As some J's Theater readers may know, in my capacity as the Harriet_Poetry tweeter (twitterer sounds a bit flightier), I have been nightly posting poetic forms for people seeking a short National Poetry Writing Month (#NaPoWriMo) writing project. The goal is a poem a day, so that by the end of the month, you'll have 30 drafts. The forms and genres each day I've suggested have been as follow: nocturne (April 1), sestina (April 2), senryu (April 3), mesostic (April 4), ekphrastic poem (April 5), biopoem (April 6), palinode (April 7), cento...
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
This upcoming Sunday, May 1, 2011, International Labor Day / May Day, in conjunction with Red Rover Series and Chicago Durutti Skool, I am organizing an informal public reading on behalf workers everywhere, and in commemoration of the 125th Anniversary of the Haymarket Affair, which occurred in 1886.The event will run from 9 am to noon, in the West Loop at 165 N. Desplaines Street at W. Randolph Street. It's reachable by CTA trains. If...
Sunday, 24 April 2011
To those who celebrate the Holy Day of Easter, holiday blessings.Today's poem derives directly from the daily poetry projects I suggest on the Harriet_Poetry twitter feed. Tonight's was an "erasure poem," based on a form that poets such as Tom Phillips, with his remarkable 1980-20?? art book/work A Humument, a visual and textual refashioning (still underway) of a forgotten 19th century novel by W. H. Mallock; The Human Document; Jen Bervin's Nets...
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Li-Young Lee (1957-) is one of those poets who entered my consciousness like a meteor when I was younger; in fact, it was his book The City in Which I Love You (Boa Editions Ltd., 1990), that rocked me so profoundly. I read those poems like a sacred text over and over, and I cannot say that they had any direct influence, though I do quote him in my first book. The lyrical exploration of his family and past, the way he wrote about his Chinese-American...
Friday, 22 April 2011
Last summer, when I immersed myself in making simple animations on the iPad, I created a shorter version of the following animation, "Codex vs. Tablet." It's one of the longest animations I've ever created, and the issues it broaches are fairly straightforward and relevant, especially now that we're in a material shift, at least in the US and other developed countries, in terms of the relationship between print books and other printed materials,...
Thursday, 21 April 2011
I'm not sure why I'm obsessed with this poem, which I did not know before I heard Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) read it as part of the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets podcast, but I have listened to it repeatedly, and it's begun to sediment in my head. I very well may write something based on it. As for Koch, he's a writer I have read quite a bit, especially when I was younger. I believe he was the only one of the four major male New York...
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
Two summers ago, I came across a contemporary poet writing a praisesong to Kenneth Fearing's (1902-1961) poetry, and I was intrigued. I knew Fearing as the author of the 1946 novel The Big Clock and had heard of his poetry, but had never read it. I also didn't know that he was the founding editor of The Partisan Review, As a result of that essay, and because I was carrelling at the New York Public Library, I went and found his New and Selected Poems...
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Congratulations to this year's winners of the Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music! I was especially gladdened by three of the winners in these areas. Kay Ryan, for long an unacknowledged stylist of the first rank, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press). Jennifer Egan, a consistently outstanding writer, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Welcome...
Monday, 18 April 2011
This weekend brought news of a brouhaha involving the extreme right-wing, homophobic Republican former US Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, he whose last name has, through the deft work of columnist and author Dan Savage, become a particularly vivid eponym. But our concern here isn't with the eponym and its figurative associations, apt as they are for Santorum, but with a bit of foolishness on his part. (C can probably already hear me pronouncing...
Sunday, 17 April 2011
I have been thinking about poetry, politics, political poetry and the politics of poetry quite a bit of late, and one poet from the middle years of the 20th century whose work was insistently political, often successfully so and not to its aesthetic detriment, pressing on in her attempt to address the social, political and inequalities in and through her verse was Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). Whether it was covering the Scottsboro Boys Case or writing...
Saturday, 16 April 2011
When Wislawa Szymborska (1923-) received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, I recall saying: "Who?" My knowledge of 20th century Polish poetry was five writers deep: Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), Adam Zagajewski (1945-), Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), and Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909-1983). Milosz I knew of because he won the Nobel Prize in 1980, and I began seeing his work here and there, then started reading...
Friday, 15 April 2011
Lest we forget that in the digital age new kinds of poems are possible, and that writers are creating them, here is one by Tan Lin (19_?-), my former colleague and one of the most original creative people I know. I'll just say that this piece, from 2002, mirrors several that he discussed, displayed and performed during a brief visit to the university around that period. One of his aims, he argued, was to create poetry that mirrored early 20th...
Thursday, 14 April 2011
The other day amid a river of tweets I spotted a mention of Paul Celan (1920-1970), and for reasons known only to the deeper currents of my mind, the following poem popped into my head. Almost like an automatism. I even tweeted in response: "Arnica, eyebright." The poem, as is probably well known, was Celan's response to an encounter with his old friend, the esteemed philosopher and Nazi Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). This Wikipedia entry sums up...
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Yesterday's poem got me thinking about another poem that treats the US Civil War, a poem I had to read in high school and did not fully understand, could not really understand or bear, even, until I returned to it, and its author, in college. I speak of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), who had died only a decade before and whose name and fame were still widely known and accepted. They have both dimmed quite a bit since then, as his peer and friend, Elizabeth...
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Just a quick note to congratulate poets Rigoberto González and Joan Larkin on jointly receiving this year's Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America! I know Rigoberto personally and am especially delighted that he has received this incredible honor, whose prior recipients include Ed Roberson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Angela Jackson, Kenneth Koch, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many other great poets. ***Today...
Monday, 11 April 2011
"This is a song for the genius child." - Langston HughesHughes was incontestably a genius, as is Ronaldo V. Wilson. (But his soul already runs wild, as did Hughes's.) Ronaldo's first book, The Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) is a novel-as-poem, or poem-as-novel. And also uncategorizable. It erects chapters-as-mirrors onto a life that is akin to but isn't Ronaldo's. Unless you look closely....
Sunday, 10 April 2011
One of the things about original artists is that it sometimes takes a while for their work to be assimilated by the wider culture, if that ever occurs. Sometimes it does, at least to some extent, at other times it doesn't, and in their time, the critics will often ride their same hobbyhorses and commonplaces, usually championing what they know and venturing occasionally a bit out to inspect, with some people being completely passed over except by...
Saturday, 9 April 2011
Naomi Shihab Nye (1952-) is a poet whose work I came to only as an adult, through my experiences teaching 7th and 8th graders. I had never heard of Nye, a native of St. Louis and the daughter of a Palestinian father and white American mother, but at some point during my combined poetry class, working with fellow poets Mattie Michael and Caitlin O'Donnell, a classmate at NYU, I was flipping through an anthology of poetry--perhaps it wasn't for children...
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