The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
The only time I had the privilege to meet Jake Adam York was after a panel he participated in at the 2012 AWP Conference. The panel was called “In White: White Poets and Race,” and I was hooked. For so long I had yearned to write blues poetry, to sit down and dialogue about race and history (as James Baldwin discusses in his essay “Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes”) with other people and through poetry.
...moreK was the first person to whom I ever told the truth.
Not any old pedestrian truth, like what I ate for lunch or my age—I was capable of that sort of honesty. The truth that I told K was that I had been abused.
...moreHaving been an English teacher with an undergrad degree in Journalism, one might think I read a lot of quality work, but I don’t.
I read news and posts that probably take less time to write than it does for me to make coffee, and I worry about that.
...morePoets fall in love with poems all the time, so much so that the question “what poem did you love last” isn’t really a question, but an invitation to wax poetic about the current darling in your eye. Because the truth is that a poet learns to fall in love with the words of another.
...moreAfter taking a certain number of poetry classes, one may end up with a giant box of photocopied poems. If one is a packrat (and I am), these poems are impossible to discard. Sometimes I cut them up for collages, or send them to friends, or pull out the ones that really chime with me.
...more“Somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” is not only the Last Poem I Loved, it also is actually the first. The way its writer (of whom I shall elaborate later on) likens one fine woman to flowers (and to a flowers’ heart) is the way I think women want to be looked at.
...moreIt feels strange to claim that “Hardware Store on a Town Without Men” is the last poem I loved, since I have loved it for some time now. A fairer term would be to call it The Last Poem I Loved Continuously.
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I do not love lightly, in poetry or in life.
I love Fredy Neptune.
This verse novel is probably the most startling reading experience I have had in some time.
...moreContrary to popular belief, language is not flat, passionless, clichéd and dying, and if you disagree, it’s imperative that you read Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “Epithalament” as soon as possible.
Language must be “weirded” if it’s going to make the ordinary new again and rejuvenate the old ideas.
...more“When you have me as I’m standing / Against a wall” ignites memories of intimacy that overcome the who, what, where, and when of relationships. Intense moments have a quality of sameness. You feel alive in that moment, not specific, and this poem offers some words where there are none.
...moreCharles North works in many modes—conceptual architect, thingy neurographer, witty synthesist, maker of the poetic equivalent of very fine shirts—but I think I like him best when he gets all lucent and dreamy, as in “Clip from Francis Jammes.”
To translate is to carry across.
...more“Dear Augusta” by Reginald Dwayne Betts speaks for itself as a whole art piece, horrifying and beautiful and eye-widening, and I’m finding it pretty difficult to write about it at all but it is definitely the last poem I’ve loved so here goes nothing.
...moreAfter years of people telling me that I would love Louis MacNeice, last week I stumbled on “Prayer Before Birth”. In the poem, the notion of the undead, the nosferatu as plague-carrier, the underworld and incarnate evil are not supernatural phenomena that threaten to appear to us.
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