Oh, and can someone please tell me what the heck a “German sausage” is?
Hello, Toronto!
Did you miss me?
Contests and Communities
Ron Silliman remarks that poetry contests “substitute an administrative social context for poetry in the place of a community one…To win a contest generally is to announce that one as a poet does not come from any community.” “Community” here is something analogous to being a member of a poetry “scene,” though Ron notes (as I would) that membership in…
Hi Del!
Let me join Stephanie in welcoming Del Ray Cross and his daily anachronizms to blogland.
Contributors’ Notes: Yes or No?
Here’s a question for everyone: Should poetry mags have contributors’ notes? You know, those little things in the back pages that say, “So-and-so’s poetry has appeared here, here, and here; he/she teaches at the College of Wherever and lives with her/his two dogs.” I ask because neither of the two journals I’m currently reading (The Hat and New American Writing)…
Noelle Kocot: The Raving Fortune
I first read Noelle Kocot in the first issue of Lungfull I ever picked up. My immediate sense was that her poem (“Palm Sunday, 1998”) didn’t belong there. I mean, I could see certain surface resemblances between it and the other poetry in the journal, but the differences were striking: it had an explicitly religious theme; it was formalist (a…
SHAMPOO 5th Anniversary Celebration!
From SHAMPOO editor Del Ray Cross: This is to happily inform you that I’m going to host an unprecedented 5th Anniversary SHAMPOO Celebration and Reading on: Thursday, August 18 at 6:30pm at GalleryOne San Francisco Mezzanine Level of One Embarcadero Center (same building as Embarcadero Cinema) on the corner of Battery and Clay Streets Expect to hear some poetry from…
Weather change–at last–like a fever breaking. A string of 90-degree-plus days stretching back to May; this past week too hot for coherent thought, our two portable air conditioners creating pitiful auras of cool we huddled around like a stove. In the car on Sunday the external temperature read 108. Monday evening the air finally cracked open: hours of lightning, power…
Anthologize This! (II)
Kasey on “hot ecleticism”: I’ll leave myself open to the possibility that there is a way of valuing both Sharon Olds and Carla Harryman on a hotly eclectic level. My instinct tells me, however, that such appreciation must occur on a carefully measured and considered individual level that is a bit much to ask any anthology to be responsible for.…
Anthologize This!
[Note: I’ve belatedly realized that I stole the title of this post from Shin Yu Pai‘s review of several Asian American literary anthologies in the most recent issue of Hyphen. Apologies to Shin Yu for that. Guess it was a good title.] Ron and Kasey, among others, discuss what it would be like to construct an Anthology of Twentieth-Century American…