Interview Part 1: Interview Part 2: A HILL | by Anthony Hecht In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur, I had a vision once – though you understand It was nothing at all like Dante’s, or the visions of saints, And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends, Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps, Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints Were all on sale. The colors and noise Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation, So that even the bargaining Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness. And then, where it happened, the noises suddenly stopped, And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved And [...]

When I’m blocked, blank, speechless, I fill the silence by internalizing a poem. I pick one that I know has something to teach me—some diction or rhythm that, once ingrained, might knock me free. I don’t think “memorization” is an accurate term for this practice. I prefer to call it learning by heart. It has little to do with rote remembering, and much to do with the commitment to know, invoke, embody the poem. I borrowed the idea from Kim Rosen, whose book SAVED BY A POEM illustrates the difference between using the mind and using the heart in relation to reading and learning poetry—how poetry affects us on both cellular and spiritual levels. “The healing did not come through writing poems or even through reading them. It came when I discovered that taking a poem I loved deeply into my life and speaking it aloud caused a profound integration [...]

PROFESSOR: Mary Ann, would you mind reading your poem aloud so that we can hear it in your own voice? MARY ANN: Absolutely. Ahem. Who’s the black private dick That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? SHAFT! Ya damn right! Who is the man that would risk his neck For his brother man? SHAFT! Can you dig it? Who’s the cat that won’t cop out When there’s danger all about? SHAFT! Right On! They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother SHUT YOUR MOUTH! I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft. THEN WE CAN DIG IT! He’s a complicated man But no one understands him but his woman JOHN SHAFT! PROFESSOR: Thank you, Mary Ann. Ok, class, let’s start with the things we like. Then we’ll move on to the things we think could be improved. [Long pause.] AMERICAN STUDIES MAJOR [pensively]: I really appreciate how the poem argues with itself, [...]

Canada, it’s spring-break time. We’ve already got trees budding. Actually, many schools have gotten the whole Winter Olympics off for two or three weeks of extended spring break drunkenness. I’ve been glued to CTV for the last week or so, watching my new favorite sport: curling. No joke, this game is intense. It’s the skill of bowling with the strategy of chess. Not to mention, curling and hockey are two of the few things that get Canadians riled up (they go from passive agressive to just plain aggressive). In the spirit of breaks from routine (are two weeks of blog posts long enough to be considered a routine?), I figured it would be good to take a break from the Grossman inspired posts and do a little reflection on a recent article in Wired magazine: And in the spirit of Spring, I want to see if I can connect it [...]

Suppose you are reading Levinas, having a nice Cuban sandwich, minding your business, thinking about the self, the other, the other self, the otherness of self, the selfishness of other, etc, etc, and the sun slants across the legs of a woman you pretend to have a deep rapport with—striping them apricot. What do you do? It’s a question of ethics. She is eating half a plate of seasoned fries. The meal is over priced. The Cuban sandwich is on the wrong sort of bread—the kind of bread they put Cuban sanwiches on when they are over charging you (sour dough). It is spring, or maybe it isn’t: maybe it is fall, the last truly warm day in fall. Yes. You are sitting in the wrought-iron chair, outside, on the last warm day in fall, with Levinas in your lap, and the beautful woman has Kafka in her lap. The [...]

Readings by Marcella Durand, Robert Elstein and John Gallaher Living legend John Ashbery carries on a long-standing Poetry Center tradition by curating and introducing an evening of readings by three less-established poets. Marcella Durand’s Traffic & Weather“presents the city as an organism, often breaking down and always vibrant,” wrote Cole Swensen. Robert Elstein’s chapbook is The Hollandaise. John Gallaher’s books of poetry include The Little Book of Guesses, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize and Map of the Folded World. More information can be found on the . Related Posts a brief and not recent internet roundup Celebrating Sylvia more correspondence

I don’t much care for flarfing, spoetry, or any of the pedantic ballyhoo and giggling that attend these “avant-garde” or rather more absurd, “post-avant-garde” little poetry-world eddies, but I am interested in the arrival of a message in my “Spam” folder that does not clearly connect to a commercial aim—text that is literary, in some sense, but displaced from its usual context in a way that makes my thoughts teeter and bend toward sublime confusion for a moment. For example, on a whim I recently checked an email address I’d abandoned to find an inbox full of Spam messages advertising prescription drugs, West African swindles, on-line casinos, virility aids, etc., yet also the following, without any immediately transparent commercial purpose: Says that the Russians once anchored here and hunted sea-otter before the first Yankee trader rounded the Horn, or the first Rocky Mountain trapper thirsted across the “Great American Desert” [...]

Richard A. Barney (ed.), “David Lynch: Interviews” KM: If your paintings had sound what would it be like? DL: Different paintings would have different sounds. So This is Love would have a muffled sound like talking through a glove. A Bug Dreams would be a really shrill 15,000-cycle piercing sound. She Wasn’t Fooling Anyone, She Was Hurt Bad would be an extremely slow motion, muffled breaking glass sound. … KM: What kind of things function as seeds for paintings? DL: Inspiration is like a piece of fuzz—it kind of comes up and makes a desire and an image that causes me to want to paint it. Or I can be going along and see an old Band-Aid in the street, and you know how an old Band-Aid is. It’s got some dirt around the edges and the rubber part has formed some black little balls, and you see the stain [...]

We begin with an Interview with David Shapiro responding to Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn and much more. (You can catch up on the conversation by checking out last week’s post which included contributions from Alfred Corn, Richard Howard, Don Share, Dara Wier, and Richard Zenith.) MORE RESPONSES FROM POETS AND CRITICS That urn is cold. I find it strange that several poets and scholars speak of the beauty-truth equation as the last lines of the poem. That equation has called forth so much fuss – its bald assertiveness is immensely persuasive at first hearing, then almost instantly the mind rebels against the symmetry of identity. The equation seems like a handsome face you glimpse in the crowd—it teeters between vapidity and sublimity, depending on whether you keep on gazing or else close your eyes to retain the first impression. This very oscillation is Keats’ work, his way of [...]

CHAPTER 10 (from Tracking the Marvelous by John Bernard Myers) “Did Grace Hartigan really look like the photograph Cecil Beaton took of her?” I was asked recently. Yes, she did. I was cross the day I first climbed the stairs to her studio on Essex Street. Oh God, I was saying to myself, another female painter whose talent will belie her appearance. There Grace was at the top of the stairs, waiting for me: tall, as “fresh as the month of May,” with what people used to call clean-cut American good looks. She smiled and put out her hand to pull me up the last step. The studio occupied the top floor of a three-storied building. On the ground floor was a shop that sold pickles and other delicatessen foods; there were barrels of pickles both outside and inside the store and the smell of vinegar, dill and spices permeated [...]

so i was talking with adam and decided that i would start doing this. sooner or later these will consist of new work published in online journals i like, but i figured right now i would just put the links to a bunch of pieces up and say a few words about them three by jack christian at i like notnostrums and i like jack christian. what is notnostrums? it has something to do with and dara wier runs that. originally i wanted this up for the first poem, MARIE, and the way that it moves through names in a way that seems sort of appropriate for an online journal. we are not saying that this is a comment on scrolling through facebook in this day and age of the internet, but that there is a quality to the rapid succession of names that seems both contemporary and rooted in [...]

Allez, allez, I leave a radio like a light on for my return from campus the way Mrs. Snediker left Katie Couric velveteening for the golden retrievers who might well prefer less Katie more quiet, all the more so as hours melt the morning, Katie becoming more nasal, less paid television friend versions of herself. I like returning to my radio friends. In lieu of dogs I dote on this ghoulish sadness that cares beyond itself, punctiliously, about Katie Couric’s heels; it astounds me upon my return that the ghoulish sadness can be so dire when it comes to the world’s hostile, dubious relation to my buoyance, but out of nowhere is oh wow, those shoes. The things on which it has opinions. Gay sadness, the leashes I give. That’s the sadness, the radio in part being on for it, to keep it occupied in my absence; ditto my returns [...]