PoetryFoundation.org

New Impressions by Alice Gregory

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:57:44 GMT

I, Literary Tourist by Daniel Nester

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:25:55 GMT

“There is poetry here.”

This is the tagline for the Brook Farm Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in Lenox, Massachusetts, where my wife and I are checking in for the evening. The phrase is embossed in gold beneath the inn’s logo—two cattail spikes, bent toward the sun—on cups and saucers in the front room display case, on top of which sits a poem of the day on a reading stand.

How to Survive in the Age of Amazon by Janaka Stucky

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:26:20 GMT

If you’re reading this, you’re probably at least tangentially aware of what happens among readers, writers, publishers, and booksellers when someone says the word “Amazon.” People get emotional. Of course, Amazon’s Kindle has revolutionized the booming e-book market over the past few years, and you can obsessively check your sales against that crappy no-good Billy Collins any time you want, but now there’s also this new mobile app that allows would-be patrons to scan a book on the shelf of their local retailer to check its price against Amazon’s offering. Not only that, but Amazon initially gave customers who used this “service” a $5 discount off their next purchase for carrying out this free-market espionage in their competitors’ physical stores. Amazon’s announcement was followed almost immediately by anger, articulated most prominently in a strongly worded piece by Richard Russo in the New York Times. Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo fired back the next day in an almost comically inflammatory article, positing that “buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you.”

Really?

Every Thing In It by Delaney Hall

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:07:28 GMT

“He wrote on everything,” says archivist Joy Kingsolver. She has pulled a flat box labeled “Work in Progress” down from a shelf, set it on a table, and—pushing her gold-rimmed glasses up the ridge of her nose—opened it to reveal a heap of scrap paper covered with narrow, urgent handwriting. “He wrote on menus, napkins, restaurant placemats, paperbacks. Anything that was available.” She leafs through the box and picks up a bank deposit slip. In the upper left-hand corner, it reads SHEL SILVERSTEIN in blocky type. A few lines of lyrics are scrawled across it: a quick sketch for a song—or maybe a poem—about a bank robbery.

This little piece of paper is one of Joy’s favorite artifacts in the whole Silverstein Archive, a collection of the author’s manuscripts, sketches, demo recordings, and ephemera that she helps to oversee. “I imagine him standing in line at the bank, bored, and composing it,” she says. “He just continuously wrote and wrote and wrote. There’s a constant creative flow. It never seemed to stop.”

The Struggle to Write by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:01:08 GMT

The Sound of One Fork was my first book of poetry, published in 1981. These poems and I emerged together from the women’s liberation and lesbian/gay liberation movements of the 1970s.

I had written poetry in college but had stopped writing when, barely turned 20, I had married a poet in 1966. Like so many other women of my generation, I married the person I wanted to be—and then had my world turned upside down when I had two children in quick succession, 18 months apart.

At the same time, while in graduate school at the University of North Carolina, I got to know feminists and lesbians involved in early women’s liberation in Durham and Chapel Hill—a movement then developing from both the anti–Vietnam war movement and the Black civil rights movement.

(The Other) Uncreative Writing by Lucy Ives

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:18:02 GMT

In a conversation I’m picturing, an imaginary American novelist named Pat is having drinks with a poet who is also the editor of some sort of poetry journal.

This poet is named Kendall:

Pat: Does it ever happen that someone gives you a poem for your magazine, and you do a bunch of line edits?
Kendall: I loved your last book, but no.
P: What if you thought it would be better for the poem?
K: Not sure what that means.

This gender-neutral hypothetical illustrates the differing senses of the term “edit” within the respective spheres of verse and prose, or, let’s just say, poetry and fiction. I want to focus on the inaction that seems associated with the editing of poetry: If poetry editors seldom alter the work they publish, what is it they are doing? How can we square this inaction with endeavor?

The Triumph of the Possible by Justin Taylor

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:34:05 GMT

Writing Like a White Guy by Jaswinder Bolina

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:13:54 GMT

My father says I should use a pseudonym. “They won’t publish you if they see your name. They’ll know you’re not one of them. They’ll know you’re one of us.” This has never occurred to me, at least not in a serious way. “No publisher in America’s going to reject my poems because I have a foreign name,” I reply. “Not in 2002.” I argue, “These are educated people. My name won’t be any impediment.” Yet in spite of my faith in the egalitarian attitude of editors and the anonymity of book contests, I understand my father’s angle on the issue.

Learning Lab: Elizabeth Alexander: “Race” by Stephen Burt

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:31:45 GMT

Earlier this year, at age 75, Richard Tagett published what is, for most intents and purposes, his first book: a selected poems called Demodulating Angel. Few poets I’ve asked know who he is, and this is partly his own doing, for Tagett holds a calling card he refuses to play. And by this I don’t mean the 11 issues of the groundbreaking gay literary journal Manroot that he coedited with Paul Mariah between 1969 and 1978, as impressive as that alone is. I speak rather of something that, at this point in poetic history, confers instant and undeniable “street cred”: the fact that, in 1961, after reading Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, he moved from New York to San Francisco to meet and discuss poetry with Jack Spicer.

Circles by Garrett Caples

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:30:51 GMT

When You’re Strange by Daniel Nester

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:42:38 GMT

Freedom and Discipline in the Shed by Maggie Nelson interviewed by Anthony McCann

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:19:50 GMT

Learning Lab: John Keats: “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by Martin Earl

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:25:55 GMT

In Gray There is Multiplicity by Eileen Myles

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:49:23 GMT

Yo-Yo’s with Celery by Ron Silliman interviewed by Jim Behrle

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:42:36 GMT

Who Did This? by Emily Warn

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:17:57 GMT

Last spring, a private poetry exhibition spilled out on my kitchen table when I opened a manila envelope stamped “the final issue finally.” It arrived in my mailbox from the poet Ken Mikolowski—the co-founder, with his late wife, Ann, of The Alternative Press (TAP). The Mikolowskis were part of the Detroit Artists’ Workshop, a community of artists, poets, and musicians who lived and worked in Detroit in the 1960s. From 1969 until Ann’s death in 1999, the couple published TAP, a semiregular “magazine” that was actually numbered packets of poetry and art, sent out three or four times a year. Using an old letterpress in their basement, the Mikolowskis printed poetry in the form of everyday items—bookmarks, postcards, bumper stickers—and mailed them out to their few hundred subscribers.

Beyond Grief and Grievance by Philip Metres

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:11:43 GMT

Things, Boundlessly by Justin Taylor

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:30:45 GMT

Hugh Kenner said it was the most hermetic poem in the English language. Robert Creeley called it “art . . . without equal.” My friend Jared White, a poet and a bookseller, calls it the Book Group Killer. James Laughlin, the founding publisher of New Directions Press, called it “a great poem really rolling in all its power and splendor of language”—and yet he declined to publish it. I’m talking, of course, about“A,” Louis Zukofsky’s erstwhile pillar of American Modernist poetry, in and out of print for years but recently reissued by New Directions. The NDP edition is a paperback original with a fine and thorough introduction by the Zukofsky scholar Barry Ahearn. It is the first edition of the full poem to be published by a non-university press (the two previous editions were from the University of California Press in 1978 and Johns Hopkins University Press in 1993) and has a yellowed white cover that seems to say, “This is how discolored with age this book would be if we had published it when we should have.” It is not a handsome look, but it does neatly sum up the problem of approaching “A,” and perhaps Zukofsky in general: how to foment the re-discovery of something that never quite had a proper heyday in the first place?

Learning Lab: Elinor Wylie: “Wild Peaches” by Caitlin Kimball

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 11:42:38 GMT

The four Petrarchan sonnets that compose the poem are relentlessly musical, heaped with what critic Morton Dauwen Zabel called the “tray after tray of choice images” that distinguish Wylie’s work. They are delicious, and the cadences hypnotic, as in the poem’s first description of nature:

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.

Citizen Flynn by Nick Flynn interviewed by Alizah Salario

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:29:39 GMT

The day before I met Nick Flynn in court, I’d gone to hear him and the poet Kelly Groom read from their respective memoirs. As Flynn read, a slide show of arresting images flashed on a screen behind him: frames from the film based on his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a massive skull with eye sockets like caves, uncertain patterns of light and shadow that could’ve had everything or nothing to do with what Flynn was reading.

Afterward, I approached Flynn and asked if I could interview him about his latest memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb, and collection of poems, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands. He apologized and told me his schedule was packed. Then he brightened.

“How about tomorrow? I’ll be in court for jury duty,” he said, fishing for his jury summons. I wrote down the address of the courthouse, and we made a plan to meet in the jury waiting room at 8:45 the next morning. It would be his second court stint in two days. Earlier that day he’d had to settle a ticket for an egregious Brooklyn error: riding his bike on the sidewalk. “A victimless crime,” he told me.

When I arrive the next day, I begin to worry that there is a footnote in some penal code prohibiting interviews in courthouses and I’ll be arrested. I notice a sign that says no food or drinks allowed. Weapons are prohibited too, but nowhere does it say no fraternizing with poets on jury duty, so I walk through the metal detector and into the dingy, sterile halls of justice.