my daughter. I say daughter: tulips must break soil. Twiggy stuff pokes the ground from below, while sun spikes the ground from above: it’s all a spiky operation— just as you drew in your first grade class! A world of piercings! things piercing and being pierced— that is as good a theory as any other— out of being: a sort of ongoing power point demonstration: Poke the pertinent facts! Say: grass! tree! Woman bending over in imitation of a peasant in France. She is not in France. She is in Cobble Hill. She is not a peasant. She is [...]

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson briefly discuss baseball haiku.

@ Public Space, 6pm Read More ...

Herman Melville doesn’t announce the ambition of directly. He kind of sneaks it in. It comes in late and sideways. At the start the feeling is almost haphazard, and Ismael says, as if in afterthought, “I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery parts of the world.” It’s imagined as a minor event in “the grand programme of Providence,” a little headline lost between “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States” and “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.” When the ambition is announced, it’s done almost obliquely. It’s done as if the narrator had lingered a little longer than necessary in the library, hoping somebody else would write the book so he wouldn’t have to: “As yet, however,” he says, “the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature … As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I [...]

This month Metro Rhythm is proud to present five outstanding poets: Meghan O’Rourke, Eleanor Lerman, Sarah V. Schweig, Zachary Pace and Jay Deshpande. The reading will be held at Blue Angel Wines in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Related posts: Things to Know, Celebrate, Cherish: MAGGY POETRY CONTEST NOTES ON NOISE {insert shrug} Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation Launch

Heads up for Michael Klein’s new book of poetry, , which will drop this Friday, October 15. Here is a list of upcoming readings for Michael in the NYC area. Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 7PM David Groff, Michael Klein, and Elaine Sexton City College 135th Street and Convent Avenue New York, NY Monday, November 8, 2010, 7PM Michael Klein and Sean Singer 85 East 4th Street New York, NY Monday, November 22, 2010, 7PM Shanna Compton, Michael Klein, Jennifer L. Knox and Jason Schneiderman 505 West 23rd Street New York, NY Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 7:30PM 5th Avenue and 5th St. Brooklyn, NY Tuesday, February 1, 2011, 6:00PM Michael Klein, Joan Larkin, and Jean Valentine Cornelia St. Cafe (Downstairs) 29 Cornelia St. New York, NY Stay tuned to THE THE for a review of Klein’s latest work of poetry. Vancouver-area Reading: Micah Towery Harry Mathews’ New Poetry Book, Upcoming Reading [...]

@ NYU Creative Writer’s House, November 4th. Read More ...