The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Well, hello there, Randall Jarrell. Where you been all my life? And how did you get a real live eland up into a poem? An eland! It came out of the poem and stared at me. I stroked its hot neck, so similar to the neck of a horse.
...moreIt is near the time of my college graduation. I’m graduating early, barely 20 years old. Among my friends, the stuff of my romantic self-sabotage is legendary.
...moreThis poem begins with an epigraph:
In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality…
-Wallace Stevens
I want to be in love forever
and not like anyone else
Reading my own poetry feels like looking into a blurred old mirror at an antique shop. I can’t tell if I look good or pale and pasty. I can’t figure out if it’s my writing or my self-criticism that is falling flat.
...moreAfter I finished reading “Wild Geese,” all I could think of was: So what! So what that I am an undocumented person living in hiding, so what that I was turned into a “criminal” when I was a child, so what that this is yet another country creating laws to “guard” Themselves against US, so what that we are a productive problem–productive for many, a problem for some–so what that I hurt some times, I am not the only one.
...moreOf all of the people I know who own a smartphone (a majority, anymore), most of them get up in the morning and immediately reach for said smartphone from their cozy nest in bed. The first thing they do is check Facebook and/or Twitter, or they check the news and post links to news stories on Facebook and Twitter.
...moreAs a fiction writer, and as a reader, I gravitate toward stories from the perspective of a specific, imperfect and alert, outward-and-inward-looking consciousness, a transparent eyeball with legs and, at least occasionally, uncomfortable shoes. The danger of a story centered around the drama of attention and understanding—of a character trying to see and not only act but also understand the world—is the ever present pull toward (even temptation of) a resolving moment of insight, an epiphany, that may not be necessary, earned, correctly scaled.
...moreA round-
cheeked girlchild comes awake
in her crib. The green
swaddlings tear open
I first encountered the last poem I loved, Galway Kinnell’s “Under the Maud Moon,” eleven summers ago, after a short trip to a novel writing workshop in Iowa City.
...moreMy maternal grandparents emigrated from Poland in 1924 after experiencing the horrors of World War I. They arrived here with pockets full of hopes and dreams and little else. I never met them; they died before I was born. I know them only through Mother’s stories and the handful of cherished items left her: three Catholic prayer books, written in Polish; a thread supposedly from the robe of the Black Madonna, a Polish saint; and a crucifix for last rites crafted in Germany.
...moreApril is over. We can’t stop these things from happening, no. We’re slipping out of spring into summer, out of busy semesters and National Poetry Month. We’re slipping outside our houses, and offices, and coffeeshops after the seemingly innumerable gray days, and I’m glad to slip into the last poem I loved, “Reaching Around For You,” where D.A.
...more
“Your limbs will be torn off in a farm accident.
Tree limbs will grow in those places.”
This last poem I loved was the poem-film “Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In a Farm Accident” based on a work from the collection Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg.
...moreI didn’t have time to be devastated on the day Adrienne Rich died, but I still couldn’t keep back the tears.
Like so many others, Rich was The One to me, America’s greatest living everything I ever wanted to be: a titan of poetry, an icon of feminism.
...moreTo truly commit a poem to memory is to commit your life to that poem. Out of all the many verses I’ve memorized over the last year, no other has so fully enveloped my days than John Ashbery’s “Poem at the New Year.” So much so that its evocative and elegiac images mark all my mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions, romances.
...moreThe last poem I loved was “Nothing Twice” by the well-known Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. I loved all of her poems that followed, but “Nothing Twice” was the first Szymborska poem I ever read. Last week, I was on my way to the train station in Amsterdam, when I found a large bookstore.
...moreLately, I’ve been feeling full-circlish. As a result, I am choosing to publicly acknowledge the-last-poem-I-loved’s similarity to the first poem that made me want to be a poet. They were both written by Bill Knott, they are both terribly short, and they are both about what to do when a death happens.
...moreMatthea Harvey’s “The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away” resides in her second full-length collection, the wonderfully-titled Sad Little Breathing Machine. It is a poem about ponies, sadness, and the inversion of cognitive behavioral therapy. It is a poem about pills, the surprising delicateness of rodents’ palates, and the psychological benefits of a day at the races.
...moreThe summer I turned 19, after my first year of college, I took off, leaving behind my small midwestern campus, to work in a gift shop in Yosemite National Park. That’s a whole other story, and maybe someday I’ll tell it, but for now it’s enough to know that I was there.
...moreCan words become a part of you?
I found Tom Raworth’s “South America” published in Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford, 2001) and have always looked back.
Listen to Raworth read it. It asks us to hunt much of the big game that is compelling and maddening in poetry: complex, searching narratives that are too ambitious to go down easily; the ephemeralness of writing; a treacherous landscape of ineffability; the overvaluing of consumption at the expense of making; self-deceit; and the constant, derailing necessity to use media to regulate mood.
...moreI love a poem that understands me. Most of the time, when I’m not reading poetry to inspire my own work, I read it as a reminder to appreciate the world, or some small space within it. Some days, I don’t want that.
...moreThe Dream Songs are, at their best, incantations, syllables given to the unspeakable. And yet, here’s the really unsettling thing: They’re fun. “Dream Song 29,” and the others in 77 Dream Songs, read quickly and lightly. Their rhythms catch in your mind and stay like pop music.
...moreAt Redbones. Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman. Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler. Pyramid of Bone. Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky. Small Congregations. Tokyo Butter. The titles alone are provocative enough to evoke curiosity about her poems. Each of these volumes sits on my poetry bookcase side by side because they are all by the same poet—Thylias Moss.
...moreFigure, noun, a person’s bodily shape or a person seen indistinctly, especially at a distance. A representation of a human in a drawing or a sculpture, a shape defined by lines, a pattern formed by the movements of groups of people.
...moreWhen I first read “God is an American,” I was wide-eyed and breathless and thought it might be a love story. To me, Terrance Hayes was the best kind of romantic–the kind of man who uses a German turn of phrase the way a tipsy i-banker might quote a line of Baudelaire in the original French.
...moreWhile still an undergrad, I was lucky enough to attend a reading by Joanna Klink. We had been reading her second book, Circadian, in my poetry class that week, and I was eager to hear some of the poems that I found so simultaneously enchanting and frustrating read out loud.
...moreI’ll be honest: I’m not usually much of a fan of prose poems. I like lineation, form, structure. Give me meter, syllabics, some rules to cling to—if I want a poem that looks like a chunky little square of prose, I prefer a sonnet.
...moreI love a poem which opens by grounding me in a particular context, or way of thinking, or regard of the narrative voice, but then uproots me tornado-style and flings me through the air to where nothing resembling a soft landing greets me.
...moreI love prose poems. Prose poems sacrifice the agility of line breaks for the raw power of the sentence. Poems with line breaks are undersized receivers who run intricate routes. Prose poems are strongside linebackers waiting to unleash a terrible fury.
...more
“Only this do you know for sure: time is an ellipsis until it is not.”
Turns out, Josh Bell wrote a poem about me. In the poem, I’m eating in a Chinese restaurant when Vince Neil walks in, and my name is “Josh” (it’s cool).
I remember exactly when I stumbled on this poem – I was sitting in a coffee shop thumbing through an anthology of humorous poetry (not all of which I found humorous).
...more
Everything from the theme of creation to the understated technique resonates; it is a book of poetry which has inspired both reflection and furious meditations of my own as I spin my own arcs from Bidart’s example. It is excellent art.