News from Cassie that the Poetry Espresso discussion group is serving its last cup on April 30. The list was kind enough to feature some of my stuff two (!) years ago, and I’ve always admired it as a model of how serious discussion of poetry and poetics can take place on a list in a civil and friendly atmosphere.
Jeremy Bushnell on Li Bloom‘s reading at Myopic on Sunday–which I’m very sorry to have missed (family obligations kept me away). But Li says: it was “‘Chicago’ soulful.”
Poem: To Americans Abroad aubergine is nevertheless capable of holding its aubergine is een gastenverblijf op 10 min aubergine is de afrikaanse aubergine of antroewa aubergine is aubergine is only minutes away from some of the world’s finest shops aubergine is agreeably reduced to a moral pulp and mashed together with the aubergine is that the vegetable curry is a…
My favorite moments in the Tanning profile: “By then [the 1980s], the most important people in her life were poets. Mainly, they were new friends–[Richard] Howard and [W.S.] Merwin and J.D. McClatchy and Harry Mathews and Anthony Hecht and Adrienne Rich. They had come to replace the artists in her own circle…and to her mind they formed a much more…
Although I’m afraid I’m going to have to agree with J.D. McClatchy (shudder) on that ban of “aubergine.” It’s a little too precious, non?
Yeah, Josh, I was just reading that New Yorker profile of Dorothea Tanning, too. I guess it was kind of irritating because of its self-congratulatory angle–a glowing New Yorker profile of a New Yorker poet–but after a while it just became a kind of silly testament to how the New Yorker long ago abandoned anything like serious literary criticism (especially…
Short Weekend for Alli Warren The clenched jaw in a dark room coming, like all what- have-you. It’s not mine to carriage or kiss. Part sugar, part spilt milk: nothing to do with eventually, or a way of knowing nothing
Kasey’s posted Richard Brautigan’s poem “‘Star-Spangled’ Nails,” alongside a photograph of the flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. In Kasey’s comment box, Henry Gould responded: “Don’t forget that in order to promote your political sentiment (regarding this juxtaposition of images), you have to deny, belittle or negate the beliefs & commitments of those actually in the coffins.” I…
A Dog Shit Poem for Alli Warren and Catherine Meng I am incubating some dog shit in the yard, next to the dead bird and its wing. My gaze is tugging on one and then the other. When I come out the next morning the pile of shit is bigger than the message of complaint that’s left in my mailbox…
After a great discussion here about what to call a certain mode of contemporary poetry–postmodern? experimental? innovative? avant-garde?–the same note is sounding over at the Boston Comment “Avant-Garde Debate”, with fine and sensible contributions by Oren Izenberg, Steve Burt, Kent Johnson, and Joe Amato, among others, which by and large decline to be pushed into the fisticuffs encouraged by the…