A few years back, I met at a writing conference in Binghamton, NY. We ended up talking metaphysics and Marxism and Beat poetics deep into the night. After Gene left, we kept in touch and Gene ended up contributing to The Cartographer Electric! the magazine I helped found as an undergrad at Binghamton. After I had left Binghamton, I thought about starting an online press that would give away free chapbooks in PDF form on the internet. We published a book by Gene, originally titled Excerpt from Pastoral Emergency. The chapbook featured Gene’s artwork side by side with his poetry (Gene studied both art and poetry at Iowa). Recently, Gene expressed a desire to revise the work. He conceived of the revision as an illuminated chapbook, and I think it turned out amazingly well. The at . While you’re there, and a few other chapbooks that I worked on with [...]

I just posted this in the Poems | News | Events sidebar, but I wanted to put it out there in the main section too. . When I was there, I got to see Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, Ed Hirsch, Mary Karr, Anne Carson, Frank Bidart, Gary Shteyngart, and tons more. It’s free (and so is the wine and cheese–at least when I was a student), but you should RSVP. You’ve just missed Robert Hass, the first reader of Fall 2010. But there are still more to come. Read More ...

Some of you have noticed a few changes here and there to The The. There are more ahead: a few contributors are moving on, and some new ones are moving in. Others will continue to contribute but on a less regular basis. I would like to welcome two new contributors: and . Make them feel at home, please. Thanks for sticking with us as we continue to figure out what TheThe is all about! Related posts: Blogging through Grossman, Part 2: Grossman demolishes otherness? “Because I am Looking to Complicate My Biography I Go Out to Buy a Tree” by Heather Christle TheThe Lookin’ for a Few Good Poetry Book Reviewers

THEthe’s will be presenting her poetry comics in Burlington, Vermont’s at the Painted Word Poetry Series this Wednesday, October, 27th. There was word on the of a road trip from NYC. Related Posts Things to Know, Celebrate, Cherish: Harry Mathews’ New Poetry Book, Upcoming Reading Dorothea Lasky’s POETRY IS NOT A PROJECT or Cutting More Lines in the Cosmic Divide Some images from the original archive are unavailable. Private: Lookin’ for a Few Good Poetry Book Reviewers The Flaming Poodle of the Mind: Poetry Readings, Vaudeville & Louise Gluck’s Legs

@ St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, 8pm. Related posts: Anne Carson, Daniel Mendelsohn, Dixon’s Place, 7pm

We like to big up our own, and is definitely worth the big up. In case you didn’t know, Simone won the Amy Award for the best female poet under 30 in NY. Because of that, she will be giving a reading TONIGHT at the New York Society Library from 6 to 8pm. The address is 53 East 79th St. Come out and show your support! Michael Klein’s New Poetry Book, Upcoming Readings MAGGY POETRY CONTEST Partial board meeting Hamlet and his (Public) Problems

Oh hai. For those of you who missed it the first time around (myself included), The Story of English is an excellent documentary on the history and nature of the English language. . The videos seem quite dated, but much of the topics discussed are still relevant. There’s another great series called The Adventure of English that’s worth checking out also. Now for a spin on the story of English from the internet age…LOLcats. In particular, . Many linguists depend upon the work of Bible translators deployed around the world in remote (to us, at least) regions of the world. I happen to know a man who worked as a Bible translator and created the only existing dictionary in the world for his regional dialect. , the LOLcats Translation begs a question: is LOLcats a true pidgin English? , it has , and now it has its own Bible. Here [...]

Poets are limited if they read nothing but their own poetry and spend the rest of their time reading novels or thrillers. Most of my beginning students have never purchased a book of poems. They wish to write poetry, but they do not wish to read it. They read fantasy fiction mostly. So the first thing I do is give them books, a couple hundred or so, none of which are fantasy, and then I tell them to send me an e mail, quote an excerpt from the book, and riff off of it. I then riff back, and, very often, my prompt for them arises from the e-mail they’ve written or the excerpt they’ve quoted. This accomplishes five goals: 1. They are now in a relationship to a book, adding a sort of ongoing marginalia to it. 2. Their reading life and their writing life are being connected, in [...]

After almost a year or two of putting it off, I and the other editors have posted the final issue of The Cartographer Electric! This was a magazine we started back as seniors at . Along with the issue, we created a reading series at the Belmar that still continues to this day. After graduating, we quickly ran out of steam to continue putting out issues. This was a true community magazine, and it fed on the energy of the readings and was inspired into existence the other poets we knew and were excited to read. It was a great experience, and I think that everyone should start a small community rag like this. It doesn’t have to be big or ambitious…just something that you share between you, your friends, and their friends. I don’t spend lots of time reading the latest issue of Ploughshares, but I was always interested [...]

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson briefly discuss Terrence Hayes’s poem “Talk.”

My dad gave me some hard line rules to live by: never cross a picket line. Be good to old ladies. Know that any job, no matter how prestigious, is just a job. And when all else fails, never cross a picket line or rat someone out. These are some hard line rules for readers of poetry: 1. If you are reading in an open, do not, not ever, not on pain of death read more than your time allotted. It smacks of conceit and disregard for others. It’s garbage. There are very few people I want to shoot, but I would shoot a conceited poet and not have trouble sleeping. Dealing with assholes is part of a host’s job. Don’t make them work any harder. 2. If you are a feature, don’t ever complain about whether you are first or last. If you are that good and they put [...]

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss William Matthews’s poem “Cheap Seats.”

I hope you’ve been watching . It’s the perfect-sized portion of poetry and comment to get you thinking, your poetry juices flowing. Mary Karr is also a great reader/interpreter of the various poems. I just watched Episode 5 on Louise Gluck’s poem “Mock Orange.” I don’t often remember my first encounter with a poem or poet, but I distinctly remember reading Gluck for the very first time (her book The Seven Ages, and then later Ararat, perhaps my favorite). The power of her voice was overwhelming, and after I got out of my “try to sound like T.S. Eliot phase” I progressed into a “try to sound like Louise Gluck phase.” Primarily, I tried to imitate Gluck’s minimalism. Minimalist art in general is one of those things that makes people stare in confusion for a few moments before moving on (especially public minimalist art). It seems potent, but also has [...]

I spoke of ontology before, the significance of being that stems from a poem, but there are minor poems, small triumphs of imagery, of rhythm, or beauty that make us think: “Why am I so concerned with truth or significance? Right now, my lover is asleep, and the venetian blinds are leaving their shadow across her face, and I wish I could stay here. Fuck Tolstoy. Fuck King Lear. I want to kiss her nose.” Well, maybe others just take everything that makes life bearable for granted, or maybe they use this moment to consider how, in sleep, a lover may as well be a tree—that there is a certain terrifying aspect to the lover unconscious and unaware of, well, of me! I’ve had girlfriends wake me up because they were lonely. Sometimes, I don’t mind, especially if we start making out again. But sometimes it annoys me. None of [...]

Harvey Pekar did the introduction to my first Iniquity press/Vendetta chapbook, A Portable Winter, back in 1999. Dave Roskos, perhaps the only true publisher and editor I know in the old sense (one hundred percent care about the underground and off the fringe poets, and zero percent bullshit) asked him to do it, and he read some of my stuff, called me up, asked me some questions, and did the intro. I spent an hour on the phone with him, finding out in that time that his wife occasionally hit him, he was getting up at ungodly hours to take his kid to various sports events, and he had cancer. A couple years later, he’d beaten that round of cancer and things were looking up. Harvey liked to kvetch. He was a great kvetcher. I like to kvetch, too. We got along. The article about his death mentioned he was [...]