Whitman

Forgotten Poet of the day: Karl Shapiro

by Joe Weil October 9, 2013 Poetry and Poetics

There are many reasons why Karl Shapiro is no longer taught or on the lips of MFA students. First, he was part of the post-war formalist/structuralism/urban boom in poetry, but he had enjoyed great success (Pulitzers and whatnot), and he was a Jew. A Jew with a Pulitzer in the 1940s/1950s who was neither humble [...]

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On Rhetorical Devices and Their Use

by Joe Weil April 4, 2012 Poetry and Poetics
Back Camera

I figured I’d post these. Many poets employ them without ever knowing their names, and that seems to work, but I like knowing the names of things. There’s something thrilling and wise ass to me about going through the world, saying: “Oh look! A Eurasian tree sparrow!” At age six, I fell in love with [...]

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Poetry Speaks with its Hands

by Joe Weil December 7, 2011 Poetry and Poetics

Certain sections of broca’s area of the brain are involved both in how words are given syntactical order and how gestures, physical movements are interpreted as flow, as arc, as coherent actions. We know that broca lights up like a pin ball machine when shadow puppets are introduced before the eye. My theory of narrative [...]

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And I Chose—All: Mary Ruefle

by Colie Hoffman August 8, 2011 Poetry

“The artist is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter where: from the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. This is why one must not discriminate between things. There is no rank among them. One must take one’s good where one finds it.” Picasso wrote this well before [...]

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‘Those are not the words’: Walt Whitman’s collapsing taxonomy of poetry

by Daniel Silliman December 7, 2010 Language

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 [...]

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Trying to do something important: a couple of thoughts on ambition in a work of art

by Daniel Silliman October 1, 2010 Aesthetics
To Make Bach the Grund of Grundrisse and the Chaconne of a Shocked Shack

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 [...]

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Towards a Different Kind of Workshop

by Joe Weil September 30, 2010 Academia

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 [...]

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