The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
Asked by James Dickey why he got “into this,” meaning into the literary business, into poetry, Robert Penn Warren says, “bad judgment.”
I suppose, one thinks about this sort of thing often when one is bleeding poems into existence. One thinks about the trials, sure.
...more
The debate about political poetry in the United States sometimes has an arid feel to it. Essential, yes. But fatally so? Not very often.
But poets caught up in violent political events are brethren. I believe it is essential for fellow poets to honor their struggle.
...moreBack in December last year I offered not so much ten definitions but ten clues, fixings, or renditions about lyric poetry. A couple dozen of you chimed in as well, which was fabulous.
Let’s do it again! Here’s round two.
...more“The old South Boston Aquarium stands / in a Sahara of snow now,” begins Robert Lowell’s masterpiece, “For the Union Dead,” a poem about race and class in Boston. To my mind, it’s one of the great American poems of the 20th century.
...moreNo one can know for sure what literary historians will make of it, least of all me as I pound out an editorial about poetry every week. But if I were a betting man, I would wager that the most significant literary event this month is not going to be the Poetry Foundation’s splashy new anthologies for school teachers.
...more
“The subcommittee’s bill breaks the promise that this country has made to poets”
...moreYesterday was the 56th anniversary of the day that U.S. customs agents seized some 500 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl on the grounds of obscenity. Yesterday and today, the Supreme Court of the United States heard two cases regarding marriage. The first one yesterday, regarding California Proposition 8, addressed the right to marry the person you love.
...moreT. R. Hummer has a comely piece up on Slate, “The Intimacy of Walt Whitman’s ‘America,’” about the influence and pleasures of Walt Whitman, plus an alleged recording of Whitman reading lines from “America,” made by Thomas Edison:
...moreRevision, as classically understood, generally relates to the poet’s understanding while composing a poem, via kneading language, via discovering insight. More and more though I find that sort of revision is only part of the problem, if it is a problem.
...moreI’ve never much gone in for shoot ‘em up movies. I’ve never seen Terminator, other than the most famous clip (“I’ll be back”). I can’t stomach Quentin Tarantino movies or, his precursor, Sam Peckinpah. I went to see No Country for Old Men because my 17-year-old son kept taunting me that I couldn’t consider myself an educated person if I didn’t, and I was worried he might be right.
...moreAbout to board a flight from Portland to New York, about to meet with the jury that’s been convening for 12 months by e-mail, Skype, and face to face meeting, to select a recipient from the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
...more45 years ago was a barricaded, world-rocking year. Both in politics and in poetry.
Between January and the end of March came the beginning of both the Prague Spring and the Tet Offensive. North Korea seized the USS Pueblo and student protests broke out in Poland.
...moreI’m surprised by the amiable but lukewarm reception Ange Mlinko gives in The Nation to Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems: Selected and New. The 500+ retrospective was published late last year.
Mlinko holds at arm’s length the charms of Rich’s later fragmentary lyrics.
...moreUp most all of last night with some kind of malady contaminated by insomnia, my mind began to drift as a means to stem the anguish. What follows, fair warning, has little symmetry or reason and more, it seems now looking it over, a disproportion of the delirium.
...moreRead poetry, what else? That’s the greatest military maneuver in the ‘Poetry Is Dead’ war, isn’t it? It’s where the odds are longest, the risk greatest, kind of like Lee at Chancellorsville.
It’s where you can ward off the absurdities, the silliness, the dismissiveness, the walk-backage, as well as the battles that took place on a three-thousand mile front of American Poetry Outrage.
...moreKelly Clarkson’s Inaugural Song Means the Death of Country Music
Inaugural country singer Kelly Clarkson said that her story is America’s story.
If that’s the case, America should be slightly concerned. Ms. Clarkson is a walking example of the American dream — as she eloquently puts it, “the American story is in many ways my story — I even played Brenda Lee in a TV show called “American Dreams.’”
She has overcome numerous obstacles, struggled against opposition both internal and external — in order to excel in country western singing, a field that may very well be obsolete.
...moreA funny thing happened on the way to President Obama’s second inauguration Monday. The president’s speech and Richard Blanco’s poem got reversed.
Broadly speaking, one’s expectations of political rhetoric is that, at its worst, it reduces complex argument to slogans and platitudes or, at its best, that it singles out constituencies and individual citizens in order to focus on the day-to-day concerns that society can address.
...moreAbout eight or nine years ago I caught a ride from Northampton, Massachusetts to New York City with the poet Matthew Rohrer. We’d given a reading a few nights earlier with a third poet, Talvikki Ansel, at the Broadside Bookshop. Traveling with us was my son, Lucas, then around 12 years old.
...moreAs of today the question of whether President Barack Obama or former Governor Mitt Romney won the Cuban vote in Florida, traditionally a solid Republican bloc, remains in dispute. Back in early November exit polls had the president with 51%. If accurate, that was a major surprise and a major breakthrough.
...moreLast week I had intended to take a quick Christmastime breather from writing Poetry Wire until the beginning of next year. Then on Friday came the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. (Then, too, on Sunday, the sudden death of an admired poet.) So poetry never sleeps.
...more
The Rumpus mourns the passing of Jake Adam York. We have here collected together some tributes and memories from his friends and fellow writers. We send our condolences to Jake’s friends and family.
...moreOne of the more mind-blowing get-togethers to take place in the last ten years occurred in Havana, Cuba, when Fidel Castro led a unique international conference that brought together participants in the Cuban missile crisis from the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and Cuba to discuss the events of October 1962.
...moreI know, just by titling this piece — “What Is Lyric Poetry?” — you’re thinking, no, you’re not. You’re not. You’re not going to do this.
Yup. Doing it. Sort of. What follows is less “What Is Lyric Poetry?” and more what I like about poetry.
...moreWho isn’t a devotee of advice from writers about writing? One of my favorite books in this guilty-pleasure genre to come out lately is Dennis O’Driscoll’s collection of witticisms and one-liners, Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry.
...moreI had intended this week to write about gratitude. To express my thanks to all the new readers of Poetry Wire and The Rumpus and to wish you all a pleasant Thanksgiving. I wanted to say something about the necessity of thankfulness in art and poetry, to say that this week I rededicate myself to having kind thoughts, to not get angry or think badly about others, to work to the benefit of others as much as I can.
...more
Poetry Wire has learned of the existence of secret love poems by former CIA director David Petraeus.
...moreI’m writing this on Tuesday, November 6, Election Day. Full disclosure, today I will vote to reelect the president. As John F. Kennedy once said, “You can milk a cow the wrong way once and still be a farmer, but vote the wrong way on a water tower and you can be in trouble.”
So, whatever may be happening after today, and I hope the election is resolved, if you’re looking for some serious respite from the post-mortem and the voting stress, just remember two things: first, elections have consequences and they are real and, second, there are just 1,461 days until Election Day 2016 — I’m talking to you, Hillary Clinton.
...moreHere’s a lede that might send you to your room with the vapors: “As a rule the work of women poets is marked by intensity of feeling and fineness of perception rather than by outstanding technical accomplishment.” So writes Bernard Bergonzi in The Guardian in 1960 about Sylvia Plath’s first book, The Colossus.
...moreEver heard that gobsmacking troubadourist Ezra Pound read his elaborate, funkified sestina, “Sestina: Altafore,” in a voice that is one part American-as-European, swilling-with-the-rolling-R’s accent and cantorian swoons and another part a sort of goofy Hailey, Idaho carnival barker? The nifty Open Culture website is featuring a recording on its blog right now.
...more