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
Amish Trivedi: Confessions of a Contest Junkie
If you have any vice or addiction in your life – and we all have something – you probably already know that what you are hooked on is bad for you. You already know how you justify your fix. You know how you feed your high. And yet, you cling to your degeneracy, denying it is a problem. Your enablers
Linda Ashok: Letter from India: Worshiping the Stone Manasa
Letter from India: Worshipping the Stone Manasa I remember my father at 21, being hounded by the police for his supposed involvement in India’s most fearsome uprising against class inequality and peasant insubordination, known as the Naxalbari Movement. Called Naxalbari after the place in West Bengal where the revolt was first began in 1967, this movement was an armed
Lawrence Raab: POETRY AND STUPIDITY
Lawrence Raab: “POETRY AND STUPIDITY” 1. OBSCURITY One of the shortest and most provocative pieces in Paul Valéry’s “A Poet’s Notebook” reads in its entirety: STUPIDITY AND POETRY. There are subtle relations between these two categories. The category of stupidity and that of poetry. I can’t recall when I first read this, but I remember thinking it was true. Also funny.
Robert Archambeau: The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry (Hurrah!)
The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry (Hurrah!) And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. —C.P. Cavafy This just in: the Empire of Poetry has fallen to the barbarians. The fall was not sudden—it took place over the course of the last seventy years or so, and even before
