Posts by author
David Biespiel
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Is Poetry Ready for Pandora?
Granted my affliction does not in any way parallel the gravity of close friends who aren’t so much battling but, as Christopher Hitchens put it, being battled by cancer, and fatally, I fear, but my affliction, by contrast, my woe,…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The State of American Poetry Address
Poets, Poetesses, and Unacknowledged Legislators of Mankind: I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of Poetry. I use the word “unprecedented,” because at no previous time has American poetry been as seriously threatened as it is today.…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Something More Than Style
Earlier this week, while speaking to some younger poets, I became intrigued with their nascent fascination, to the point of headiness, with all things poetically elliptical, non-linear, and disjunctive. I say intrigued, but in my heart it felt more like…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 10 Things Successful Poets Do
Over on Lifehack, there’s one of those smarmy little lists to help you better yourself called 10 Things Positive People Don’t Do. Enjoy. Reading it got me thinking. What are 10 things successful poets do? It’s not like there’s a special pill you…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A New Poetry Emerges from Iran
If war is a defeat for poetry, what is diplomacy? Like poetry, diplomacy involves craft and discretion, finesse and poise, skill and subtlety. It requires canniness, deliberation, presence of mind, and shrewdness, as well as providence and wisdom. I’ve been…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: News of the Weird in Poetryland
New book reports postmodernists forced to write in rhyme and meter Exposing widespread abuses faced by beginning poets writing in postmodern verses, a new book titled “Between the Lines,” revealed that poets who write post-experimental poetry are forced by their…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: When JFK Read Poetry
Not that one needs an excuse such as the imminent threat of nuclear armageddon to read poetry, but the early 1960s might have been a good time to turn to poems for comfort, insight, solace, and understanding about the disposition…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Art of Communion
There comes a time in the process of writing a poem when you find yourself putting the reader’s interests and desires ahead of your own as the poet. Not that the reader is a potted plant, I mean. Because the…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Poetry Shutdown Begins – Poets and Critics Fail to Agree
A flurry of last-minute phone calls, philippics, tweets, and Facebook posts by poets and critics late last night failed to break a bitter standoff over the latest poetry-is-dead attacks, setting in motion the first poetry shutdown in the history of…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 10 Burdens for American Poetry
As with the myth of America, America’s poets believe a poem should go from rags to riches. And yet, why so much surprise when it actually happens? There is more to American poetry than its genial and hospitable prairie lands.…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Reading My Hate Mail
Every since I wrote this weekend with the news that I’m stepping down, after 11 years, as a columnist on poetry for my local paper, I’ve received some very nice farewells. I mean, very nice. One woman wrote me to…
