“Content dictates form.” “Less is more.” “God is in the details.” These three statements sum up Stephen Sondheim’s artistic credo according to Finishing the Hat, whose title seems to establish a quizzical connection between writing lyrics and millinery. The first two criteria are the standard guidelines for modernist architecture of the twentieth century, so maybe the millinery metaphor is encapsulated in the third. Still, reading this book, I have trouble understanding Sondheim as the musical equivalent to either Mies van der Rohe or Elsa Schiaparelli. Perhaps it will all eventually become clear. Of two scheduled volumes dealing with his work in musical theater, this is the first, tracking his career from an early piece titled Saturday Night (1954) up to Merrily We Roll Along (1981). Highlights include Bernstein’s West Side Story, for which Sondheim supplied the lyrics only, as well as his best-known musicals (Gypsy, Follies, A Little Night Music, [...]

There’s been a bit of back and forth about questions of translatability ( and ), and I thought it was worth some observations. I have mentioned this before on the blog, but for those who do not know, I teach upper level ESL to students who plan on entering graduate school in North America. It’s basically a college writing class, but the ESL aspect creates interesting dilemmas for me as a teacher. For example, I’m consistently torn between allowing students the comfort of pulling out their electronic dictionaries and forcing them to live in the uncomfortable space between languages. If I allow dictionaries, I will essentially handicap (or allowing them to handicap) their future English skills. They will forever be tying English words to words or phrases in their native language. As a result, they will never be fully fluent in English (at least not in the same way as [...]

A Review of What does he write of? The poet searches into his own lonely darkness and parses the secrets buried within it. He gets down, fat and breathless in his small turning, puts his body down in a stale bed, leans into this isolation, closes his eyes and dreams your body there, next to his, and relishes the event of your mutual rest, the transient physicality of your mutual interest, your deliciously losable connections, the time he was with you: he is making you again, not wholly but religiously, snacking on such remembrances, scooping up the fragments of you lingering in the lacunas of your being gone. He builds a reclusive paradise next to the bittersweet ways you have slipped away from him, from life, the way death’s stern promise folds you up in an incomplete absence, and there and thus he almost saves you, unsatisfactorily but earnestly; he [...]

Last time, we saw that in his critical introduction to , Gene Tanta wants us to approach his poetry both as immigrant poetry (which means a couple of things) and for its aesthetic value. I postulated that he accomplishes a dialectic between “local” and “universal” through strategies that extend and enrich Deep Image and surrealist poetics. Let’s see how this happens. First, look at how these thirteen-line “ghost-sonnets,” as he calls them, are built: The cavalry is always peering down into the ravine whenever you’re not looking. Someone is burping. Someone is shirt-shinning the author’s coffin. Someone’s nose or finger or toe is playing in the underwater roots downstream. Under the lean and starry sky the fortune-teller took your money, saying: You seem far away, like a cuckoo clock on a sunken ship. If it consoles you, you’ll die on an odd breath or an even breath. Architecturally, this poem [...]

This entry is part of a series, Towards a Different Kind of Workshop» For beginning writers, rules of thumb are important. My goals are simple: 1. Get them to avoid cliches–not of thought (almost all thoughts are cliche), but of language and image. 2. Get them to play with cliche so that they master them rather than being mastered by them. 3. Teach them to vary sentence length against the line. 4. Teach them to be aware of word choice. 5. Teach them to know the difference between the concrete and the abstract, and all the hues and shades in between (a big mistake we make is teaching them to show, not tell without letting them know that the showing must tell–that an image must work for the poem. 6. Re-orient their sense of the “poetic” to include ordinary experience rendered in an extraordinary way, rather than extraordinary experience rendered [...]

A week ago I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, at the Aspen Institute’s Cultural Diplomacy Forum at the Philips Collection. She was participating in a panel discussion with Michael Dirda about her work at Johns Hopkins and the role the arts can play in shaping foreign policy. Two days later, Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize and became a permanent member of a triumvirate of South American fiction giants (along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Roberto Bolano). Both writers exhibit the type of friendly and meaningful dialogue proposed by the many noteworthy speakers at the Diplomacy Forum. I want to put these two figures into dialogue with each other, by speaking about Nafisi’s Reading Lolita and Vargas Llosa’s lesser-known work, The Storyteller. My favorite line from Nafisi’s panel came from her anecdote about her arrival at Johns Hopkins. A [...]

Musicians, jazz musicians, keep fake books–at least they used to–with all the chord changes as well as written-down alternatives they may want to try. Why don’t poets keep fake books? I know Thomas Lux has his own personal anthology of poems he likes or is interested in. It’s a great idea. To make a good fake book, 1. Leave plenty of room in the margins to write notes. 2. Leave doodle space. 3. Keep the backs of the paper blank so you can write the poem out in your own hand, or write an answer to it, or a variation on it. When you write someone else’s poem out by hand, you get an entirely different relationship to the language–the line, word choice, etc. Here’s another strange practice, but one that appeals to me as a sort of loopy scientist: Read a poem once silently. Close the book, take a [...]

Nixon went down to the beach and sat in the sand and waited. The waves came in, the waves went out, and he sat there in his suit and waited. There comes a point, in every election, where there seems like there’s nothing anyone can do. Whatever is going to happen will happen. It has happened already. Sometime during the day, sometime while the votes are cast or after they’re cast but haven’t yet been counted, the candidates can’t do anything anymore except wait. Politicking ends. Maneuvering stops. Everyone waits. They’re as helpless as hitchhikers, at that moment, in that in-between time. As helpless as sinners in . For the last few years, every election day I’ve gone down to the county headquarters and waited while they count the ballots. In the evening at the end of the day, the poll workers pull up to the bunker, lining up their [...]

Micah Towery will be reading his work with at on Friday, November 26, 8-10pm. . Michael Klein’s New Poetry Book, Upcoming Readings ¿What Where? Poetry Series Things to Know, Celebrate, Cherish: James Tate, Housing Works, 7pm tagged as british columbia, langley, Micah Towery, poetry reading, Vancouver, water shed arts cafe, [spaces]

To carve a face in wood you must practice. And practice and practice. You must practice eyes, especially, and mouths and noses, though you cannot think of them that way. Think only of the wood and the edge of the knife and of shapes. You must break the face into pieces, in how you think of it, and think not of faces but of pieces and parts, 0f shapes and lines. Practice triangles with your knife. Practice triangles with your gouge. Practice circles and ovals, oblongs and uneven polygons, rectangles and slightly-off squares. Cut triangles with the tip of your knife for eyes, pairs of triangles on each side of each eye. Connect them with thin, arching lines, cutting a curl of wood away, leaving a circle remaining, a mound, a pupil, inside. Practice until you have a whole boards of eyes. Practice until there are a million ears clustered [...]

This entry is part of a series, Joe Weil on Metaphor» In my next several posts, I am going to talk about metaphors and the invisible neutrino of “and” that lies beneath them. I will make the following contentions: 1. Metaphors are as much about disassociation as association 2. Metaphors generate subtexts. 3. Consciousness and metaphor are inseparable. 4. To present two unlike objects is to create the implicit arc of metaphor. 5. All language is relational. In a sense, language is innately metaphorical because no word is the thing or state of being it describes. We can call a person “Big Ben” or “tree” if he is tall, “bean pole” if he is skinny, or we can call an obese person “slim” or “bean pole.” This is ironic, sarcastic, incongruous. An obese person is certainly not “Slim,” but to say to an obese friend, “Hey Slim,” can carry far [...]

This entry is part of a series, Joe Weil on Metaphor» I am reading Rosanna Warren’s book, Departures, and liking it a great deal, and, since I find her poems especially keen on using the entire spectrum of poetic concreteness between representational abstraction and non-representational abstraction. I’ll use her “Portrait: Marriage” as a grounding for what I am trying to get at here as we continue . Prior to the modernist “revolution” (it was more of an evolution with certain revolutionary slants) poets used a rich and heavily Greek/Latin-influenced sense of occasion and rhetoric to formulate their poems. There were the small lyrics, and the very free madrigals and airs but even these were homages to the small lyrical poems of the Greeks and Romans. Here are some of the more common rhetorical devices. 1. Apostrophic address: speaking directly to the dead, to roses, to nation states, to states of [...]

Almost every poem in Matthew Zapruder’s third book, Come On All You Ghosts (a statement that is both joke and plea) starts with the word today or implies it with a declaration involving an observation almost generic in sound and meaning: “Today a ladybug flew through the window. I was reading” “Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway….” “I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice” “Sometime around 11 p.m. the you I was thinking of” “Today I read about the factory” “This morning I rode my gray metal bike” “Today I have the feeling that no matter” “Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport” Of course, that recurring intention of today gets predictable after a while, but Zapruder uses it to compose poems that sound like what the love child of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara [...]

To celebrate the forthcoming ¿What Where? Chapbook Series from , there will be a reading at featuring Anselm Berrigan, Ryan Doyle May, Christie Ann Reynolds, Ben Fama, and Robert Fitterman. The event will be hosted by Lonely Christopher. Details: Wednesday, November 17th, 8pm. 600 Vanderbilt Ave (at St. Marks), Brooklyn, NY. . Related posts: Maggy 2 Launch Things to Know, Celebrate, Cherish: Anne Carson, David Shapiro Reading Bianca Stone’s Poetry Comics @ The Fleming Museum Michael Klein’s New Poetry Book, Upcoming Readings

Adam Fitzgerald has been up to some crazy shit lately. Not only is the man a teaching, (Maggy) magazine editing, maniac, he’s also managed to put together a 100-page, 6-part poem collage in all that spare time he has. This is how Adam describes this piece: “The Gorgias” will have the first of six installments to be posted online. It incorporates poetry, collage, pornography, emails, Gchats, Facebook, and something I’m very excited about — music by STARS OF THE LID (an amazing ambient drone band that I’ve listened to for the past year when writing). The work is today. Check it out.