David Wojahn: AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (Part 2)
AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (Part 2) Let me now talk about what happens in one of my letters to students, beyond the anecdotes and exchanges of pleasantries. Typically, a letter first addresses questions students may have posed in their own letters, questions ranging from nuts and bolts stuff (“Could you please talk to me about
David Wojahn: AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (Part 1)
AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (PART ONE) Let me start with a poem by the late Galway Kinnell, a figure much revered among readers of contemporary poetry, although he was a decidedly uneven writer. Kinnell is generally associated with the so-called Deep Image School, whose best known figures are
Michael Gregory Stephens: Angels on the Avenue: The Lower East Side When Poetry Was the World
Angels on Second Avenue: The Lower East Side When Poetry Was the World At the start of the 1960s, the Lower East Side transformed itself—from a Jewish ghetto that was still peopled with immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe—into the East Village, a neighborhood of jazzmen, hipsters, alternative poets, ranting public intellectuals, drug addicts and winos and dropouts, students
Kathy Lou Schultz: Teaching African-American Poetry in the Age of Trump
Teaching African American Poetry in the Age of Trump Poetry can’t change the world. The world where we witness horrors from the dismissal of every child’s right to receive a quality education and live in a safe environment, to white racists toting semi-automatic weapons and the Nazi flag through the streets. The world where we wait to see what
Emily Grosholz: Do I write as a Woman Poet, or as a Poet who is a Woman?
Do I Write as a Woman Poet, or a Poet who is a Woman? When I was a child, I thought of poetry as one of the common idioms of life. My mother’s father wrote sonnets, and she and her sisters wrote occasional verse for various occasions; my father’s grandmother’s father published a book of poetry, and my father edited
Mark Scroggins: Poetry as Wallpaper: In (Ambiguous) Praise of Low-Intensity Poetics
Poetry as Wallpaper: In (Ambiguous) Praise of Low-Intensity Poetics There are many William Morrises. For Marxists, he is a central figure in nineteenth-century English radicalism, author of a number of still riveting essays on labor and art and the memorable utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere. For readers in the fantasy and science fiction hinterlands, he is preëminently the
Joshua Corey:The Golden Age of Poetry Blogging
“Blogspot was our Montparnasse” – Robert Archambeau The era of poetry blogging was a brief one, more like a moment than an era. It was preceded, in the 1990s, by the SUNY Buffalo Poetics List, founded according to its archival site by Charles Bernstein in late 1993. A simple listserv that predated widespread access to the World Wide Web, it
Ernest Hilbert: On Literary Relics
Rare book collectors devote whole lives to finding and preserving books by authors they love, though the books alone may not be enough to satisfy them entirely. Those who pursue first editions are an uncommon breed, arriving in any number of amiable or maddening types, sharing a desire to acquire, organize, and shape expensive collections that embody their highest desires
Chard deNiord: SWIMMING IN THE DROWNED RIVER OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY
As a poet, essayist, and interviewer for the past twenty five years, I have struggled with a compound question that too few of my colleagues have felt emboldened, for understandable reasons, to address, namely, what is the state of poetry in America today and what is the best way to talk about it with potential readers who feel both lost
Anthony Madrid: A Gallery of Rhymes from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Book 1
A Gallery of Rhymes from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Book I 1 Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year’s pleasant king; Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing, Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! This is the first stanza of a short poem by Thomas Nash. I
Michael Anania: When Buffalo Became Buffalo
When Buffalo Became Buffalo There are several issues embedded in my title, I suppose, not only when Buffalo, the private University (after 1962 the State University of New York at Buffalo), became Buffalo but how and why Buffalo became a center, perhaps the center, of American poetry. For me, “when” is easy. Buffalo became Buffalo on August 5, 1963.
Ernest Hilbert: The Muse and the Auctioneer’s Gavel: Learning About Poetry from First Editions
The Muse and the Auctioneer’s Gavel: Learning About Poetry from First Editions For a decade and a half I have worked more or less contentedly as a rare book dealer, roughly half the number of years I’ve devoted to being a poet, an equally eccentric pursuit. In that time I’ve had the pleasure of placing quite a number of
