Kay Ryan has been compared to Emily Dickinson, and I like to imagine Dickinson and Marianne Moore reading her with sly commiseration. Unlike some poets with recognizable styles, Ryan does not write the same poem again and again, and her sharp eye is both benevolent and unflinching.

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What does one do with an essay like the one David Alpaugh penned for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the current state of poetry publication? As an editor who publishes about 50 poems a year here on The Rumpus (all directly solicited), I feel like I have to respond, since I’m contributing to the noise that seems to bother Alpaugh so.

Others have already responded. John Gallaher says of Alpaugh’s claim that he doesn’t know who the best poets writing today are, “In the face of all of this raging against the blur of numbers, he gets his big chance to assist, to cull some of the chaff, and what he says is “I have no idea”? Nope. That just won’t cut it.”

Mark Scroggins replies to Alpaugh’s claim that the potential loss of a contemporary Blake or Dickinson would be the “most devastating result of the new math of poetry. The loss would be incalculable” this way: …more

The poems in The Ancient Book of Hip create a precise and evocative description of time and place; they celebrate that space, even as they have a witty undercurrent of critique.

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“We write because we can’t not write. We want to make music out of our breath; we want to be under the power of an art that toys with us and could destroy us, but which allows us to get a glimpse of what’s real.” …more

What Jelloun proves throughout this book is that he has not let language(s) fail him or the people, places and historical moments he memorializes, making dates that are not headlines as important as front page news.

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Note: I’m adding this late, but it’s important. Our sincerest condolences go out to the friends and family and admirers of Lucille Clifton, who died yesterday at the age of 73. She was a tremendous voice for poetry and she will be missed.

This is what a feminist poet looks like.

An openly gay legislator reads a poem by an openly gay poet on the floor of the state house instead of saying a morning prayer. In Utah. God did not seem to be displeased, or if he was, He stayed quiet about it.

Love poetry might get the heart racing.

Gil-Scott Heron has a new album out. Can’t wait until my subscription rolls over so I can download it. You can read an interview with him here.

Why Vancouver’s Poet Laureate isn’t taking part in the Winter Olympics.

My Twitter recommendation for this week is Robert Lee Brewer, who runs the Poetic Asides blog for Writer’s Digest. Robert is very active is trying to bring new people into poetry, both as writers and readers, and I can’t support that enough.

Brian Spears

Many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia [Plath], showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but not silence.

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Poet D. A. Powell, a subject of a Supersized Combos last April, has been announced the winner of the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University.

Philip Pullman writes about Blake’s poetry, and argues that it can be appreciated separate from the illuminations.

Thermos interviews Katy Lederer, who we reviewed nearly a year ago.

Anindita Sengupta on Indian English Poetry.

Inferno, the video game. It’s Dante in the same way “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” is Homer. Except it’s a video game. And Beatrice is in hell.

More on gender, race and poetry in this post at Harriet. And some good advice as well–advice I plan on taking as Poetry Editor here.

And on that note, would you like to write about poetry for The Rumpus? What was the last book or poem you loved? Send me a write-up, no length requirements, and I’ll publish the best of them. poetry-at-therumpus-dot-net.

Brian Spears

Taste of Cherry is a beautiful, carefully crafted, and sensual display of poetry; the verbal, pyrotechnical, unabashed bravery of the poems is their most significant quality.

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Margo Berdeshevsky’s work straddles the line between fiction and poetry. Her characters grieve, dream, punish themselves, and try to find harmony between who they are and who they might still be. …more

“Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.”

Jacket Copy last week pondered the unfortunate tendency towards suicide, especially among poets, and why you are not allowed to kill yourself anymore.

B. H. Fairchild fuses mundane with spiritual in resolute ways, as “in the silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant,” a glorious line that would have been less so if the words “rain” and “abundant” were switched …more

By Charles Bukowski from a new collection of (mostly) unpublished poems, The Continual Condition.

thanks for the luck

at this time
I no longer have to work
the nightclubs, the universities, …more

A tale of a poetry reading, or maybe the word “cock” is inherently funny.

Annie Finch tells you everything you need to know about the sonnet.

Who was in Best American Poetry 2009? The answer probably won’t surprise you.

W. S. DiPiero in Threepenny Review: “Certain art gets fresh with us. It stings with what it offers because it says, on any given repeat, something we’re not prepared to hear, though we think we know it so well that it can’t turn on us.”

This week’s Twitter recommendation is Elisa Gabbert, author of Thanks For Sending the Engine. I’ve been following her for a couple of weeks now–good stuff.

Brian Spears

A collection like Ohio Violence is best consumed in small doses, so that its imaginative density, which is never ponderous, can be absorbed.

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Eva

Only here would snow and low, pale
blossoms mix so easily, blowing foam
which tears at the window, then snuffs
itself out. Such things pass quickly,
season to spring. But everywhere:
reminders. Salt splits the road. The river
heaves with run-off. Inside I’ve forced
blooms, but they refuse, stalks dull
and staring. It’s spring, then it isn’t.
You love me, then you’re leaving.
What to do with this half-life? It’s tricked
the trees again, got them on a good day.
Warmed, the dogwoods puff like rice.
Snow starts, then it stops. By morning
there’s no evidence at all above ground.
Didn’t we have winter? Wasn’t it hard,
and didn’t I want you? Her lover’s name
for Eva: little girl of no consequence.
How could I think I was the only one?

Alison Stine

Read the Rumpus Review of Alison Stine’s Ohio Violence.

I love Philip Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb.” He hated it. On a side note, I really love that the BBC is willing to spend 30 minutes on the story behind a single poem.

This is, I think, a good way to approach an online poetry journal–make it something other than a paper journal transferred onto a website.

Sherman Alexie hates the Kindle.

Google has now digitized ten million books. Presumably, none of them are poetry collections by Sherman Alexie.

Daniel Nester loves The Outfield’s “Your Love.” And why not? I saw them play in Fayetteville when I was in grad school–they were pretty good.

I’m going to start including a link to someone I think you should be following on Twitter. This week: John Williams of Linebreak. If you have suggestions for people I should follow on Twitter, leave them in comments or email me at poetry-AT-therumpus-DOT-net.

Brian Spears

Just one for tonight, and I doubt that the site I’m linking to will even notice the hits we send his way–in fact, there’s a strong possibility that everyone who reads this will have already seen the post I’m referencing–but what the hell. It’s a really good piece, I think.

It’s Ron Silliman musing on the ways the poetry world, as he sees it, can be both binary and more than that. …more

Congratulations to Keith Waldrop, winner of the National Book Award in Poetry. Here’s their interview with Waldrop.

Mark Scroggins uses the Barrett Watten reading I mentioned last week as a jumping off point for an interesting discussion of, as he puts it, “the relationship of personal formation, as detailed & explored in autobiography, and literary interpellation.”

The Valpariaso Poetry Review’s Poem of the Week is a selection from Rumpus contributor Alison Stine.

An interesting piece on inadvertently burned books starring William Carlos Williams.

There are terrible jokes, and then there are terrible poetry jokes. It might be too much for you.

Quill and Quire takes on Reader Spoils a company which sells reader reviews. But while the post is great, the response from Reader Spoils is precious.

Brian Spears

The Rumpus has already mentioned W. S. DiPiero’s essay about walking in San Francisco from the November issue of Poetry, but there are others dealing with the same general idea as well. Kay Ryan on Marin County, Peter Cole on Jerusalem and A. E. Stallings on Athens are a good start.

I very much enjoyed the poems in the most recent issue of Diode.

We don’t do lists here at The Rumpus, and we don’t generally link to them, but this isn’t an ordinary list. It’s a series of recommendations of new books of poems by poets who aren’t, so far as I can tell, famous (in the limited sense for which that word can be used to describe any poet).

Elisa Gabbert tries to get at what’s behind all the MFA program rankings hate.

Brian Spears

As much as Intruder makes us look at the difficult, the painful, the ugly, it also gives us a chance to watch the insides of a snow globe swirl, to enjoy beauty in all its victory, through images, rhythms and dreamscapes, for moments, throughout these pages.

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These poems often resist the reader in the same way his speaker resists his father, but the book’s exploration of such distance creates a closeness between the reader and the poems, and the speaker and his father, that’s almost too much to bear.

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Tom Healy’s first collection of poems, What the Right Hand Knows, is fashioned entirely of artful silence and alluring reticence.

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At The Morning News, Daniel Nester reminisces about his former life as a New York poet.

More than that, though, he talks about his abdication from the world of poetry.

“I remember some night when I am eating a Mexican dinner in the company of a Famous Eastern European Poet. As we celebrate his reading, a member of our party starts to choke on her food. We laugh at first, but her situation escalates. Emergency medical technicians come in, stick a tube stuck down her throat.

She is taken away in an ambulance.

And all the while, Famous Eastern European Poet continues to eat his meal and speak with other famous poets. They glance back twice.

The only explanation for why this Poet did not react to the woman choking on a bony burrito was it was messing up one of his few nights in Manhattan. I have no explanation, however, for Poets A and B sitting next to him, who continued their conversation on European literary festivals and the pros and cons of living in Iowa.”

I spend a lot of my time rediscovering things.  It’s a nifty, almost unconscious trick. All it necessitates is wandering through a landscape, engaging with reality and picking up on sensory cues.

Whether it’s a certain food I once loved, or the scent of an old girlfriend, my mind is ceaselessly uncovering something it was once intimately acquainted with.  Sometimes I think there isn’t enough room in my mind for things I can remember, so old memories pass out my ears like smoke. . .

Just the other day, walking into an Oakland news stand on a whim, I saw a copy of Parabola magazine and I rediscovered Rene Daumal, the French mystic philosopher, poet and writer. …more

It’s Saturday night, the skies are cloudy, and the satellite reception keeps cutting in and out. Guess it’s time for some poetry links.

I don’t generally link to poetry reviews elsewhere, but the NY Times reviews poetry so rarely that I figured I ought to do it if only for the sake of novelty. It’s for Adam Bradley’s Book of Rhymes, a new anthology that makes the case for rap’s inclusion in the world of serious poetry.

Harper’s Magazine points us to meatpaper, and Kevin Young’s “Ode to Boudin.”

Kooks and Poets

John Clare, victim of identity theft.

And finally, the search for the perfect Auden Martini.

Brian Spears

Brandon Scott Gorrell’s debut collection, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present is an anxious, ambivalent ode to Internet culture. …more

The Next Settlement has a rock-solid American quality that compares favorably to William Carlos Williams.   Think Plymouth and ocean waves constantly changing, hypnotic in part because of the mysteries beneath.

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It’s April and I’m back home for Passover and Easter and my brother’s birthday. I’m wandering my parents’ farm. The air is cold and I expected warm, the trees are sparse and I expected leaves. Yesterday it rained and rained. This is rural Kansas, where I grew up. …more