David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl meets Gay Marriage
Yesterday 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.…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Identity v. Identification
T. 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:
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Poesis Delenda Est!
I’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…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: You Will Be Judged
About 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…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Going Back to 1968
45 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…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Genius of Adrienne Rich
I’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…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: My Kingdom for a Bag of Bones
Up 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…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: “Daddy, what did YOU do in the great ‘Poetry Is Dead’ war?”
Read 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,…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: What Alexandra Petri Should Have Said in the Washington Post.
Kelly 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…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Poet and a President
A 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…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Things They Do Look Awful Cold — Talking ‘Bout My Generation
About 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.…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Viva Richard Blanco!
As 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%.…