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Lives of the Poets: Sotère Torregian by Dale Smith

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:46:28 GMT

Sotère Torregian, a self-identified French surrealist, perhaps the only such macédoine extant in North America today, grew up in “No Man’s Land with lots of machine gun bullets flying all over the place,” a place known also as Newark, New Jersey, where he was born in 1941. He lived in a multilingual home where he learned French, Italian, Greek, and Arabic, among other languages. Identifying at an early age with the Africanized Mediterranean, he learned English with difficulty. He received instruction in handwriting and manners at St. Anne’s School in Newark, where he was expelled for kicking a nun. Over the years of his youth he invented himself as a poet, attending readings at New York’s Café Le Metro with Paul Blackburn, Joseph Ceravolo, and David Shapiro and publishing his first poems with Art and Literature (Isere, France), Paris Review, and Ted Berrigan’s magazine “C.” He left the East Coast for California in the late 1960s and taught in the nascent African-American Studies program at Stanford. Since then he has published a half dozen books of poetry, including The Golden Palomino Bites the Clock (Angel Hair, 1967), The Age of Gold (Kulchur, 1976), and the one I published with Hoa Nguyen: “I Must Go” (She Said) “Because My Pizza’s Cold” (Skanky Possum, 2002). Punch Press recently published his latest collection, Envoy.

—Dale Smith explores the life and poetry of Sotère Torregian

Learning Lab: Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ozymandias” by David Mikics

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:00:20 GMT

The critic Leslie Brisman remarks on “the way the timelessness of metaphor escapes the limits of experience” in Shelley. Timelessness can be achieved only by the poet’s words, not by the ruler’s will to dominate. The fallen titan Ozymandias becomes an occasion for Shelley’s exercise of this most tenuous yet persisting form, poetry. Shelley’s sonnet, a brief epitome of poetic thinking, has outlasted empires: it has witnessed the deaths of boastful tyrants, and the decline of the British dominion he so heartily scorned.

24/7 Relentless Careerism by Jim Behrle

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:36:51 GMT

“Let’s just begin by saying that there are more poets than ever before in the history of literature—and therefore more magazines, reading series, and tiny publishers. There are probably 800 or so active writing programs in the United States alone. I could have looked up the actual number, but facts don’t actually matter. If I say that Obama is a strong and effective president over and over again, it makes him a strong and effective president. Be louder and say simple things over and over again, and you will triumph in any debate or forum.”—Jim Behrle discusses how you can become the most important poet in America overnight.

The Soul That Grows in Darkness by The Editors

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:39:52 GMT

In the last 100 years, perhaps no other artistic medium has provided more fodder for poetry than the cinema. Movies have become central to the poetic imagination, whether the poet celebrates the movies or reacts against celluloid saturation. While Sidney and Shelley exhausted a good deal of effort in their defense of poetry, Frank O’Hara would rather spend his time defending the great art of the cinema in poems such as “Ave Maria.” In his poem “A Step Away from Them,” O’Hara builds on Ezra Pound’s Eisensteinian methods (“In a Station of the Metro”) by portraying an otherwise quotidian experience—his lunch hour—using cinematic techniques, rushing headlong through a series of jump cuts that make it an exhilarating scene. It is as if the eye of the poet has become the camera lens, and composition is merely an act of editing.

Good Poems About Ugly Things by Molly Young

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:48:15 GMT

Frederick Seidel. I wonder: Is it all true? I begin to read his Poems 1959–2009, and the first thing I notice is his poetry's dazzling mix of the historical and the individual. Into the emptiness that weighs / More than the universe / Another universe begins / Smaller than the last. The second thing is the vaginas. Or I guess I should say “vaginas,” since Seidel’s women feel less like people and more like abstractions. Nonetheless, the “vaginas” are everywhere: in Seidel’s dreams, in the eyes of a Modigliani subject, on the poet’s motorcycle. All it lacked / Between its wheels was hair. / I don’t care / We do it anyway.—Molly Young on reading Frederick Seidel.

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Nevermoreland by Abigail Deutsch

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:38:23 GMT

At midnight on October 8, 2009, about 50 people gathered on the sidewalk before Baltimore’s Westminster Church. Some wore jeans. Some wore pajamas. Some wore capes and gowns and girdles. The drivers rolling down Fayette Street slowed to peer at the assembly, which bulged beyond the curb, into the path of traffic. A black-cloaked figure dominated the open church doorway, shouting the jangling rhymes of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” On the periphery of the church sprawled the graveyard containing Poe’s remains.

A passing cabbie bellowed: “What is this?”

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In a Relationship by Tao Lin

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:24:36 GMT

Inventing Michael Field by Michelle Lee

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:37:14 GMT

Some 125 years ago, a new playwright named Michael Field created a buzz among London literati with the print debut of two blank-verse dramas in a single volume: the ancient Greek Callirrhoë and the English historical Fair Rosamund. Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund announced the “ring of a new voice, which is likely to be heard far and wide among the English-speaking peoples,” according to the Spectator and other critics of the day.

Carl Sandburg Stops Making Sense by Ross Simonini

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:42:56 GMT

Nonsense is for everyone. It falls off the tongues of all speakers of all languages everywhere, from Hugo Ball in Switzerland to Aimé Césaire in Martinique to SpongeBob SquarePants in Bikini Bottom. True, nonsense words and sentences can’t make arguments or walk through A-ergo-B lessons, but this is part of nonsense’s reason for existence: anti-logic (“breaking the oppressor’s language,” says Césaire). It is a parody of language, a burlesque, and yet it still deeply resonates, not with specific emotions or ideas, but with the uncanniness of a life-altering dream.

The indisputable masters of nonsense are children. Without a lifetime of words to slough off, children remain mostly immune to language’s rules and so give us the Dada-est Dada-isms. But as each day passes, children around the world are sacrificing their verbal freedom for a language that may never be as exciting as their natural blathering.

Learning Lab: W.S. Merwin: “The Nails” by Jeffrey McDaniel

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:38:29 GMT

In Memoriam: Ruth Lilly, 1915-2009 by The Editors

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:18:55 GMT

The Poetry Foundation is grateful for Ruth Lilly’s extraordinarily generosity and kindness. The staff and trustees of the Poetry Foundation are greatly saddened by Ms. Lilly’s death and extend their condolences to her family. Thanks to Ms. Lilly’s munificence, the programs of the Poetry Foundation bring poems to 19 million Americans who would not otherwise read or hear them. From the annual $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a contemporary poet’s lifetime accomplishment, to five Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships that go to aspiring poets, to ensuring Poetry magazine continues publishing in perpetuity, to a host of new programs and prizes established by the Poetry Foundation since receiving the bequest, Ruth Lilly’s legacy will allow millions of readers to discover the great magic of poetry for generations to come.

The Poetry of Deep Winter by Annie Finch

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:04:31 GMT

“Unlike autumn, in whose complex and fertile imagery poets love to linger, winter, that stylized season, is often evoked as a single deft emblem in just a line or two—lines that can be cold and heavy with the press of everything not said. It could be pain at a parent’s stoicism as in these lines from Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”: “Sundays too my father got up early/and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold.” Or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s bittersweet desire to dwell on lost loves in "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”: “Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree.” Or a child’s suppressed loneliness from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Bed in Summer”: “In winter I get up at night/And dress by yellow candlelight.” One brief winter image can infuse an entire poem in a few pen-strokes, bare-branch-black and snowdrift-white.”

2000-2009: The Decade in Poetry by The Editors

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:05:54 GMT

The past ten years have changed poetry in ways that have shocked and delighted even the most forward-thinking readers and writers. Online communities have flourished, dominant paradigms have shifted, and readers have found new solace in traditional forms. Poetry—and poetry communities—will never be the same. We asked poets and critics whose work has had a wide influence over the art form to describe the poetry “event” that most shaped their view of the decade. They focused on events both private and public, and their responses reveal that poetry in the new decade will continue to be a living, breathing, and ever-changing thing.—The Editors

The Robert Burns Zombie Cottage of Hotlanta by Nick Marino

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:50:35 GMT

“To get to the Robert Burns replica cottage in the Ormewood Park neighborhood of Atlanta, you turn right at the Zesto burger hut. You pass a white picket fence draped in kudzu, then turn again when you see the Georgia Department of Public Safety building at the corner of Alloway Place and East Confederate Avenue. Then up a hill you go, through an ordinary residential block lined with modest brick homes, when suddenly and conspicuously it emerges: the landmark cottage where Scotland’s national poet was born in 1759. Or, rather, a painstaking reproduction.”—Nick Marino tracks down the Robert Burns replica cottage in Atlanta, Georgia.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Good Bad by Abigail Deutsch

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:09:39 GMT

“Yet just as cheese sometimes gets too moldy—to plunge forward with my metaphor in the blithe manner of James McIntyre—so can bad poetry rot beyond possible appreciation. Charles Lee and D.B. Wyndham Lewis discussed this problem in their famed anthology The Stuffed Owl (1930), a collection of bad poetry that has served as a model for many such volumes to follow. They outlined distinctions between ‘good Bad Verse,’ which they sought for their book, and “bad Bad Verse,” which they avoided.”—Abigail Deutsch examines the good, the bad, and the good bad.

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The Cranberry Cantos by The Editors

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:36:46 GMT

A list of Thanksgiving poems for family and friends.

Read the list.

Learning Lab: Mina Loy: “Lunar Baedeker” by Jessica Burstein

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:54:10 GMT

Mina Loy is not Myrna Loy. While the actress Myrna Loy starred in the “The Thin Man” films, the Modernist poet Mina Loy was busying herself with the avant gardes of Italian Futurism, Dada, and to a lesser extent American Surrealism. The confusion is recurrent. Yes, their names are similar and yes, they were contemporaries, but the mix-up makes an even deeper sense given the two Loys' shared elegance, and the Platonic rightness of imagining the poet ordering and lining up a sequence of martinis while in the company of William Powell.

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Washington, DC, Poetry Tour by The Editors

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:53:18 GMT

The Washington, DC, Poetry Tour reveals our nation’s capital through the eyes of its great poets, including Archibald MacLeish, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Elizabeth Bishop, among many others. From the hallowed halls of the federal buildings to neighborhood side streets, the tour features poems written in and about DC, as well as photographs by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis.

Narrated by inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander and produced by the Poetry Foundation, the tour showcases archival and contemporary recordings of DC poets, scholars, and musicians, all shedding new light on DC’s historic landmarks.

Poetry lovers in the city can download the audio tours and maps to explore the National Mall and Northwest DC, or take a walking tour beginning at the Library of Congress and ending in Dupont Circle.

Take the tour!

Absolute Necessities by Jeff Gordinier

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:24:08 GMT

“See, I can’t seem to stop myself. The other day I left Baby Grand Books in Warwick, New York, with John Keats. Last spring, somewhere between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, I stumbled into a boxcar-shaped used-book outpost next to a taco stand and ended up riding northward with Tom Clark and Nikki Giovanni in the backseat of my rental car. In Manhattan I pass through Grand Central Terminal nearly every weekday; there, I have been known to drift into Posman Books and drift out three minutes later, dashing toward track 42 with Marie Ponsot or Leonard Cohen or Robin Robertson or Ada Limón under my arm. There are times when my purchases are random; there are times when they’re linked to some curious mental impulse—even pity.”—Jeff Gordinier explains his compulsion to purchase poetry.

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Learning Lab: Anne Bradstreet: “To My Dear and Loving Husband” by Emily Warn

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:51:35 GMT

Why was Anne Hutchinson punished for being outspoken about religion and politics, while Bradstreet became a cultural icon? One answer can be found in her poem “To my Dear and Loving Husband.” From our contemporary perspective, it reads like a traditional Elizabethan love sonnet (composed of 12 lines instead of 14). Compared to Bradstreet’s earlier discourses on science, religion, and politics, it is written in a relatively plain style and unabashedly declares her abiding love for her husband.—Emily Warn examines Anne Bradstreet's “To my Dear and Loving Husband.”