Why Television Sucks on her mother...

For the last ten years of her life, she has been a Hospice Nurse. What this means is, my mother has seen a LOT OF PEOPLE DIE. A LOT. She is at peace about her passage. She has seen things, she tells me. The same things, over and over and over, as the end approaches. She knows there is a system in place on the other side to shepherd you into the next world. She says, “At some point, they begin to focus on a point up and in the corner of their room, and their eyes are FOCUSING on something, and they speak to it and LISTEN TO IT. It starts out as “No.” Or, “I’m Scared.” And they pause and listen. Sometimes, this will go on for days. Until, finally, the dying person will be looking at the spot, and out of nowhere say, “Yes. Allright.” And they close their eyes and pass away. TIME AFTER TIME AFTER TIME. My mother says, when you ask who they are talking to, it is a relative who is dead, Aunt, Uncle, Mother, Father. She also said 100% of men, when they die, call out for their mothers.

Silliman on Creeley

I walked around all day yesterday with a huge ball of emotion inside of me, feeling completely bereft at the death of Robert Creeley...

Jorie Graham on NPR radio

Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, when American soldiers were once again heading off to war, the poet Jorie Graham found herself walking the beaches of Normandy. She was struck by thoughts of the American soldiers who landed on the coast of France. In the hedgerows and fields, she found images of death and remembrance.

Soon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer began trying to make sense of wars past and present. The result is a new book of her poetry, Overlord. It's the code name for the U.S. invasion of Europe and its also an attempt by Graham to connect soldiers serving today in Iraq to those who fought before them, as well as a search for what binds soldiers of all uniforms, Iraqis, Germans, Americans -- all dying for a cause -- and leaving unanswered questions be

The (NY) Sun shines on Ashbery

The biggest surprise of his life, he said, is having found as many readers as he has. (His new book, "Where Shall I Wander," has an initial print run of more than 9,000 copies, which is a lot in the poetry world.) He has always been a difficult poet, and even his most ardent admirers throw up their hands over some of his work. But few have ever doubted his talent, and against all odds, he has become relatively popular

Submitting to Magma 33

Submissions received now will be considered for Magma 33 (November 2005), which will have Tim Kindberg as Editor. He invites poems on the theme of "40,733,985 minutes of obscurity" - of life beyond the Warholian 15 minutes of fame. The unnoticed, the ignored; an interstice between two blades of grass, in a municipal park you once walked across; an arm caught in the background of a photograph; the extras in last night's film. Poems on other subjects will also be considered.

The World Is a Beautiful Place

The world is a beautiful place
to be born intoif you don't mind happiness
not always beingso very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and thenjust when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you...

Ferlingetti, via growabrain,

Astley comes out swinging...

Our self-regarding poetry establishment is completely out of touch with the readership of poetry at grassroots level, and if they aren't responsive to that audience, they will lose it completely. I don't often find myself agreeing with A.N. Wilson but he seems spot on with this remark: 'Today's English poets are huddled behind a stockade composed of the public's indifference and their own self-importance' (Daily Telegraph, 24 January 2005).

Nor is this a peculiarly English or British phenomenon: it seems to go with the nature of the all-too-familiar beast, Homo poeticus. This is Billy Collins, writing in the New York Times: 'One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves andhow generally we are ignored by everybody else' (23 February 2003).

And this is Les Murray: 'Poetry has been captured by a class which prohibits the positive. They see themselves as in perpetual rebellion against society, and it's a rather sour, radical rebellion. I don't buy it, particularly as it practises heavy bullying and manipulation of fashion against people' (NewZealand Herald, 12 May 2003).

the ILD: now this could make a difference

Four billion people in developing and post-Soviet nations —two thirds of the world's population— have been locked out of the global economy: forced to operate outside the rule of law, they have no legal identity, no credit, no capital, and thus no way to prosper. The Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), based in Lima, Peru, has created a key that can open the system to everyone — a time-tested strategy for legal reform that offers the majority of the world's people a stake in the market economy.

'The most promising anti-poverty initiative in the world is that being advanced by the ILD."

Bill Clinton

Adrienne Rich gives masterclass in right-on sincerity...

If you love language and see it being betrayed, if you feel a huge gap between what you're told is going on and what you actually see and feel on your nerves -- then this is the material of your art, there's no escaping it.

"The question then is, how do you make enduring beauty and form out of such materials?
"And that will be the question of a lifetime."

'A writer

is dear and neccesary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul'.

Tolstoy

Brenda Maddox on the Fading of Freud

Modifying existence is where neuroscience meets psychoanalysis. Freudian theory is having to make peace with the new theories of the causation of behaviour.

Irish Curse Engine

Select one item from each of the boxes below and click on the "Mallacht" button to generate your curse in Irish.

Via Davezilla

Scottish poetry in terrible state?

The herald moans about Scottish publishing. But like in politics... What with Robertson running Cape and Paterson at Picador, maybe they shouldn't sweat it.

Paglia talks poetry to Newday

In "Break, Blow, Burn," Paglia approaches poetry with a similar kind of reverence for craft, noting, for example, the way Shakespeare strings a sentence along in Sonnet 29 to create a palpable tension, leaving it unrelieved until the poem's final rhyming couplet, "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings/ That then I scorn to change my state with kings." It is no accident that the book's title comes from a poem by Donne. "I've always loved that poem," says Paglia, "in part because he compares God to a potter."

how to fold a paper in half twelve times: the algorhythm

the art of the caption: squooshy pineapples

The Flame to end all Flames

Makes some of Duhig's curses look polite....

Hear Tennyson reading the Charge of the Light Brigade

Half a league, half a league,Half a league onward,All in the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.'Forward the Light Brigade!Charge for the guns!' he said:Into the valley of DeathRode the six hundred

Elite Combat Unicycles

scroll down to see them in action...

Museum of Hoaxes

including an important collection of ideas for April Fools day...

Roddy Lumsden's Mistakes Poets Make

Be prepared for your minor competition win to herald ten years of arid obscurity rather than the sunlit uplands of the success you drunkenly imagined was then secured.

(from Magma)

Because you've only got one life to live

Extract your own DNA by spitting gargled salt water into diluted washing-up liquid and slowly dribbling ice-cold gin down the side of the glass. Spindly white clumps which form in the mixture are, basically, you.

Guide to determine if you are a Jerry Bruckheimer movie...

. Your girlfriend is a waitress, but could be a model.
2. A bus explodes.
3. A psychopathic millionaire devises an elaborate plan to murder you or someone you know ...
4. ... and you feel compelled to stop it.
5. You are Nicholas Cage.
6. Despite a total lack of training, you are able to shoot and fight with the accuracy and ability of a special-forces soldier.

In case you've ever been tempted to skydive

take a look at this video...

Groucho's Letter to Warner Brothers

While preparing to film a movie entitled A Night in Casablanca, the Marx brothers received a letter from Warner Bros. threatening legal action if they did not change the film’s title. Warner Bros. deemed the film’s title too similar to their own Casablanca, released almost five years earlier in 1942, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. In response Groucho Marx dispatched the following letter to the studio’s legal department:

Get your 'I park like an idiot' bumper sticker

notice the sunken Cessna ...

Ten Bulls by Kakuan

In the pasture of this world, I endlessly push aside the tall grasses in search of the bull.
Following unnamed rivers, lost upon the interpenetrating paths of distant mountains,
My strength failing and my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the bull.
I only hear the locusts chirring through the forest at night...

How we work: Paul Valery

"Yesterday was my Birth Day,” Coleridge wrote in his notebook in 1804, when he was thirty-two. “So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month.—O Sorrow and Shame. . . . I have done nothing!” It was true...

(via rodcorp How WE Work)

Bird with Two Right Wings

And now our government
a bird with two right wings
flies on from zone to zone
while we go on having our little fun & games
at each election
as if it really mattered who the pilot is
of Air Force One
(They're interchangeable, stupid!)
...
(lawrence ferlingetti, via growabrain)

The sounds of Antarctica

again via information junk

Breugellian expressions as bat lands in crowd

via Information Junk at http://footprints.organique.com/

Banksy strikes again

Pics of Banks current ouvre, and impressive it is.

Between Herbert and Easter

Discipline



Throw away Thy rod,
Throw away thy wrath;
O my God,
Take the gentle path.

For my heart’s desire
Unto Thine is bent;
I aspire
To a full consent.

Not a word or look
I affect to own,
But by book,
And Thy Book alone.

Though I fail, I weep;
Though I halt in pace,
Yet I creep
To the throne of grace.

Then let wrath remove,
Love will do the deed;
For with love
Stony hearts will bleed.

Love is swift of foot’
Love’s a man of war,
And can shoot,
And can hit from far.

Who can scape his bow?
That which wrought on Thee,
Brought thee low,
Needs must work on me.

Throw away thy rod:
Though man frailties hath,
Thou art God’
Throw away thy Wrath.


Geroge Herbert

Clive James on Camille Paglia

Clearly designed as a come-on for bright students who don't yet know very much about poetry, Camille Paglia's new book anthologizes 43 short works in verse from Shakespeare through to Joni Mitchell, with an essay about each

Judith Wilson fellowship at Cambridge

Faculty of English
Applications are invited from practising poets for a Visiting Fellowship of a period between three and six months (one or two academic terms) in the period 1 October 2005 – 31 March 2006. The Visiting Fellow will reside in Cambridge during the tenure of their appointment, and work directly with students for at least three teaching contact hours a week. A stipend equivalent to £7,500 per term (3 month period), pro rata, is offered, together with an affiliation to Girton College. Applicants should send a curriculum vitae, an official application form, and a statement of up to 500 words outlining their current writing projects, how they would use the Fellowship, and ways in which they would work with students. Applications forms and further details of the post are available from the Secretary, Judith E Wilson Committee, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP (email: chgd2@cam.ac.uk). The closing date is 15 April 2005. Interviews will be held on 19 May.
Click here for Employer Profile
If you apply for this position, please say you saw it on jobs.ac.uk

Looking for the Comet

You push back the sheet, leave me
naked and cooling in the night air.
You stand by the window,
by the yellow flowers in their blue vase
and there’s moon on your face and shoulders.
“It’s here”, you say, but I’m pretending sleep,
and just watch you, watching the comet
moving off towards the sun and beyond.

A car passes. Headlights fill the window,
making new shadows, that rise, then fall.
You take a flower from the vase,
carry it to me in both hands, slowly wipe
the petals over my face. Now, I can smell
the pollen on my skin, feel the trail.

Andrew Waterhouse

Query Letters I love

real life query letters sent to a hollywood exec. Liven any morning...

Wole Solinka's Reith Lectures

Subject for the Nigerian Nobel Prize winning poet: the climate of fear....

Power at last: Bysshe, would you were here now...

Poets and politicians may seem like strange bedfellows. But MSPs from all over Scotland have been commissioning poets to write public verse, as part of the Holyrood Poetry Link 20

In case you missed Todd Swift's

royal wedding poem...

AR Ammons essays reviewed

Or as Richard Howard puts it, in the book's bristling opening piece, "the shore, the beach, or the coastal creek is not a place but an event" for Ammons, and a spiritual one at that. Howard cites these quintessential lines from Ammons' 1965 masterpiece, "Corsons Inlet": "There are dunes of motion, / organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance/ in the overall wandering of mirroring mind: / but the Overall is beyond me."

Stanza hosting four US poets

Doty is not a religious man, yet he ponders glimpses of heaven through various sets of eyes, Paul’s among them.

On Saturday the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside, in conversation with Richard Holloway about "Poetry and the Spirit", praised American poets for their willingness to engage with spiritual issues.

Beam your craiglist add into outerspace

craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster won an eBay auction for the first private communication transmission light years into deep space, with the idea of offering this opportunity to craigslist users.

Poemanias own trojan horse...

slipped undercover and got into the city. Its been hard updating the blog for the last few days. We're working on it.

Rich prize

Adrienne gets the NBCCA poetry prize


(via the poetry page)

Alnutt's sixty grand...yea, that's sixty

courtesy of Northern Rock. When Penelope Fitzgerald won the booker, she said she would spend the winnings on a new iron. Gillian has grander plans: a new roof AND a computer...

Rae Armentrout: Cosmology and me

I left Christianity behind in my teenage years but, predictably, I didn’t leave the questions or the habits of mind I formed within it. For the last fifteen years or so I’ve taken an interest in cosmology and physics. I don’t think it’s because I’m looking for an authoritative view of reality different from the one I grew up with


(via the page)

Moby lives discussion on first novels

via bookslut

Billy Collins on the good life

Contrary to popular opinion, poetry in America is not a dying art, at least as far as Billy Collins is concerned.

The science of charity

Not that Homo sapiens is the only species in which individuals bestow kindness on others. Many mammals, birds, insects and even bacteria do likewise. But their largesse tends to be reserved for their genetic relatives; this makes sense in evolutionary terms, because by helping someone who shares many of your genes you improve the chances of propelling this common DNA into the future. Humans are different, for we cooperate with complete genetic strangers - workmates, neighbours, anonymous people in far-off countries. Why on earth do we do that?

Kathryn Gray interviewed by Bookninja

It begins twenty years ago. I am standing in a sports hall, arms crossed, round-shouldered, flat-chested, goose-flesh and all. I am the last girl left to be picked and even then I am taken in a gesture of magnanimity and goodwill. Less accepted than tolerated. These girls, I think - no I’m sure - are supposed to be my friends. But I’ll show them. I lumber around with my arms in the air. I jump up and down on the spot. I cry out for the chance, the ball is passed - away from me. I cry out, the ball arches over me. I cry out and the ball is thrown offside or anywhere - rather than to me. An hour of despair passes like this. Yes, it really is that simple. It all began with being not very good at netball. It all began with shame.

The Bookslut Guide to Book Lovers Trivial Pursuit

Okay, so you’re caught in the grip of winter, and you can’t afford cable, and all of your spare change gets turned into either booze or books. Why not spend your time hiding out with your friends playing Trivial Pursuit? But if you don’t want to play a game where every fifth answer is either Richard Nixon or the Dallas Cowboys, where are you going to turn?

What else are we doing when we watch a movie?

Literary theory is being influenced more and more by research in cognitive psychology, and as the previous article I discussed showed, psychology research is also influenced by theory. Today’s article, “Generating Predictive Inferences While Viewing a Movie” (Joseph P. Magliano, Northern Illinois University, and Katinka Dijkstra and Rolf A. Zwaan, Florida State University, in Discourse Processes, 1996), is another example...

Motion fights the curriculum NI knights

Listen to his radio interview here for insight into what it takes to change the way your kids are taught...written interview is worth a read too...

Not a bad BBC collection of audiopoems...

Armitage, Heaney, Auden, Hegley, you get the idea...

The toilet roll dilemmas...

scroll down the page for further oriental enlightenment...

(via kottke)

The day Paul Muldoon brought home a Fender Stratocaster

(Pauls wife recalls) 'When Paul played his guitar in the basement, the whole building vibrated, and I would sit there, one story up, swaying with nausea. When I couldn't stand it any longer, I went to the top of the basement stairs and flicked the light to get his attention. "Please. Stop." He stopped. But not for long...

New Bono jeans come with embroidered Rilke...

Exactly why poemanias is doing product placement remains a mystery...

via choriamb

Umberto Eco explains novels and death...

His argument in "Functions of Literature" runs something like this. A common assumption is that facts about the world are unchanging but interpretations of fiction are up in the air, are malleable. But the opposite is true, Eco claims.

Facts about the world, you see, can be revised in the face of additional evidence - ideas about the earth's position in the universe is an example of this revision. At one time the earth was thought to be the center of the universe, now we know it isn't.

Works of fiction, on the other hand, are fixed in time forever. No additional evidence can overturn a novel's facts. Captain Ahab either gets the white whale in "Moby-Dick" or he doesn't (he doesn't). Oedipus either marries his mother or he doesn't (he does). And this won't change in a year or 10 or 1,000.

via booklsut

Poet in a bear suit

Facts for Visitors, Srikanth Reddy's first collection, thrives in exotic and surreal landscapes: footpaths with "a steady stream of green ants," "a crumbling aqueduct," and "the hanging gardens of sleep," to name a few; and Reddy's subject matter, diction and choices of form further the investigation his settings instigate, probing the lines between the known world and the unknown, the inherited, now-deteriorating idiom and a new kind of lyric speech, and formal and free-verse. The book is an exquisite parcel of prose-poems, villanelles and terza rima, all executed with apparent ease, snugly packaged by Reddy's eclectic imagination

Poetry Mag and the Lilly Bequest: an interview

A year ago Feburary, a poet, investment banker, entrepreneur, college professor and founder of a successful investment banking firm, John Barr, was named president of the Poetry Foundation. The Foundation was formed to handle a bequest of $100 million made to Poetry magazine from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly...

Can the ICA be saved?

kow Eshun, newly appointed to lead London's Institute of Contemporary Arts over the next several years, quietly, but forcefully shrugs off questions about his job title. Unlike his predecessors, who were all plainly named 'director', he will be called 'artistic director'.

In case you've lost the link to Alan Eastman's poetry blog

'Given: metre and metrical verse ... () belong to the oral tradition when poetry was cast in predictable rhythms to aid memorization and summon up trance like states' - no?

Matthew Caley on Modernism, the mainstream...

It starts, as most things start, with Ezra Loomis Pound. Pound, the irascible, volcanic centre of the Modernist project, abandoned as many movements as he started, leaving the beginnings of multiple possible paths barely touched on. His own development rapidly ran through the Georgian lyric, neo-Troubadour poetry, ballads, sestinas, Anglo-Saxon voyage poems, Imagism, haiku and Chinese translations - amongst other things - before hitting the ‘major’ works Mauberley and Propertius and of course, the Cantos, sixty years in the making and abandoned, not finished. Yet he is a contemporary -

Perloff on Free Verse forms

The so-called freedom of free verse must be understood in this context. When Pound declares in Canto 81, "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave," he is speaking to a particular situation in late-Victorian "genteel" verse, when meter stood for a particular collective attitude, a social and cultural restriction on the "freedom" of the subject.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, coming out of an entirely different tradition, but in the same time period, makes a similar gesture when he declares in 1926, "Trochees and iambs have never been necessary to me. I don't know them and don't want to know them. Iambs impede the forward movement of poetry"

UK Poets: Here's a list of Mags taking submissions (via Litrefs)

Acumen (gets 15,000 poems/year)
Ambit (poetry/prose)
Aesthetica (poetry/prose)
Dreamcatcher (poetry/prose)
Granta (prose)
Interpreter's House (poetry)
Interzone (SF)
Iota (poetry)
Liar Republic
London Magazine (poetry/prose)
Magma (poetry)
Modern Poetry in Translation
MsLexia (women only)
Neon Highway (experimental poetry)
the North (poetry)
Other Poetry
Oxford Poetry
Pennine Ink (poetry/prose)
PN Review (poetry)
Poetry London
Poetry Monthly
Poetry Nottingham
Poetry Now
Poetry Review (gets 30,000 poems/year)
Presence (Haiku)
Pretext (poetry/prose)
The Rialto (poetry)
Shearsman (late-modernist poetry)
smoke: a london peculiar (poetry/prose)
South (poetry)
STAND (poetry/prose)
Staple
Tears in the fence (poetry/prose)
The Third Alternative
Wasafiri (poetry/prose)
Weyfarers (poetry) The main magazines about writing (some available in newsagents) are
MsLexia
Writer Forum (writint@lobalnet.co.uk)
The New Writer (admin@thenewwriter.com)
Writing Magazine (christine.sheppard@writersnews.co.uk) Web magazines include
Boomerang
Snakeskin
Stride
London Review of Books
The TLS.

Magma and Motion

Mick Delap interviews the Poet Laureate, with an interlude about founding Magma

Archive: Discussion between Vendler, Burt, Scharf and Perloff: Poetry Criticism - what is it for?

Burt: 'Louise Glück has argued that some of our most difficult poets are practicing ersatz thought, trying to take credit for grand philosophical gestures and genre-breaking meta-creations when in fact they've run out of things to say.

I didn't like that essay when I first read it, but now I think she has a point. The linguistic turn, the turn towards extreme surface difficulty, in contemporary writing—and not only in self-described "language writing"—came about in part because third-generation American confessional poetry, poetry about the biographical and affective history of the self, by the mid-1980s had become omnipresent, exhausted, and dull. (Unless it was by Glück herself, or by Frank Bidart.)

But now it's disturbing to see how readily computer programs can simulate the farthest-out, least-referential "innovative writing"; do we really want more poems that wouldn't pass Turing tests?

Why I am not a Painter by Frank O'hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have sardines in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's sardines?"
All that's left is just
letters. "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it oranges. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called sardines.

The Rat by Don Paterson

The Rat by Don Paterson

Taken from Landing Light published by Faber & Faber

A young man wrote a poem about a rat.
It was the best poem ever written about a rat.
To read it was to ask the rat to perch
on the arm of your chair until you turned the page.
So we wrote to him, but heard nothing; we called,
and called again; then finally we sailed
to the island where he kept the only shop
and rapped his door until he opened up.

We took away his poems. Our hands shook
with excitement. We read them on lightboxes,
under great lamps. They were not much good.
So then we offered what advice we could
on his tropes and turns, his metrical comportment,
on the wedding of the word to the event,
and suggested that he might read this or that.
We said Now:write us more poems like The Rat.

All we got was cheek from him. Then silence.
We gave up on him. Him with his green arrogance
and ingratitude and his one lucky strike.
But today I read The Rat again. Its reek
announced it; then I saw its pisshole stare;
line by line it strained into the air.
Then it hissed. For all the craft and clever-clever
you did not write me, fool. Nor will you ever.



20 poemanias points if you can quote the poem this was inspired by.

A study guide to Simon Armitage

you don't have to be taking GCSE's...

Rae Armentrout interviewed by Here Comes Everybody

Where are they buried?

108 poets included so far...more coming soon...

do you have to rub it in?

Kickass politics

from the Guardian

Personality disorder test

Camille Paglia says...

Commentary on poetry is a kind of divination, resembling the practice of oracles, sibyls, augurs, and interpreters of dreams. Poets speak even when they know their words will be swept away by the wind. In college Greek class, I was amazed by the fragments of Archaic poetry - sometimes just a surviving phrase or line - that vividly conveyed the personalities of their authors, figures like Archilochus, Alcman and Ibycus, about whom little is known. The continuity of Western culture is demonstrated by lyric poetry.

hmm

A remote tribe that lacks a counting system suggests

Ask a member of the Pirahã tribe to count a cluster of pebbles, and even the brightest member of this isolated Amazonian tribe will probably respond with a blank stare. This is because the Pirahã do not have words for precise quantities or the action of counting--instead they quantify objects approximately, using words analogous to our "few" and "many." Even their word for one, "hói," might be more accurately translated as "about one,"

Whitman in Grub Street

In the years leading up to the war, Whitman, that old "Bowery B'hoy," was a Grub Street journo and frequenter of Pfaff's saloon, headquarters of New York's free-loving bohemian set. He was known as a "rough," a "rowdy" who fraternized with cabdrivers and longshoremen. The erotically tinged "Calamus" poems, written about 1860, suggest Whitman as something of a cruiser. In modern parlance, this street-level versifier was akin to a gay, hirsute Eminem.

via the page

Archive: interview with Forward First Collection winner Tom French

Recently I’ve been trying to work out a poem about the accidental meeting between a trainee sniffer dog and the ghost of a soldier in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, one searching for a medal for bravery his fellow soldiers buried in the grounds as a practical joke (which he failed to find while he was still alive), and the other for a kilo of hash in a zip-lock bag. At the moment, though, it’s still just a yarn.

Neil Rollinson the Builder

What has us got here?
The shell of a hairdresser’s shop,
a bank, an old coaching inn,
and who knows what else
in the dim and distant past,
dirty and dusty from frack
to bunt, the floors all damp
and screedy, the yellow welts
of datums scarring the plaster.

Five points interview with Michael Longley

Longley: I mean, I wouldn't want to disown the earlier “me's,” the earlier versions of me, and, in some ways, I would very much like to go back to the way I was writing when I was young, which was formally and elaborate. I think, too, and this might be true of life generally, that as you get older, you discover some quite simple things which take a long time to discover, like what you like and who you are. And up until then, you're trying on faces and you're trying things out, and this self-knowledge leads to a kind of insouciance, not giving a fuck, right?

Poemanias back on air

after 48 hours of service provided disruption. Apparently there was a leaf on the phone connection or something.

Not to mention Fenton on Lawrence

see that Miranda Seymour, reviewing the new biography of DH Lawrence, claims that, in 2005, Lawrence is "unstudied and unloved by any but a staunch group of specialists". This is amazing. I bought the Penguin Popular Classics edition of Sons and Lovers at Hamburg station the other day, and a Wordsworth Classics edition of the poems not long before that. Does this make me staunch?

Tim Kendall reviewed

in this weeks Guardian.

Anne Stevenson's sonnet workshop

gets into gear...

I suggest that you begin by reading ALOUD as many sonnets as you can get hold of. These days, you have a lot more liberty than Shelley did. 'The Windhover' by Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, is a sonnet in 'sprung rhythm' that flouts the 10-syllable rule. George Meredith, in a sequence called 'Modern Love', wrote 16-line sonnets, and the American poet John Berryman wrote nearly as many love sonnets as Shakespeare in a very idiosyncratic idiom.

An interview with David Berman

He is David Berman, lead singer of the Silver Jews, former roommate to Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus, and author of an acclaimed and eminently readable first collection of poetry entitled Actual Air (Open City, 1999). He describes his poems as “psychedelic soap operas,” and in them he name-checks such pop cultural icons and brand-name products as Judas Priest, Visine, Woolite, and Elmer of Elmer’s Glue...

via choriamb

Ted Kooser will use newspaper column to reach more readers

How do you bring poetry to the people? Deliver it to their front doors, of course.
Which is precisely what U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser plans to do.

The Rebellion of ee cummings

"So far as I am concerned," Cummings once declared, "poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality....Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else."

Meghan O'Rourke on How To Read John Ashbery

Ashbery becomes a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter, so that the poems are like the sound you would hear if you spun through the FM/AM dial without stopping to tune into any one program for long. Sometimes (as you can imagine) this is infuriating. But in the best of Ashbery, the excess verbiage helps make the moments of lyric focus all the more propulsive and startling, like coming across a lost tune as you spin the dial...'

A more interesting review here, from Slate, though Meghan cuts a lot of slack. Since when does 'excess verbiage' help?

TLS on The Riddles of Kafka

...So too it is with biographers. They prefer the working hypothesis that the life is a decipherable enigma, not an insoluble mystery: anything else lets the curiosity, the ambition to want-to-know-exactly go to sleep too soon. In a related case, the Italian Germanist Giuseppe Bevilacqua has shown how far one can get with such a hypothesis. For decades he has studied the late poems of Paul Celan, to the common reader as opaquely unintelligible as most pieces by the writer from Prague. Under Bevilacqua’s expert scrutiny, that reads the life and work together, these dark forms bloom into a confession, coded in a private language, from which even the timing of Celan’s long-planned suicide can be inferred.

Interview with Andrew Motion

before he kicks off his new radio series on the practical business of writing poetry and Motion hopes that if people have a greater understanding of how poetry is written then it will help them enjoy it more - whether to read or write.

Man with clever plan. Arranges poetry slam. Except it's haiku.

The tension at Caffe Roma in North Beach Friday night is not about whether haiku will be created and shared. All around the small cafe, pencils are poised ...

Did Pound come from Co. Sligo?

Or maybe its co. Cork? Can't quite tell from this real audio reading of Canto 1. Wherever its from, listen out for that mean high tremolo...

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure --
if it is a pleasure --
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one...

(its got to be...billy collins)

Julian Barnes on Flaubert's Parrot

One evening in 1983, I was having a drink with Kingsley Amis. He made the mistake of asking me what I was working on. I made the mistake of telling him. I made the further mistake of not looking across at him, in order the better to concentrate. My account would have involved words such as "Flaubert" and "parrot" and perhaps, as an indicator of generic category, the phrase "an upside-down sort of novel". As I was nearing the end of my preliminary outline - still with some way to go - I glanced up, and was confronted with an expression poised between belligerent outrage and apoplectic boredom. It was the sort of look pioneered by Evelyn Waugh and now more or less extinct in literary society...

from the Wisdom of Bob Dylan

A man [woman] is a success if he [she] gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he [she] does what he [she] wants to do. Bob Dylan~

Tim Yu on the fallout

from his decision to quit the poetics list...

Oliver Sacks

'fell in with the poet and motorcycle enthusiast, the late Thom Gunn. '

"Thom had a poem called 'The Wolf Boy', and he speaks of the duplicity of the wolf boy, between his social life and his nocturnal - that appealed to me very much, the more so as my middle name is Wolf, and so I could pretend to have a sort of lycanthropic part. I would be Dr Oliver Sacks, the intern, wearing a white coat in the daytime, and then, when the day was over, I would take off into the night, and go for long, crazy moonlit rides."

Lets pretend we're in a Dutch Master's...

Ludicrous pictures of 2004: the NYT poets symposium ever so precisely catches the spirit of the age...Bloom resting from a ho-down (and why is he there in the first place?), Komunyakaa, Paul Muldoon, Deborah Garrison, John Ashbery and Jorie Graham all do fine imitations of cardboard cut-outs. The attached 'symposium' is completely rivetting too...

and Gawker review McGraths Ashbery review...

McGrath writes that “Ashbery, now, at 77, seems almost avuncular, the grand old man of American poetry…” Ah, if by avuncular (aka uncle-like) you mean like Uncle Creepo, well, sure. Check out this photo at right, in which Ashbery looks like he’s getting ready to eat a small toddler for lunch.

(via dumfoundry)

NYTimes's McGrath does Ashbery

And elsewhere, there are midnight forests, unlit fires, whistling winds, ebbing tides, skies ''cold and gray'' -- the whole romantic landscape seen in the flat, almost clinical light of hindsight. But the response is practical and accommodating, a recognition that things aren't as bad as they might have been; instead of full-fledged disaster there's just erosion and disappointment:

All hell didn't break loose, it was like a
rising psalm
materializing like snow on an unseen
mountain.
All that was underfoot was good, but lost.

Causal Fallacies

Post Hoc : Because one thing follows another, it is held to be caused by the
other.
Joint effect : One thing is held to cause another when in fact they are both the
joint effects of an underlying cause.
Insignificant : One thing is held to cause another, and it does, but it is
insignificant compared to other causes of the effect.
Wrong Direction : The direction between cause and effect is reversed.
Complex Cause : The cause identified is only a part of the entire cause of the effect.

So it's not just Canada that plagued by monotones...

Many readers admitted to the same bafflement over why anyone would go to public readings. Many correspondents expressed frustration at the mandatory monotone of the Canadian poetry reading. We do all know the sinking feeling one has on finding a seat in a dark room and hearing the first reader get up and begin intoning with that regular stressing of every second syllable that poetry seems to encourage -- you know: "If I hear a no ther po etry read ing that sounds like this I'm go ing to DIE...

via bookslut

The Pleasure Principle

It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regard as complicated. Take, for instance, the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, costruct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, anytime. The thirds stage is the recurrant situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary.

Philip Larkin

Form

Trying to tell it all to y0u and cover everything
Is like awakening from its grassy form the hare:
In that make-shift shelter your hand, then my hand
Mislays the hare and the warmth it leaves behind.

Michael Longley

File under: apocryphal epitaphs

Here lies the bones of Copperstone Charlotte
Born a virgin, died a harlot
For sixteen years she kept her virginity
A damned long time in this vicinity

via realefun

The Guardian's March Workshop with Anne Stevenson

Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms. Originality and inspiration can take you anywhere.
Or can they?

Since this is an exercise, I'd like you write at least one sonnet in which, using contemporary language to express some aspect of life today, you conform to the rules set long ago either by Shakespeare or Petrarch. Then, if you wish, you can experiment with a second poem of 14 lines in which you freely bend the rules.

Email your submissions to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk by midnight on Sunday March 13. Anne's responses will appear on the site in the following week

Coming up in March...

Mark Doty, The School of Arts (Cape)

Barbara Guest, The Red Gaze (Weselyan University Press)

Jen Hadfield, Almanacs (Bloodaxe)

Christopher Logue, Cold Calls - War Music continued (Faber)

Glyn Maxwell, The Sugar Mile (Picador)

Squid Squad

squid squad n. A team of biologists and other scientists that researches the squid.

From Word Spy. This Web site is devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases. These aren't "stunt words" or "sniglets," but new terms that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources

Poetry, Spilt Religion, and the Poetic Imagination by Paul Lake

'The most experimentally radical and socially ambitious movement of recent decades has been “Language Poetry.” Born of various schools of Post-Structuralist criticism, and deeply influenced by Marxism and feminism, the movement’s theorists argue that language itself is a code that contains and reproduces the larger code of society; and that more than anything else, it binds us to traditional notions of self, gender, and identity. In this view, not even poetry is immune to the corrupting influence of a capitalist culture; rather, poetry is itself a commodity, infused with something called cultural capital, and must be recognized as such in order to demystify it and destroy its seductive illusions. To aid in this process, movement theorists believe that the practice of writing should be revolutionized; closure should be avoided and meaning made indeterminate so that reading becomes more democratized as each reader learns to construct a text’s meaning for him or herself. Narrative, argument, the poetic line, grammar, syntax, and even spelling should be broken open to allow an infinite play of interpretive possibilities, as well as to expose the sinister workings of language (poemanias italics).'

This is an odd one, but at least we get to see a Contemporary Poetry Review piece for free.

Hear Wallace Steven's reading

in what sounds like a submarine.

The selection includes "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain," and "Vacancy in the Park." Note that the .ra format is real audio.

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Mark Strand

Archive: THE POETICS OF L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

in case you missed Bruce Andrew's manifesto:

'The normal starts to seem precarious, contingent, even exceptional.'

'I want something that holds together that’s not smooth.'

is it just me or does it begin to feel like an interior designer's notebook...

The best American Poetry 2004...

doesn't include Kleinzahler (what??), but does bring in Muldoon. Hmm. Fair enough, though its unlikely Paul has changed passports. The idea is a good one, the list fairly authoritative (chosen by Lyn Hejinian), but a lot of the links don't get to the poems themselves.

Exhumed: interview with Ian Duhig

'There is a fantasy abroad that the principal function of language is to communicate. In many circumstances the principal function of language is to excommunicate'.

Not sure when this came online, but its a fascinating piece of internet archeology, Ian interviewed not long after the whole New Gen thing.

Japan Times reviews The Tanka Anthology

Historically, of course, the 31-syllable tanka precedes the 17-syllable haiku by more than a thousand years. Michael McClintock's detailed introduction to "The Tanka Anthology" describes the background of the form in early writing, its predominance in the first great anthologies of poetry, and its naturalness and suitability to the rhythms of the Japanese language. From its first appearance in the eighth-century "Man'yoshu" to its best-seller status at the hands of contemporary poets, this form has had an extraordinarily long run by any standards

on Bukowski's afterlife

An uncannily prolific afterlife was something that Bukowski counted on. As early as 1970, he wrote to his editor, “just think, someday after I’m dead and they start going for my poems and stories, you will have a hundred stories and a thousand poems on hand. you just don’t know how lucky you are, babe.” In the next quarter century, the surplus grew, thanks to Bukowski’s nearly graphomaniacal fecundity. “I usually write ten or fifteen [poems] at once,” he said, and he imagined the act of writing as a kind of entranced combat with the typewriter, as in his poem “cool black air”: “now I sit down to it and I bang it, I don’t use the light / touch, I bang it'

(via the page)

Feb/March: Poemanias is reading...

RUBICON: the triumph and tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Hollander. Absolute masterpiece; great build up chapters sketch in the early years of the republic. By the time it reaches the civil wars and Ceasar the narrative is un-putdownable. Remarkable achievement, considering all the scolarly credentials are intact. Instant Poemanias award.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Afghan boy growing up in Kabul in the 80's, followed by a diaspora to the US West Coast. Pretty stunning. Poemanias doesn't do novels a whole lot, but this is a shoe in-for book to take on the plane. Very, very, very good.

Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes. New cultural history of Russia by the author of the gripping A People's Tragedy. An excellent context filler, though the tone can get a bit thick at times - he hasn't digested the research as well here as he did in his civil war best seller.

The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio. I'm finding this one much harder going than either Descartes' Error or Looking for Spinoza. Can't tell if this is my fault or Damasios. Anyway the subject - consciousness arising out of our emotional lives - is central, Damasio's one of the experts, so this is a must read.

Warning: possibly offensive roman poem

Over on The Poem discussion board Roddy Lumsden's been looking for contemporary erotic verse. So far few suggestions. Neil Rollinsons got to be the front runner for living British writers, but check out this Martial - I wouldn't call it erotic...not to mention that Michie (the trans.) has toned it down a notch, partly to hit the rhymes.



Either get out of the house or conform to my tastes, woman

Either get out of the house or conform to my tastes, woman.
I'm no straight-laced old Roman.
I like prolonging the nights agreeably with wine: you, after one glass of water,
Rise and retire with an air of hauteur.
You prefer darkness: I enjoy love-making
With a witness - a lamp shining or the dawn breaking.
You wear bed-jackets, tunics, thick woolen stuff,
Whereas I think no woman on her back can ever be naked enough.

I love girls who kiss like doves and hang around my neck:
You give me the sort of peck
Due to your grandmother as a morning salute.
In bed, your motionless, mute -
Not a wriggle,
Not a giggle -
As solemn as a priestess at a shrine
Proffering incense and pure wine.
Yet every time Andromache went for a ride
In Hector's room, the household slaves used to masturbate outside;

Even modest Penelope, when Ulysses snored,
Kept her hand on the sceptre of her lord.
You refuse to be buggereed; but it's a known fact
That Gracchus', Pompey's and Brutus' wives were willing partners in the act,
And that before Ganymede mixed Jupiter his tasty bowl
Juno filled the dear boy's role.
If you want to be uptight - all right
By all means play Lucretia by day. But I need a Lais at night.

Common Errors in English

The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I’ll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we’re concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers. The aim of this site is to help you avoid low grades, lost employment opportunities, lost business, and titters of amusement at the way you write or speak.

Rabid Jellies

an original screenplay concept

by homer

Science Fiction: A struggling artist teams up with a plug ugly dog to find the true meaning of love. In the process they deflower four British men on welfare. By the end of the movie they blow up 3 washed up ex-SNL cast members and end up winning the admiration of their 3rd grade teacher, living happily ever after.

Think Ernest Goes to Camp meets godzilla

Tentacles of desire: the man who loved cephalopods

But what particularly caught Handley's attention was a 3-volume ukiyo-e 1 erotic book Kinoe no Komatsu (Young Pine Shoots) by Hokusai 2, published around 1814, and most particulary the several woodblock prints of octopi and female pearl divers in intimate situations contained in the work 3.

Overheard in New York

Girl: Look! Cantaloupes! Mom! Look at the cantaloupes!

Mom: No dear, cantaloupes are a fruit. These are antelopes.

At thirty, the party is over

Fact is,
the revolutionaries were cooler than the revolution,
the booze was better than the bar,
and that 'O My Comrade' anthem
sucked - (though I did hum along to those corny love songs).
But what the hell -

Apocalyse Now with gerbils...

High energy is only half of it. We also learned we need to be high concept. The commonality here, apparently, is to be high. This stress on high concept eventually led us to write The Official Movie Plot Generator - the perfect tool to provide a writer with ideas for cliché loving execs and producers! In our experience, the more cliche and hack: “A cop who doesn’t play by the rules” “A hooker with a heart of gold” “In the feel good comedy of the year” the more it seems to make studios salivate. We think it’s Pavlovian.

For those of you looking for other ways to be high concept, there are many ways to do it. You can reverse it. “It’s a reverse Shawshank Redemption. They have to break into the prison.” Or the well-known “blank meets blank.” “Die Hard meets Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Or “blank with kids” “It’s Goodfellas with kids.” “It’s blank with animals” “The Great Escape with Pets,” “Castaway with Dogs” or

Don Paterson Aphorism no.17

The sea rehearses all possible landscapes, the sky - invisibly - all possible seas. But the land is a lexicon of frozen hells, and some of us remember.

and Randall says...

"A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times."

Bad Poets by Randall Jarrell

"In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with 'This is a poem' scrawled on them in lipstick...

Aristotle's Poetics

Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.' For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause.

Green thoughts, green shades

neat little Marvell chapbook right here.

Get your copy of the Wasteland...

right here. Then backrack through Identity Theory, good site 'n all.

For those who need the numbers....

on global warming, this is one of the more sophisticated models out there. In fact the MIT one is unique in several ways (including not having to make things up as it goes along... )

The vice guide to manners...

What the fuck is the matter with people these days? They're walking around, wearing sandals, not paying for shit and talking about their dreams. Don't they know the rules? It's time we write a definitive guide to everything in the world, a list of DOs & DON'Ts that people can reference seriously and systematically for the rest of their lives.

How to sell your book, cd on Amazon

In 8 easy steps, here is how to get your book, CD, or DVD listed on the long tail of Amazon...

Cool reading on 10th March

Oxfam Books & Music 91 Marylebone High Street, W1, near Baker Street tube
7-9 pm, March 10

A. Alvarez
Ian Duhig
Sarah Maguire
Roddy Lumsden
Frank Dullaghan
Kevin Higgins (launching his debut collection)

Admission by ticket only. To reserve a ticket, call 020 7487 3570 or email oxfammarylebone at hotmail.com. I would reserve, as its likely to be sold out.

hosted by Todd Swift, Oxfam Poet In Residence (2004). All donations will go to Oxfam.

Stammers in full flight

I Don't 'Go Organic' Often, But When I Do

I don't 'go organic' often, but when I do
cash registers explode, shop assistants lurch back
beneath furry earflaps,
the wild beasts knitted on Iroquois sweaters
leap up,

their hunters let fall their bows,
returning, at all fleet, to tented encampments of their tribe
to sit wordlessly
with the Great Spirit...


See the rest of this bravura piece via link. Stammer's Stolen Love Behaviour was already a Poetry Society Book Choice, and is a must buy for poetry lovers.

Memorabilia

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!

But you were living before that,
And you are living after,
And the memory I started at –
My starting moves your laughter!

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand’s breadth of it shines alone
‘Mid the blank miles round about:

For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather-
Well, I forget the rest.


this Robert Browning poem was apparently stirred by Browning overhearing a man in a bookshop discussing meeting Shelley. It was a favourite of Michael Donaghy's, - both because of the sting in the tail, and the contemporary feel.

File under: things we take for granted (like not getting tortured for blogging)

The human rights group Human Rights First has begun a Defender Action to help Arash Sigarchi.

Not to mention a new blogger fromDamascus, who speculates on how he will respond to torture
http://amarji.blogspot.com/

Hofmann translates Durs Grunbein

In the translator's preface, Hofmann owns up to his limitations and strives to focus on using his own voice to establish a tone that is as close and authentic to Grünbein's as possible. With this approach a lot of literal meaning is lost, which is fine, but Hofmann occasionally does too much to explicate meaning, which robs some of the poems of important subtext. In being a diligent translator, Hofmann occasionally forgets that much of the joy in poetry is the reader's task of finding the hidden meaning that resides beneath words and lines. Nevertheless, Hofmann has accomplished an admirable undertaking, and he never gets to the point where he leaves the poems sterile and lifeless, which happens all too often with translated poetry.

via the page

londonmark blog is 'searching for intelligent life in camden

bloggers can syntax too...

Geographically accurate tube map of London

An essential from Kottke.org

The Farley poem on BBC 3

See what you make of it. There's a mixture of music, and Paul reciting in what sounds like actual locations; buzzing flies and streetsounds to bring up Carthage etc. Sounds are a though, but are they distracting? Pity one can't rewind (without going back to the beginning and forward-fasting again.) But Paul reads well and its vintage Farley, 'Listen to me, I was Carthage'.

Hill's Comus a miss for O'Brien

'(Milton's) Comus is a masterpiece. Hill's book - pace the Archbishop of Canterbury, Harold Bloom and AN Wilson, all brandished on the cover - is not.'

So Geoffrey's latest doesn't work for the UK's most authoritative critic (and btw, what's Sean doing writing for the Indie? Does that mean the Sunday Times isn't doing poetry reviews anymore?).

The point being made ever so politely is that being boring doesn't cut it whatever your literary model...

Don Paterson's 'How I Write'

'A great hero of mine, the American critic Randall Jarrell, said that a poem is a way of forgetting how you came to write it; if that's true, and I think it probably is, all of what follows is complete lies...'

maybe (and this theme is taken up again in the TS Eliot lecture) but still worth looking at closely. Click on the link and then 'Prose: The dilemma of the poet'.

Wittgenstein was autistic...

or at least he's up as 'differently wired' on the neurodiversity.com homepage, along with Alan Turing (no surprise there), Nickolas Tesla and Andy Worhol. There's an interesting test inside mapping emotions with facial expressions...

Ok, for those in tonight at 10:30 (UK time)

Ports Saturday 5 March 2005 22:30-23:00 (Radio 3)

In Paul Farley's evocative radio poem, three ports - Carthage, Liverpool and Rotterdam - speak to each other across the centuries and down the sea lanes. From the ruins of the great Phoenician harbour, we follow the radar-blip of commerce as it travels on from the abandoned Liverpool dockside to the cranes and containers of Europe's busiest port

Guardian reviews Alan Jenkins

Poemanias missed the launch of A Shorter Life at the Rebecca Hossack gallery last thurday (blame it on flu, on snow), but it's safe to assume Alan was wearing his traditional black woolen turtleneck, long on the booze and short on the actual reading...


"Galatea", which brings most of these preoccupations (loss, the vagrant tide, the dissatisfactions with self) bleakly together, ends with a desperate, italicised memento mori, in which a woman's voice metaphorically connects the poet-as-mariner to the work itself: "Whenever you go out, in your little craft of wood, / Your little craft of words, it will be me you hear, / It will be me reminding you of how you scorned your mother / And all women who loved you (God knows why), / It will be me reminding you that you will die, / It will be me reminding you of everything you fear."

New Glyn Maxwell poem

Sally playing Patience


It’s even got a cinema
the farmers like to go there
Joey, then they smoke cigars
they have a film discussion
in a room with velvet fittings...


(via The Page)

Turns out it was length all along...

Finger length 'key to aggression'

Finger length is linked to testosterone exposure in the wombThe length of a man's fingers can reveal how physically aggressive he is, Canadian scientists have said.
The shorter the index finger is compared to the ring finger, the more boisterous he will be, University of Alberta researchers said.
But the same was not true for verbal aggression or hostile behaviours, they told the journal Biological Psychology after studying 300 people's fingers.
The trend is thought to be linked to testosterone exposure in the womb

Its the primitive bit what learns us...

The brain is perhaps the most complex machine in existence. It contains our intellect, senses, emotions, personality, and memory -- the very things that make humans so human. Scientists used to study the brain by dissecting it or just observing behavior. But now they are able to get further inside by using electrodes and sophisticated scanners to actually see the brain firing as it functions. These mental maps are creating a new picture of gray matter -- one that shows that the most primitive part of our brain, not the most advanced, may be the engine for learning

Sable Arvon creative writing residency [UK]:

Are you a Black or Asian writer living in the West Midlands?The Sable Arvon creative writing residency with Kamau Brathwaite and Marita Golden has a bursary available for writers, provided with the support of the Heaventree Press. If you are a writer (fiction, poetry, non fiction) and wish to be part of this unique masterclass, meet other writers and work with expert tutors, please contact Kadija by e-mail, mentioning that you are from the west midlands area.The residency is for one week and takes place on the 18th to the 23rd of April 2005.

(from Dumbfoundry)

New issue of LIMELIGHT...

and its an impressive lineup:

Ian Duhig continues his string vest theme. Ian's the only poet to win the National Poetry Competition twice...

Matthew Sweeney's got four in. Matthew an odd visionary, and one of the most remarkable readers alive.

John Stammers Stolen Love Behaviour is just out. Look out for the classic 'I don't go organic often, but when I do'.

Donaghy: 'If poetry depended on intellectuals for its survival it would be about as current as hieroglyphics.

'On the graduate level, modern pedagogues have long felt disinclined to lead tour groups around the gallery waving their pointing sticks at the sheer genius of the Old Masters. They want to be the main event. Literacy corrupts, they seem to be saying, and Literature, the common ground of writing agreed to be worthy of cultural survival, is the tool of the oppressor,

These are Michael's comments on finishing the stint as resident at the poetry soc. You can follow the link and buy 'Wallflowers', which is still available and a must for all poetrylovers.

And Farley again here, interviewed by Stammers...

Well, the gap, or the shortfall if you like, between mediated experience and firsthand, physical experience, is an interesting space to get into, to explore. When I read my poems now, I’m aware that’s one of the things I’ve been trying to do. And I still find foreignness everywhere. There’s a couple of phrases from the poem you mention (‘Thorns’) where I seem to have set out my stall earlier on: ‘the eye being drawn’ or ‘my ear being led’; I’m interested in the difference between what comes in at the eye and the ear. You know that line of Coleridge’s: ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are’? I don’t know about making the world we know unfamiliar, that feels a bit over-familiar to me! I’m never aware of myself doing that....

New Paul Farley poem on the BBC tomorrow

Paul has written a ‘radio poem’ for BBC Radio’s ‘Between the Ears’ called Ports. Travelling between ancient Carthage, Liverpool and Rotterdam, the three ports talk to one another down the sea-lanes, mapping a space where the Aeneid, the Mersey ferry and the sea container meet. Broadcast date: 5th March 2005.

Mind, it would be helpful if we got the time and channel for the poem as well, but try searching the beeb tomorrow....

Eratosphere and copyright

Eratosphere's Musing on Mastery threads routinely allow people to post their favourite poems by living authors, ie, under copyright. Tricky one that - for instance if you look up the Michael Donaghy thread, you'll find a whopping number of his poems posted, which surely Michael's executors would never sanction. Personally my view is that a healthy proportion of a writer's work ought to be on the net, and the more it is reproduced, the better. Several studies show that sales increase due to web presence.

Michael Donaghy filmed interview and tribute

Didn't know about this interview with Michael, who was pretty universally recognized as 'Il miglior fabbro':

MD '...but when you write a letter to someone or a love poem to someone, to someone in particular or send a telegram, you know who you are talking to. But in poetry as a literature, printed form, you have really no idea who your audience is. What you are doing is – you have to set up a fiction, a working fiction – that is your audience, and what they are, for me, my ideal reader has read all the books I have read, but doesn’t necessarily know all the people I know...'

Great tribute and links here. I haven't got the filmed stuff to work yet, but the transcript is great.

In case you need 20 facts on Lumsden

Roddy's interview with poetry kit. Here's his first poem, age 7:

The lark was singing in the trees
One of the forest, one of these
In its nest it has some eggs
Out of these will come furry legs.

Scottish Top 20...

Excellent site, including poems by Paterson, Clanchy, AB Jackson, Turnbull etc (oddly, no Lumsden).

Ahhaaaa...file under: How The Obvious dawns afresh

Linguistics may be clue to emotions,

according to Penn State researchThursday, January 20, 2005

Words may be a clue to how people, regardless of their language, think about and process emotions, according to a Penn State researcher."It has been suggested in the past that all cultures have in common a small number of emotions or emotion words, but that every culture has multiple ways of nuancing them, sometimes quite differently," says Robert W. Schrauf, associate professor of applied linguistics at Penn State. These words include joy or happiness, fear, anger and sadness. Schrauf and Julia Sanchez, graduate student in psychology, Chicago School for Psychology, asked groups of people in Mexico City and Chicago in two age groups, 20 years old and 65 years old, to freely list the names of as many emotions as they could. The emotions were then categorized as negative, positive or

Emotion, Evolution, And Rationality...

this latest tome includes essays by Damasio on his views vs. William James.

Do you think of yourself as a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet?

Topm Beckett interviews Nick Piombino

Make that two wickets for Imlah

What's up with Mick over at the TLS? Is it just me or has his form improved of late? After Paul Farley's amazing (if horrendous) Tramp on Fire, this week he's got 'The Arrow' by Erica Wagner (whois?)...

This is an old miracle.
No one really remembers now
if it was by fire, by water, by wire:
if it was a footprint in the snow.

The lost gift echoes in their open beaks,
curls around their coiled metal tongues.

(that half of it, and the rest is equally persuasive).

Then there's a short Michael Hofmann which is in poetry rather than in clever journalese:

Motet

It's naphtha now your gone
a sudden apprehesion of squalor
the unflowering cardamon plant
gummy with syrup and flies

Mike Snider's Blog...

is stuffed full of poetry links etc. too. You might have noticed that poemanias has got caught in a vicous spiral of blog searches lately...bringing you only the best ...

Answers.com links to Wikipedia

Now that Google has linked to Anwers.com, and the latter is linked directly to Wikipedia, we have a situation where it becomes advantageous for scholars and others to provide content for the free, user-updatable encyclopedia. This in turn makes it likely the encyclopedia will become not just the largest (it is already) but perhaps even the most authoritative. Talk about a rapid climb up the 'fitness landscape' (see link).

Looking for poetry blogrolls?

The Poetry Blog and Dumbfoundry both have long ones.

http://dumbfoundry.blogspot.com/

http://zwikipoetry.freezope.org/blog

How About Not 'Curing' Us, Some Autistics Are Pleading

...People don't suffer from Asperger's," Justin said. "They suffer because they're depressed from being left out and beat up all the time."

from the NYT.

Mini reviews by Tyler Cowen

This blog's impressing me more and more...


What I've been reading


Tyler Cowen
The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, by Edward Jay Epstein. Why is opening weekend so important? "The benefits of prolonging a film's run in the theaters are now negated by the loss that would be sustained by delaying its video opening past the point at which it can benefit from the movie's advertising campaign." This is the best available work on the economics of cinema. How many books cite both Arnold Schwarzneger and Mises's discussion of non-pecuniary goods?
King Lear: This is about my fifth reading. I had never fully realized that Lear had incestuous relationships with at least one of his daughters (for instance check out 1:2, 150-152, 1:4, 176-182, plus the entire Oedipus analogy). Furthermore he was ready to sell out his country to the French. Edmund, Goneril and Regan were not so bad after all.
Handbook of Economic Sociology, second edition, edited by Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg. Yelp if you wish, but I see sociology as the most underrated social science. It is (some) sociologists who are the problem. Most of the advances in economics over the last fifteen years have actually come in sociology done by economists. Just look at Steve Levitt or behavioral economics. Since economists have not discovered any new "core mechanisms" since herd behavior (circa 1989 or so), I expect quantitative sociology to whup our collective behinds over the next twenty years. The only question is who will be doing it, us or them.
Art: A Field Guide, by Robert Cumming. This has been my favorite bedtime reading book of the last twenty years. The book gives two or three succinct paragraphs on why each of about 1500 famous artists is good, bad, or somewhere in between. No cultural relativism here, and obviously the guy should start a blog. Few good pictures are included, so you do need to know the works of the artists.
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short. One of the best studies of the anatomy of evil, the psychology of colonialism, and twentieth century Cambodian history.
What I wish I was reading: Going Sane, by Adam Phillips. I read all his books the day they fall into my hands. Phillips, a psychoanalyst for children, is the master of witty and paradoxical observations about human nature. I am told that this new book offers a partial "recipe for contentment," but so far it is available only in the U.K. and perhaps Commonwealth countries.

Wisdom from the Occident...

"The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics."-Ralph Waldo Emerson

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
Ray Bradbury (1920 - ), advice to writers

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.
Samuel Goldwyn (1882 - 1974)

Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Commissioned New York based artist Cai Guo-Qiang to create a work expressing his view on the current state of global affairs. The result is Inopportune, a four stage installation, an eerie dream of dazzling lights and ghostly cars, tigers and arrows, explosions and stillness.

These images are of Stage One, the brilliant centerpiece of the show. Nine cars explode and flip in sequence with illuminations radiating like fireworks or comic book explosions.

from Josh Rubin

Greatness vs. supersizing

A total networker careerist can be a great or lousy poet. So can a hermit in a cave. Feeble poetic ambition probably starts before careers begin. Beginning poets aren’t, I think, cynical in their stylistic choices. If anything they’re too earnestly docile. Young poets probably shouldn’t aim explicitly for greatness. Life is stressful enough without that kind of pressure. But when the only aim is getting an A+ in reproducing teachers’ revolutions, it’s unlikely to lead anywhere but mediocrity...

poetry mag. debate ~(from the page)

The Story of English

Tyler Cohen from www.marginalrevolution.com writes:

After Shakespeare, playwright Thomas Nashe contributed more words (nearly 800) to the English language than any other writer. His successes include: conundrum, grandiloquent, harlequin, impecunious, Latinize, Mediterranean, memorize, multifarious, plausibility, seminary, silver-tongued, terminate and transitoriness. Balderdash and helter-skelter have been attributed to him as well.
And his failures?
Adequation, apophthegmatical (my personal favorite, it means "pertaining to an apophthegm," what else?), baggagery, clientry, confectionate, intermedium, oblivionize (excellent, no?), bodgery ("botched work"), and collachrymate ("accompany with weeping"). "Chatmate" sounds like a word, and perhaps it will yet receive its due.
"Sparrow-blasting" was intended to mean "being blighted with a mysterious power of whose existence one is skeptical," this could someday come in handy. By the way, here are some works by Nashe, I am told they include some soft porn. Here are some amusing quotes from Nashe, including a summary of different ways to be drunk.
The above discussion of words is from David Crystal's The Stories of English, highly recommended, here is one good review. The book has more detail than the usual popular treatments of linguistic evolution, yet it remains readable to the educated layman. Crystal also rebuts the common myth that television is producing a uniform dialect, either in the U.S. or around the world

Bushism of the day

"One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures." — U.S. News and World Report, January 3, 2000

Paul Farley on the birth of Treacle

... our childhood kitchen cupboard in Liverpool, there was always a tin of Tate & Lyle treacle (and golden syrup too). It hung around for years. I remember turning it over in my hand, studying its metallic label: the dead lion, the swarm of bees, the legend 'Out of the strong came forth sweetness' ...

File under: Kermit jokes

One day, Kermit Jagger goes into a bank because he needs a loan. He asks the teller and is directed to Ms. Patty Wick. He tells Ms. Wick that he needs a loan. She tells him (rather haughtily) that he needs some sort of collateral because they don't go loaning frogs money every day.
So, Kermit reaches into his bag and hands Ms. Wick a small glass elephant. "What is this?" she asks. "We can't give you a loan using *this* as collateral!" Kermit tells Ms. Wick to go talk to the bank manger.
So, Ms. Wick goes to the manager and asks him why she should take the glass elephant as collateral. The manager replies......
"It's a knicknack, Patty Wick. Give the frog a loan. His old man's a Rolling Stone."

Don Paterson and John Stammers host weeklong workshop in Spain

10th to 16th October 2005

Award-winning poets and editors Don Paterson and John Stammers will be leading a new residential poetry week in Jimera de Libar, from 10th to 16th October 2005.

Fourcast coming up 17th March

Thursday 17 March, 8pm start
FourCast - a reading to benefit the trust fund for Michael Donaghy's son Ruairi, hosted by Roddy Lumsden

MATTHEW HOLLIS
ROBIN ROBERTSON
GRETA STODDART
LIANE STRAUSS

@ The Poetry Studio, Poetry Society, 22 Betterton St, Covent Garden WC2 Entrance is £5, proceeds to the Ruairi Donaghy Trust

Poetry London launch - Spring 2005 issue, hosted by Pascale Petit

Wednesday 16 March, 7pm start

ANTONY DUNN
PAUL FARLEY
ESTHER MORGAN
MATTHEW SWEENEY
@ The Gallery, Foyles, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2

File under: You might have missed this Kleinzahler interview...

So its old, ok, but its pure untrammeled freeway from the bard of the new jersey turnpikes...

Chris Greenhalgh looks over the Guardian's Feb Workshop poems

Chris says of them 'All of the shortlisted poems were of an extremely high standard. I was impressed by the range of subject matter and formal variety on offer, and enjoyed reading them all'. Sorry, but is that a nice pat on the head for the workshoppers or what? How old are they, three?

Italy 'in lutto' over Luzi

or they should be. He was 90 and an influential hermeticist. Hermeticist? Hermetezoid? Hermit?

Christian Science Monitor on the National Book Critics Poetry Nominees

'Literary awards often reveal as much about the current trends in a genre as they do about which books are worthy of praise. Nominees usually hint at judges' preferences for style and form' - they're kidding right?

How not to buy happiness...

'An enduring paradox in the literature on human happiness is that although the rich are significantly happier than the poor within any country at any moment, average happiness levels change very little as people’s incomes rise...'

and

'Unpredictable noise may be particularly stressful because it confronts the subject with a loss of control. David Glass and his collaborators confirmed this hypothesis in an ingenious experiment that exposed two groups of subjects to a recording of loud unpredictable noises. Whereas subjects in one group had no control over the recording, subjects in the other group could stop the tape at any time by flipping a switch. These subjects were told, however, that the experimenters would prefer that they not stop the tape, and most subjects honored this preference. Following exposure to the noise, subjects with access to the control switch made almost 60 percent fewer errors than the other subjects on a proofreading task and made more than four times as many attempts to solve a difficult puzzle.18

Answers.com replaces Dictionary.com at Google

Apparently its a better online dictionary.

The History of the Universe in 200 words or less

from kottke.org