poetry
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Rene Daumal at Parabola
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,…
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
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…
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Poems for the Gmail Generation
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.
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A Vestige Stirred By Light
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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The Wind Has Stopped Blowing (Your Pockets Are Filled With Wind)
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.…
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Tissue of Flesh and Light
Marchant transforms potentially stale-sounding specifics into a breathing, universally grasped object as writer, reader and paradoxically, the “no longer beautiful mind” are in communion, even if the mind presented cannot comprehend the connection.
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The Worst Words Ever
“What word do you hate and why?” That was the question posed to poets this year at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. Answers ranged from chillax (ugh) to redact (yuck) to appall. And Phillip Wells’ explanation of hatred for the word…
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Stephen Burt On Enjoying New Poetry
Over the weekend, I finally got around to unboxing and shelving my archived litmags in the new apartment. As I placed my issues of the Believer back into magazine files in proper order, the top headline on the cover of the…
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Writing, Joni Mitchell, LA and Other Things
Your poem sounds like a Joni Mitchell song I’ve never heard before.
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Saddam Hussein the Poet
On Thursday, the National Security Archives obtained and released 20 FBI “interviews” with Saddam Hussein. One of the things Hussein did, apparently, was read his interviewer some of his poetry. Unfortunately, these accounts don’t actually include transcripts of any of…
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Somalian Refugee Writers Show the Way
Dadaab is not an oasis. There is no water. In July, food rations are expected to be cut back to 1000 calories a day. The camps are short 38,000 latrines. Every year only twenty students from the entire camp escape…
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In Case You Missed. . .
Last month’s North Beach Poetry Festival, William Taylor, Jr., poet, author of Words For Songs Never Written, and gentleman, has provided a very succinct report of the festival’s events which, incidentally did not appear to include much in the way…