check out suzanne’s amazing tale … [[here]] …
way … to … go … lady … !!

i crawl out of the swamp to name ten influential books of poetry … no order … for jordan …
Complete Poems - Carl Sandburg
The Waste Land and Other Poems - T. S. Eliot
The Double Dream of Spring - John Ashbery
Post-War Polish Poetry - Czeslaw Milosz (ed.)
This in Which - George Oppen
One Night Stand & Other [...]

There is, of course, one necessary statement - that there are no viable statements. It is from this apparent desert, this barren mappemonde, that poetry, the beautiful, must be constructed. It cannot be the language of statement or, indeed, of crisis. To dramatize a crisis - another aspect of “familiar” poetry - is to make [...]

stan apps on gary sullivan’s poetics …
Gary’s poetics consists of decisively rejecting mysterious theatricality, and thereby creating an aesthetic of material accountability. The words in Flarf poems are materials that have been put there precisely so that a mysterious theatrical tone of all-knowingness from the beyond cannot develop. Instead, evidence of human foolishness and [...]

i’ve got a real goofy blushing thing going on right now to realize that whiskey river quoted from one of my plainer poems the other day … thanks, whiskey

from Bemsha Swing …
Some [poets] don’t really present a mimesis of the “self” at all …

my students and others who’ve stumbled onto my stuff at fyp and plainer are usually confused because they can’t figure out who’s talking … it doesn’t sound like the me they know … sometimes i ask, “who says anyone is [...]

on what i just did at plainer … i don’t know … i didn’t do it to hurt anyone … or to make anyone angry … i wasn’t working from any theory … i wasn’t trying to be new - because i know i can’t be … it wasn’t a proof …
i had these sounds [...]

Reginald Shepherd’s Blog: Some Thoughts on Difficulty in Poetry.
In the perennially popular “death of poetry” discourse, there’s a consensus that people don’t read poetry because it’s too hard, too “elitist” (another word that should be expunged from the English language: it’s never descriptive, only pejorative). I’ve always thought the opposite, that most poetry isn’t hard [...]

jordan says:
The PTA speech? All I know is it would start off with me giving my best
Emerson impersonation: “Why should not we also enjoy an original
relation to the universe?” And go on with a sharp critique of (English)
teachers and parents. I’d point my finger out to all the teachers with
their hands filthy from only teaching [...]

ah … stempleman & beckett get down to it.

over at the soph discussion board, miss emily is getting severely dissed:
“Does anyone have any convincing arguments against my opinion, or reasons why Dickinson should be considered great? Because at present all I see are dozens of dashes, weak images, and a scant philosophical underpinning.”
“While her poetry seems to be pretty good to me, I [...]

waykool: lyrikline - Lyrik International, Poetry international … via International Exchange for Poetic Invention

listening to nick piombino’s recent bowery club reading … i remember a small post i’d made on his fascinating Contradicta … i seek it out and just (to the split second) as it appears on my screen, i hear nick reading precisely those words … Listen to the whispers- all the bold voices have had [...]

Pound-Eliot Sestina. By Alfred Corn …
T.S. Eliot never wrote a sestina.
I guess he was afraid of copying Pound;
Or else doubted his metrical finesse. If
We rate poets according to form, he blew.
With Old Possum, it’s like free verse all the way.
Yet, except for “Sestina: Altaforte” …

Listen to the whispers- all the bold voices have had their say.
Strategy, shrewdness, brilliance, determination, pride, power, love, all will falter - hope alone remains infallible.
so very very good to have nick piombino back with his Contradicta … these words that don’t so much cancel each other as reflect some interior light hoarded … held [...]