Get your war back on.
Author: Timothy Yu
While I am by no means a Robert Pinsky fan, I have to admire his willingness to do ugly things to get his point across.
I guess I am still a little confused over what David means by a “social poet.” Initially I thought he meant a quality of writing: a poetry which creates (as he put it) “a social language that desires all to speak, hear and be heard.” You could argue that O’Hara has this quality in the way he lets “everything” into…
I stacked the deck a little in the O’Hara/Andrews cage match, I think. O’Hara seems inward, concerned with his own “sordid identifications”; while Andrews is (aggressively) outward, portraying “You as the human labor saving device,” a product of all the economic and political discourses that plug up the poem’s arteries. But both are a kind of slide show of social…
We benighted West Coasters are still waiting for our Poetry Project Newsletters. That Pony Express ain’t what it used to be.
“Thinking in poetry,” for me, was greatly nourished by “thinking in postcards.” If sitting down to write each day–and needing to produce something before a 5 p.m. postmark deadline–was daunting in the abstract, the actually small size of the blank space I had to fill was comforting, a perfect example of constraint producing freedom. Each postcard on its own was…
I’d like to be “contagiously smart & supple & capacious” (& seductive) when discussing poetry. Too late, Stephanie–you already are. Stephanie comes about as close to that blogtopia as anybody I can think of–how “our lives & poetry cross each other’s boundaries,” exactly. I’ll admit that in that region I’ve been tentative. My poetry seemed to get better when I…
HiH has returned to the question of a “social” poet and whether Frank O’Hara and/or Bruce Andrews might be one. David had originally asked: Who is the more ‘social’ poet — Frank O’Hara or Bruce Andrews? It would seem that optimism or something resembling grace would be an axiom of a truly social poetry. As I define it are there…
And: “Kind of like Don Ameche breakdancing in Cocoon.”
“The captain from Star Trek (he was Royal Shakespeare first, I just found out) in X-Men-Two, with a helmet on his head, in that giant brain machine, concentrating hard enough to find every single mutant on earth, who appeared to him as red whisps of light.” “A diary, then, warped by the knowledge that others are reading it.” “A meditation…