dumbfoundry

No student of war poetry in the 20th century can afford to be without two anthologies by Catherine Reilly, who has died aged 80: Scars Upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War (1981), and Chaos of the Night: Women's Poetry and Verse of World War Two (1984). [...]

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Of the new books I've spent quality time with this year, my favorite has been the shortest: Mike Snider's poetry collection "44 Sonnets." By my count, 44 sonnets equals about 5300 words -- I've written blog postings that were longer. But Snider does an awful lot with his words. I found "44 Sonnets" as moving and engaging as a much-clung-to novel, or as the kind of CD whose music you find yourself returning to dozens of times.

Sonnets? Sonnets? Y'mean, like Shakespeare and the Romantics? Note to those who haven't yet stumbled across this fact: There's a rhyming-and-metering, traditional-forms renaissance going on in the poetry world.

'That's good to know,' I shot back. Literally. The cute little .38 fell out of her gloved paw unfired as the red circle from my .45 spread across her white silk blouse like a Japanese flag. She uttered a couple of punctuation marks before hitting the floor. One of them was an exclamation mark. The other was just a typo.

It’s like arriving at a concert hall and being handed a violin, and you’re expected to play. That’s what we expect readers to do, perform themselves, because they’re half of the performance.

Forget the notion of the solitary poet, scribbling away in a lonely garret. If plans for a 'maison de poésie' are successful, Canterbury could be home to a vibrant community of poets sharing their thoughts over a cup of coffee or glass of wine before leading a workshop or giving readings of their work to the public. Every night. [...]

Curtis hopes to gather support for the idea of a permanent building for poets and their work which would have an all-year-round programme of performances and workshops, based on the French idea of 'maisons de poésie': 'houses of poetry' that exist throughout France and have spread across the French-speaking world, from Quebec to Morocco. The facilities within each maison vary, but generally encompass a performance space, a publishing or printing house, a library and information resource for poets and researchers and a cafe or bar. Some also boast residential accommodation to put up visiting poets or house a poet-in-residence.

The most ambitious maison de poésie to date is the Passa Porta in Brussels. [...]

The story of 20th-century American poetry. Oh joy! What more can be said? Perhaps something new can be extrapolated from something very old : say, the battle between text and oral performance. [...]

American poets, I suppose, will continue to cluster in groups of various kinds. But I would guess that these groupings in future will have more to do with feelings of kinship stemming from political, class, ethnic, religious, or other kinds of social allegiance, than with a sense of kinship based on chosen literary styles or theories of poetry. Because the stylistic and theoretical allegiances which evolved in the 20th-century – based, so emphatically, on text rather than performance – are already irrelevant to contemporary practice. The new/old poetics must take the measure, not of text, but of incantation.

Call for Submissions:

Eucalyptus seeks poems embracing narrative in inventive and provocative ways, poems that walk the middle ground between the prosaically confessional and the dogmatically disjunctive, poems that valorize Experience without fetishizing it, poems that aren’t afraid to make meaning through their own artifice. There are no length restrictions. Send whatever poems you believe may fit the above guidelines. Eucalyptus is especially interested in long and/or serial poems. [...]

Kevin Andre Elliott, in dismissing the dichotomy of the School of Quietude and the Avant-Garde as tired and ready to be banished from literary discourse, has come out and said what many of us have been thinking. Who, other than Ron Silliman's old buddies from the wanna-be legendary past doesn't groan audibly when some Buffalo alum from the early nineties trucks out another load of heroic-us vs. oppressive-them rhetoric? And really, how far does a dichotomy like this take us in understanding poetry? [...]

The question, rather, seems to be whether there is something inherently conservative about the act of studying literature, or maybe even about the idea of "literature" itself. I can think of a few possible responses to this: [...]

Because he is the most gracious of poets – the unquestioned king of the generous jacket blurb, worded just vaguely enough so that you’re never quite certain if he’s read the work – and perhaps because his own verse is filled with indirection if not active misdirection, fabulous wanderings off topic into lush, witty digressiveness, sometimes never to return, John Ashbery the person has remained above the petty poetry wars of his generation, beloved by post-avants & quietists alike, save for a churlish few who mutter into the margins about some need for direct statement. Thus, just possibly the most wonderful thing about Other Traditions, the little critical volume Ashbery has constructed from his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, is that he picks a fight.

Under a lifeless disco ball in Helmreich House, roughly 20 members of the Bowdoin and Brunswick community sat quietly in rows Tuesday evening to listen to poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil's sprightly, melodic voice. The bar was temporarily transformed into a display table for Nezhukumatathil's latest book, Miracle Fruit, along with a sampling of coffee, coco, and cider.

OK, on to actual poetry. Here's some things that come to mind immediately:

1. Just as with exclamation points, every poet has a lifetime limit on the number of times cunt is used in a poem.

2. Don't ever, ever, start a poem with 'I remember'.

3. You don't have to list all your credit. All 67 of them, including the local horticultural newsletter and your high school awards.

4. You can mention that the last time we wrote back that we thought your work needed 'more magic', and that you've tried to put 'more magic' into your work, but the chances are that that reader is no longer with us.

5. If you have to explain what a poem is about, one of three things has happened, and none of them is a good thing.

6. We have a strict limit of 10 similes per poem.

7. If you don't know what in media res means, you should.

8. Onomatopoeia is to poetry like sunbathing is to skin cancer.

9. A mediocre poem is no less mediocre because each word is a single line.

10. Avoid sending a packet of poems, each of which has a sandpiper playing a major role.

11. Nobody wants to read about old people making love. Even old people.

12. It is generally not a wise strategy to use phrases that were, coincidentally, the principal refrain of a Superbowl commercial.

None of this advice applies to my friends and blogmates, of course, all of whom are wonderful poets and savvy competitors.

Ciaran Carson on the extraordinary challenge of translating Dante—and indeed, anything at all—and what fourteenth century Florence and twenty-first century Belfast have in common.

The deeper I got into the Inferno, the more I walked. Hunting for a rhyme, trying to construe a turn of phrase, I'd leave the desk and take to the road, lines ravelling and unravelling in my mind. Usually, I'd head for the old Belfast Waterworks, a few hundred yards away from where I live. The north end of the Waterworks happens to lie on one of Belfast's sectarian fault lines. Situated on a rise above the embankment is the Westland housing estate, a Loyalist enclave which, by a squint of the imagination, you can see as an Italian hill-town. Flags proclaim its allegiance. A gable wall bears the letters UFF—Ulster Freedom Fighters—flanked by two roundels, each bearing a Red Hand within a white Star of David on a blue ground. Often, a British Army helicopter eye-in-the-sky is stationed overhead.

As I write, I can hear its ratchety interference in the distance; and, not for the first time, I imagine being airborne in the helicopter, like Dante riding on the flying monster Geryon, looking down into the darkness of that place in Hell called Malebolge. [...]

American poets, I suppose, will continue to cluster in groups of various kinds. But I would guess that these groupings in future will have more to do with feelings of kinship stemming from political, class, ethnic, religious, or other kinds of social allegiance, than with a sense of kinship based on chosen literary styles or theories of poetry. Because the stylistic and theoretical allegiances which evolved in the 20th-century – based, so emphatically, on text rather than performance – are already irrelevant to contemporary practice. The new/old poetics must take the measure, not of text, but of incantation.

There are plenty of political issues surrounding literature and poetry that are interesting to discuss, and I have all sorts of political opinions that are not far removed from those of my colleagues, but I cannot view political concerns as an acid test of the value of literature or poetry. Even a "conservative" body of work will end up having a certain value that is not confined by its ideology. If someone proved to me the Euripides was "conservative" in the context of his time, that he was on the wrong side politically, I would still stick with Euripides. I would say that that is very interesting, but that that is not the way Euripides is to be judged in the first place. By the same token, I would not admire him more if it were proven that he was "progressive" for his time. In short, I lose no sleep worrying whether teaching literature is a conservative thing to do. Creating poetic texts is something people do, have always done. It's like asking whether breathing is conservative.

Properly stated, a poet's career refers not to the career of the person but of the work: in the sense I want to use the word anyone concerned to share their work with others is fostering that work's career. Profession can have an influence on career: the canniest poets will use their professional perks to advance their own careers (canny and generous poets advance the careers of others as well; you could argue that "career" is always a social category while "professional" associations are only guilds). The caricature of the Professional is the poet wholly obsessed with the perks and privileges accorded to his person and his ego; the caricature of the Career Poet (trying to avoid the word "careerist") is the poet who lives, to the point of self-effacement, Pound's credo, "It matters not at all who writes great poems, but it matters very much that great poems get written." Those who tend too much toward the first pole look pretty crass to those who tend toward the second, while diehard Professionals tend to resent or ignore the Career Poets and are the first to cry foul when they catch the Careers playing by their own rules on what has become a Professionals' field.

nevertheless, there is a place for calling things by their right names, according to an open & explicit set of premises & postulates, designed by the professional critic, to establish differentiae of judgement : because such creative critical labor has its own proper sphere & center of gravity; & because, paradoxically, establishing such differentiae can help us to see, sometimes, how individual works & artists are part of larger ongoing communal projects & traditions.

They’re deliberately anti-ambitious, which I suspect must raise up a whole range of emotions when other poets read these works.¹ It takes a particular kind of gall to write without ambition & Deemer knows it:

FAME & FORTUNE

Fame:
the cows stop eating
to watch me pass.

Fortune:
more blackberries
than I will ever pick.

The Tasmanian Writers' Centre invites Australian & international writers to apply for the 2006 Island of Residencies program.
Writers from Tasmania and mainland Australia can apply for a Writer's Residency for THREE weeks in Tasmania.

International writers can apply for a Writer's Residency for FOUR weeks in Tasmania.

APPLICATIONS CLOSE WEDNESDAY 30 NOVEMBER 2005.

For 2006, the Tasmanian Writers' Centre plans to host one for two residencies during June and July for Australian and/or international writers who have written extensively about Antarctica. Therefore Australian and international writers who have written extensively about Antarctica are encouraged to apply for these particular residencies.

Residencies are also available at other times of the year for writers who have published work on any subject, in any form including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, writing for children and/or young adults, and writing for the stage.

Four UK and four Chinese authors accompanied by a photographer as they travelled the length and breadth of China for seventeen days.

Sam Hamill writes, "The Friday evening opening ceremonies took place in a wonderful Greek style amphitheater on a steep hillside. It was packed with a noisy, excited crowd, as was the surrounding hillside. When opening comments began to get lengthy, people began calling, “Start the poetry!” Poets from nine or ten countries read in various languages (with translations), and from the joyous cheering and shouting of the audience, one might have guessed it to be a soccer match rather than a three-hour poetry reading. I was told there were nearly 8,000 people greeting 70 poets from around the world for this eight-day festival. Sitting on that stage, watching those bright faces and listening to poetry in languages I did not understand, I suddenly felt a deep sense of kinship—with the audience and with the poets. It was something I first experienced in small way in Greece , twenty years ago, and again in Italy … a deep abiding affection as we enter the State of Poetry —as we transcend The State. It's almost miraculous the way some poets connect despite linguistic and cultural barriers—as if seeing heart-to-heart."

Ralph Wessman writes, "Both poets refer a good deal to the international poetry festival in Medellin, Columbia, where Williams has twice been a guest. The first experience so impressed her that when she returned to Australia she determined to learn to speak Spanish. On being invited back to the festival seven years later she was able to read in a mix of Spanish and English.

'I'd found the experience of listening to poetry in Spanish, just wonderful - but frustrating too,' says Lauren Williams. 'I couldn't understand the words but could see from the expressions on the faces of other guests that this was something good, that I was in the presence of some great poetry being read - and I couldn't understand a word. It came to a climax for me when I was asked which poem from my work I'd like read to the audience - in Spanish - and, when I pointed to one beginning

Lust comes to visit
knocks on the door

the response was deadpan. I thought, this can't be right! What's happening, what are they hearing? ... It turns out the programme translation mistakenly assumed 'Lust' to be a person's name, and the audience was listening to the equivalent of

Jason comes to visit
knocks on the door

No wonder there was no response. They were thinking, who is this woman? I turned to the translater and demanded to present a poem myself - a rap poem - cos that crosses any language barrier, it's rhythmic - and this saved my ass big time!'"

Theory has no value in and of itself. [...]

Thesis: there is more range of stylistic variation in The Hat than in Poetry (Chicago). [...]

In brief: I am uncomfortable with the loss of control.

Hail is a collection of 15 “word sonnets,” a technique or form purportedly developed by Augustus Young. In a –excuse the pun- formal ‘word sonnet,’ a poet uses 14 lines (as per tradition, but completely avoiding division into quatrain, sestet, octet, and the like) to execute his poetic. “Word sonnets” also have no rhyme or metrical requirement, unlike their traditional counterparts. Hence only the length of the word sonnet -14 lines- conjures to mind the traditional sonnet. The “word” component of the word sonnet comes by the fact that each line be comprised of one word only. Further formality or adherence to form is supplied by the lack of typographical pyrotechnics; the poems are left-justified just as a traditional poem would be. The effect of a word sonnet as practised by Mayne is to create a poetic that is almost epigrammatic...

In our continuing feature on Deaf Poetry, meet Peter Cook, an outstanding Deaf poet, purveyor of a gestural style that sends dance and theater flying back to their original roots as poetry. Peter is also a poetry activist, and in his work with the deaf & hearing poetry duo, Flying Words Project, has brought American Sign Language (ASL) poetry to hearing audiences around the world. Peter currently lives in Chicago with his partner Candace and their newborn son, where he teaches and acts along with ?writing?/performing poetry.

Please remember to make your way west tonight at 7 pm to hear

Geraldine Kim
Aaron Kunin
Laura Sims
Forrest Gander

at the Kitchen
512 W. 19th Street

$5
books will be cheap

call (212) 255-5793 ext. 11 for more information

Join us November 16, 2005 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for "Of the People, For the People: A Celebration of American Poetry," the 33rd birthday gala of The American Poetry Review. Meryl Streep will read from the poetry of Emily Dickinson, along with a line-up of six of the United States' most esteemed poets--Rita Dove, John Ashbery, Robert Pinsky, Jorie Graham, Edward Hirsch, and Robert Hass, who will read from their own work. Cocktails and dinner will follow the reading and panel discussion.

Joshua Clover is probably right to reject the theory/poetry binary: the attempt to subtract the one from the other in order to make alliance with praxis/life just points to their fundamental similarity as modes of rhetorical cognition that stand at some necessary distance from, y'know, doing something.

But a poetics of reciprocal alteriority raises another core possiblity of a repressed evolution in poetry fabrication, a pre-poetics. For, as writers began to avoid the congested highway of Lacanian selection, new historicism, queer theory, and the like, others opted for a less traveled route, until the new one (post-cooperative) was no longer less traveled, so many chose the first one after all, up to the point where congestion built up there as well. Poets distributed themselves in a ratio between the two roads. The same thing can happen in praxis where it is called The Tennis Court Oath.

The basic elements of the lyric whole can be outlined as follows:

1. texture (sound, rhythm, diction, imagery)

2. representation (story, reality, plausibility)

3. sense (pathos, emotional effect)

4. implication (argument/logos; meaning/ethos)

[...]

today: Mary Burger & Juliana Spahr.

coming up: Shanna Compton, Jennifer Knox, Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Peter Gizzi, Stephanie Young, David Larsen, and Elizabeth Willis.

Call for Submissions:

Eucalyptus seeks poems embracing narrative in inventive and provocative ways, poems that walk the middle ground between the prosaically confessional and the dogmatically disjunctive, poems that valorize Experience without fetishizing it, poems that aren’t afraid to make meaning through their own artifice. There are no length restrictions. Send whatever poems you believe may fit the above guidelines. Eucalyptus is especially interested in long and/or serial poems.

Jane Hirshfield: 'There is only one real reason to read a poem, and that is to find your way to a larger life than would otherwise be yours to live. This is also the only reason to write a poem. All the other reasons a poem might come to exist—as courtship gesture, say, or the desire to communicate or to effect some change; because it has been requested of you or because it might offer some chance for expression of circumstances or of self—have their place, but they are bits of bait laid in the mousetrap. Or the lion trap, if you will—because what a good poem, a real poem, catches is not mouse-sized, it is the size of your own life and death.'

Alfred A. Yuson: DURBAN, South Africa – The Ninth Poetry Africa Festival 2005 held here from Oct. 10 to 15 has certainly been the most dynamic, delightful, and thoroughly engaging poetry event I’ve participated in.

Last year’s International Poetry Festival 2004 in Rotterdam impressed me with its excellent organization, manifold programs and sub-events, however simultaneously most of these were conducted, so that one had to skip others for a single option. But the so-called "mainstream" poets or published "page" poets were segregated from "performance poets" – consisting of spoken word artists, hip-hop rappers, and slam poetry exponents, as well as video poetry and musical artists, who all had their own specific turns in various venues.

Here in Durban, we have been one big happy family, with traditional, quiet readers interspersed onstage with the generally younger, more energetic performers who recited their explosive verse from memory, with body language to suit. Most readings are done in English, thus dispensing with the verbal rendition and/or screen projection of translations that tend to slow down proceedings, as happened in Rotterdam whenever a Dutch or any other non-English poet took to the podium.

A poet is to be appointed in a drive to reduce the number of people taking their own lives in the Highlands. [...]

There are cyclical wounds furious flights
inside rounded air sacs
wounds that are thought of at night
and break out in the morning

or that open up at night
and in the morning are thought of
along with the other thoughts
our organs are adept
at inventing like bandages

When did you last read a book of literary criticism? Not recently, most people who do not write criticism themselves will answer. Criticism today is impenetrable and irrelevant, since it is jargon-ridden and no longer interested in literature. Or so people have said. There may have been some truth in this caricature a few years ago, but the Age of Theory is over in America, for better or worse, and plenty of literary critics go on with their work. Take Helen Vendler, who has been writing about literature in lucid prose for more than 40 years. Her "Invisible Listeners," a compact study of "lyric intimacy" in three poets, demonstrates, if you have forgotten, some of the best reasons to read literary criticism. [...]

Vendler's cases are the disarmingly human Jesus in George Herbert's 17th-century devotional lyrics, the imagined future "you" in Walt Whitman's long-lined democratic chants, and Francesco Parmigianino, the Mannerist painter invoked in John Ashbery's long poem from 1975, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." [...]

HIGHLAND council is to fund the creation of Scotland’s first “suicide poet” to explain, in verse, why so many people kill themselves in the north of the country, writes Marc Horne.

The £17,000-a-year scheme will involve posting “suicide themed” poems on billboards to raise awareness. The poet will be expected to meet relatives of suicide victims as well as medical experts to gain insight into the issue. [...]

Stephen Fry has launched a scathing attack on the 'arse-dribble' of modern poets and revealed a private passion for writing his own verse. [...]

Kristy Bowen's errata: free for a limited only.

List of poetry readings in the Republic of Ireland. There's Dublin and Galway, but wow, check out Tipperary!

"They wanted to cuddle him and Dylan did not mind being cuddled but really to think of him as a womaniser is laughable because there was a part of Dylan that was a little boy.

"Spirits were a disaster to him -- he really could not take them."

[...] If poetry is reduced to the iconic, the mutely representative, it becomes exactly what Plato would censor : the infinitely suggestive, multivalent text; ultimately ambiguous, essentially New Critical. And even if we accept Crane's and Olson's arguments regarding Aristotle's emphasis on the mimetic, representational (para-verbal) poetic substance, we are left with a basically aesthetic resolution (dénouement) to the creative process : the tragic poem "succeeds" by means of the craft which makes for a "self-standing", affective object. [...]

My Vocabulary officially kicks off its new season this Sunday with a salute to vanity. Tune in to hear live readings by the show's two hosts, James Meetze and Matthew Shindell. As they read, hear them spin some of their favorite music for you in between poems. Michel Cazary will also be taking her turn at the board.

The show begins at 4pm PST and goes until 6pm (that's California time, so please adjust for your own local time). You can tune in online at http://ksdt.ucsd.edu. You can listen through winamp, itunes or any comparable program.

So please join us and make it a habit. We're on every Sunday and we have some fantastic shows lined up for you for the next several weeks. Please also don't forget that you too can contribute. Find out how by visiting http://myvocabulary.blogspot.com. You can also email us at MyVocabulary@gmail.com and add us to you AIM buddy list as MyVocabularyKSDT.

Yours in poetry,
Matt

As I've done for the past several summers, this July I appealed to the readers of Third Factory to send along word of recent "finds" in the fields of poetry, culture, scholarship, and politics. And as I've come to expect, the response was generous and richly informative. [...]

David Larsen | The Thorn | Faux | 2005 | (9)

Jennifer Moxley | Often Capital | Flood | 2005 | (8)

Juliana Spahr | This Connection of Everyone With Lungs | U of California P | 2005 | (8)

Taylor Brady | Yesterday’s News | Factory School | 2005 | (7)

Alli Warren | Hounds | Self-published | 2005 | (6)

[etc.]

A name not reckoned with much in literary circles today, R.S. Crane wrote some of the most substantial criticism of the last century. His work in poetics is on a par with that of Eliot, Coleridge, Johnson, and any other major critic in the English-language tradition.

MiPOesias Magazine: The Tom Beckett Issue

Tom Beckett Intro and Pushcart Nominations
Laurel Snyder interviews Shanna Comptom

Readings by:
Shanna Compton
Michelle Buchanan
Sheila Murphy
Jonathon Mayhew
Geof Huth
Mark Young
Jordan Stempleman
Nick Piombino

Music Credits
Birdie Jaworski on native flute

Produced by Didi Menendez
Directed by Birdie Jaworski

For this workshop, then, I want you to go to a tradition outside your own, a way of seeing alien to your own, and write from there - not in an imitative way ("now, here's my pseudo-Aboriginal poem ... ") but by living for a while in someone else's myth-world in order to renew your own.

As for whether you're quietude or post-avant, Laurel Snyder, a simple test is whether you prefer

Norman Dubie, C.K. Williams, Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, Sandra Gilbert, James Dickey, Howard Moss, Robert Pinsky, Norman Finklestein, Charles Wright, Charles Simic...

or

Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, Tony Towle, Bernadette Mayer, Ronald Johnson, Jess Mynes, Nada Gordon, Lisa Jarnot...

Most people, if they've read contemporary poetry at all, will have a strong inclination toward one or the other side. If you like poets on both lists equally, then you are a true eclectic. There is no cure, unfortunately. The symptoms can be managed to maintain a good quality of life.

The sixth century poem 'Pais Dinogad' in the Book of Aneirin boasts of the astonishing hunting abilities of Dinogad's father, and suggests he killed a 'llewyn' as well as a roebuck, a boar and a stag.

Experts originally believed the word referred to the lynx, but the notion was later dismissed as it was thought the feline had become extinct in the UK around 700 years before the poem was written.

But now carbon dating of lynx bones found in the Yorkshire Dales National Park has revealed the animal may well have still been around for more than half a millennium after it was thought to have disappeared. [...]

Bitterness roiled the atmosphere yesterday around the Nobel Prize in Literature as the Swedish Academy prepared to announce this year's winner tomorrow. Knut Ahnlund, 82, took the occasion to quit his lifetime appointment to the 18-member panel and denounce last year's award to the Austrian feminist Elfriede Jelinek, The Associated Press reported. [...]

Saadi was born in Shiraz around 1200. He died in Shiraz around 1292. He lost his father in early childhood. With the help of his uncle, Saadi completed his early education in Shiraz. Later he was sent to study in Baghdad at the renowned Nezamiyeh College, where he acquired the traditional learning of Islam.

The unsettled conditions following the Mongol invasion of Persia led him to wander abroad through Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. He also refers in his work to travels in India and Central Asia. Saadi is very much like Marco Polo who traveled in the region from 1271 to 1294. There is a difference, however, between the two. While Marco Polo gravitated to the potentates and the good life, Saadi mingled with the ordinary survivors of the Mongol holocaust. [...]

Ludhiana, October 10: Modesty is not for a man like Bashir Badr who claims he is the best Urdu poet, both in India and Pakistan. And why not. For here is the man who has over 18,000 couplets to his name and countless Urdu ghazals.

Some of his couplets, like Dushmani jam ker karo, per itne gunjaish rahe, jab kabhi hum dost ho jaayen, to sharminda na ho find their place as the historical photo caption under the picture of Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto post the 1971 Indo-Pak war settlement, or others like Koi haath bhee na milayega jo gale miloge tapaak se, yeh naye mizaaz ka shehar hai zara faasle se mila karo are mouthed by the likes of Sushmita Sen in her interviews. [...]

Well, does poetry have a place in the processes of protest & dissent? What poems have, for you, stiffened the sinews & summoned up the blood in respect of your own commitment to protest & dissent? You show me yours & I’ll show you mine…

By elevating energy and gusto over talent and judgement, performance poetry is strangling the real thing. [...]

Ironically, it is performance poetry that is eating away at the universal characteristics of poetry. Voice has become, not something that is welded into lines of language on a once-blank page, but a fetishised thing of personal ownership - my voice, with my accent and all I have to say with this voice is to do with me, me, me. That's why the only way you can experience this language is if I personally perform it for you.

Some performance poets - like Lemn Sissay - are good poets, so let's not go mad and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Nevertheless, the bath water is stagnant with its own misplaced self-righteousness and needs a good flushing out. The Poetry Society's Foyle Young Poets Awards event on National Poetry day this year drove this home to me. [...]

Well, that was a revelation. I've just returned from my reading to random rush-hour commuters. [...]

In association with IMRAM [Irish Language Literature Festival], 'poet's corner' on all DART trains in October will feature poems by Claire Dagger, Bríd Dáibhís, Rody Gorman and Gearóid Mac Lochlainn.

[scroll to the very bottom]

The past five years or so have seen a proliferation of “best-of” lists and publications, not least in the world of Australian poetry, with two competing titles - namely The Best Australian Poetry series (published by UQP) and Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems - hitting bookstores across the nation. All of which begs the question: why not just put together an anthology of poems entitled Simply The Best?

While such an exhaustive task may well be beyond us financially at present, we are interested in what you think. Which poem (or poems) would you nominate as simply the best Australian poem(s), ever?

Twentieth-century writing scintillates with hard lady poets and their take-no-prisoners, innovative work. Even next to Marianne Moore, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Mina Loy, no one is harder, more difficult or more obdurate than Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-91), the subject of Elizabeth Friedmann's novel-like biography. [...]

at one extreme, the solitary hermit/visionary/prophet. the scholar, the scientist, the sage. the light of contemplation.

at the other extreme, the song & dance, the give & take of communal festivals. the physical embodiments of harmonious nature. earthly delight & fellowship. music.

the poet's word occupies a middle ground, mediating between the two. the pleasure involved in surmounting aesthetic difficulties, meeting artistic challenges, solving puzzles & problems. bringing order to chaos and freedom to order; uniting contraries; taking pleasure in judgement & necessity (tragic mimesis).

Pindar, for example. or Sophocles.

Much of my poetry is based on cognitive distortions. I never attempt to present a "best self" as poetic persona. Rather, a self that is even more befuddled by reality than I am, angrier, more splenetic.

For example, fetishes. Investing more in some object than its real value would suggest. I dislike the moralism that condemns fetishes and wants us to weigh everything according to its "true" value. The distortion itself has poetic value. Plus, I like the inversion of importance inherent in fetishism, its metonymic torsion.

Winter 2006: MEMORY
Deadline for submissions - October 10, 2005
Scheduled release: January 15, 2006

These days memory can refer to any number of things from the ability to remember a body’s experiences of the past to the capacity of a computer to assimilate and retain information. But why, or what, is it important for poetry to remember? Also what if any is the unique of memory in poetic process, and how does it provide for capacity to create? Is memory the connective tissue that holds a poem together, or is it something else? This issue will feature interviews, articles, essays and poetry that exemplify memory as vision and inspiration.

Arts at Michigan is organizing a new mural painting and poetry project in downtown Ann Arbor. This collaboration between the Main Street Area Association and Arts at Michigan is open to all [University of Michigan] students. You don't have to be an art genius to paint, and if you are, neat! The goal of this project is to expose the work of U-M students in collaboration with the community and to beautify Ann Arbor. If you're interested in designing, painting, and/or writing poetry for the mural project, see below for more details and contact information.

[scroll down] CALL FOR NEW POEMS ON THE IRAQ WAR

For a special issue due to be published online April 1, 2006, guest editor Sarah Browning seeks recent poems on the war in Iraq. Topics might include, but are not limited to: the impact on the Iraqi people, American servicemembers, military families, and/or the American people; Abu Ghraib and the American archipelago; opposition movements of all kinds; the effect of war policy on life at home; personal survival in dark times; imagining a way forward. All approaches and styles, with a preference for poems one page and under.

Deadline: December 15, 2005
[...]

CALL FOR POEMS ABOUT WASHINGTON, DC

For a special issue to be published in July 2006, Kim Roberts and guest editor Andrea Carter Brown seek poems celebrating Washington DC. Poems must mention a specific location in the city by name, for example, a street, neighborhood, park, building, or monument.

Deadline: February 15, 2006.

I’m going to take a nap, he said,
would you like to come?
I wasn’t sure I wanted to;
I’d never been to his nap before
but I said okay.
We had a snack
and a glass of Chardonnay,
then we took off our clothing.

NEW YORK -- An aspiring poet drowned Wednesday night after he apparently jumped into the Hudson River to save his book bag filled with his writings, police said.

Dennis Kim, 22, jumped from the railing of the Christopher Street pier after his bag fell into the river, police said. [...]

The Poetry Foundation announced that Landis Everson, Tony Hoagland, and William Logan are the winners of its second annual Pegasus Awards. The announcement was made at a dinner ceremony last night on the stage of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park in Chicago. The prizes honor achievements not already acknowledged by other poetry awards. [...]

Landis Everson received the Emily Dickinson First Book Award recognizing an American poet over the age of 50 who has yet to publish a first book of poetry. [...] In addition to publication and promotion of his manuscript by Graywolf Press, Everson received a cash prize of $10,000. [...]

Tony Hoagland was named the recipient of the second Mark Twain Poetry Award of $25,000, recognizing a poet's contribution to humor in American poetry. [...]

William Logan was the recipient of the first Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism of $10,000 for poetry criticism that is intelligent and learned, as well as lively and enjoyable to read. [...]

A rush-hour poetry reading for rail commuters is being given by internationally known poet Ivy Alvarez at Cardiff Central Station on Monday (10 October.)

Ms Alvarez says it will be a tangible and visible reminder to hundreds of commuters of the value of poetry, with thanks to Arriva Trains Wales and its support of the creative arts.

Her poetry booklets, what's wrong and catalogue: life as tableware will be available for purchase after the reading.

Ivy Alvarez's poetry appears in journals and anthologies in Australia, Canada, England, the Philippines, Republic of Ireland, Russia, Scotland, Wales, USA, and online. This year she received the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (USA) and the Hawthornden Castle Fellowship (UK).

The reading starts at 4.30pm in the station foyer.

click "my ass" or picture for poem video

Words and voice are: ron androla

HE lived and died in poverty, but John Clare's poetic appreciation of the Peterborough countryside made him a legend.

Like many artists and literary giants, Clare did not live to enjoy his fame, and he would be amazed to discover just how valued he is today.

Indeed, he would have been staggered that someone would splash out £3,600 – a fortune in his day – for the only known photograph of him. [...]

Bonham's could not reveal who had bought it – but the city-based John Clare Society said it had declined to take part in the bidding, as it could not raise enough funds to pay the asking price. [...]

In Edge of the Orison, Sinclair has left London altogether, striking up into the “extruded suburbia” of the M11 Corridor. His inspiration, and psychogeographic predecessor, is the poet John Clare. In 1841, Clare escaped from the High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest and, over a three-and-a-half-day “hallucinatory voyage”, walked the 120 miles north-west to his home county of Northamptonshire. Shortly after arrival, he was recommitted to a local asylum, where he remained until his death in 1864. Sinclair follows Clare’s route (the pun of “syn-Clare” is implicit throughout this pun-riddled book) and uses the counterpoint of the earlier journey to meditate on, among other things, the politics of land use, doppelgängers, genealogy and the future of the English countryside. In Sinclair’s visionary account, Clare’s tilt into madness – induced by the landscape changes which the Enclosure Acts wrought – becomes a parable for the fall of rural England, and the psychic maladies suffered throughout contemporary Britain.

It's not every big-budget movie that gets its two biggest emotional payoffs with poems by Elizabeth Bishop and e.e. cummings.

About thirty poets from fifteen different countries will descend on Durban for the 9th Poetry Africa international poetry festival which takes place from 10 to 15 October.

The extensive week-long programme includes performances, readings and book-launches every evening at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, with a festival finale and the DURBAN SLAMJAM at the BAT Centre on Saturday 15 October. Day activities include seminars, workshops, poetry competitions, poetry in prison, open mic opportunities, and school visits. [...]

I am increasingly interested in language as it actually already exists rather than language as it is dressed up for various "poetic" uses. That is, I like poems that make use of the ways in which language is already alive and poetic, rather than those that view ordinary language as insufficient and attempt to remedy this situation.

I do like artificial poetic languages too. That is, languages that set themselves up deliberately in opposition to ordinary speech and would never be confused with it. But I like them exaggeratedly artificial. I don't like, so much, a poetic language that excludes the vitality of speech by being more "formal" in register, yet still pretends to a sort of "naturalness." Poetry with a lot of markers of poetic genre (similes and the like). To me that's the worst of two worlds. In other words, I like Creeley and Keats, but not so much Wordsworth.

Sean M Whelan: This year as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival I will be performing in a show called Death To Your Dreams, written by myself and a fantastic Melbourne band by the name of The Mime Set. Below is the press release for the show, this will give some idea of what to expect.

The day after his Forward prize win, David Harsent talks about his winning collection, Legion, poets' day jobs and why poetry matters.

Guardian: Huge congratulations - how are you feeling today?

Harsent: Richer! [...]

Guardian: You also write a series of detective novels under the pen name Stella Mooney. Are you better known for the novels than your poetry? Does the prize mean you won't have to write a detective novel this year?

Harsent: I'm not really a detective novelist, like that. My detective fiction sells pretty well, and my publishers are quite happy but I'm not a bestseller, I haven't got a profile like PD James or Dan Brown so it's not true to say I'm better know for crime fiction. I'm doing pretty well but I'm not a household name.

All poets have to have day jobs. I used to be a bookseller and then a publisher, a lot of people teach and we all have to try and make a living as nobody can make a living just from poetry. [...]

Thursday, October 6th, 8 PM

at the Cloister Cafe
238 East 9th Street
between 2nd & 3rd Avenues
New York City

7th-14th October 2005
A Window on the World - A Poetry Writing Workshop with Roz Goddard
Daljit Nagra - Poetry Workshop
National Academy of Writing Masterclass: Maura Dooley and Dennis O'Driscoll on Writing Poetry

He is man internationally recognised as the voice of Indonesia's political and social conscience. [...]

Rendra is now in Australia, to perform his work, for the first time since the downfall of Suharto, and brings us today's audio postcard.

You can see Rendra performing in Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. [...]

Here’s a thing about blurbs. You want to wish they could be used differently, like, hey, Catherine Meng, you should definitely read Kate Greenstreet’s chapbook Learning the Language. Of course that would be pretty limiting as an advert strategy: “hey! you one person! I think you’d like this. Or should read it for whatever reason.” Of course I just speed-read the first half with dinner and maybe that’s how it should go: twenty or thirty people, speed-read the book or chapbook or broadside and then shout out to the person you know who should read it most. Then go back and read it again more slowly and re-blurb to three other specific people. Blurb also sounds like something done involuntarily, right? I read this book, and then I blurbed. “Blurb! Excuse me!” But Catherine seriously you have got to read Kate Greenstreet.

I don't see anything wrong with poets appropriating theory or any other sort of linguistic material for aesthetic effects, but they do risk "doing it wrong" from the perspective of the experts who don't know how to read a chunk of theory any way but AS theory. [...]

Adrian Mitchell's poem Human Beings, from which the lines above are taken, has been voted the poem that most people would like to see launched into space.

From Albanian to Vietnamese, encompassing Farsi, Gaelic, Kurdish, Punjabi, Urdu and 24 other languages along the way, a new set of poem posters are about to give Britain's health service waiting rooms a fresh injection of poetic inspiration.

The Poems for the Waiting Room project, which sends poetry posters to hospitals, GP surgeries, dentists, health centres and mental health offices all over the country is now in its third year, and the latest collection - In Praise of Diversity - is its most ambitious yet. [...]

This year's Forward prize for best collection - one of the most prestigious poetry awards in the British literary calendar - has been awarded to David Harsent for Legion (Faber), his contemporary take on war poetry.

A poet who publishes crime novels has won the UK's most valuable poetry prize, worth £10,000.

David Harsent, 62, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Legion, which the judges called "exceptional".

Harsent, who was previously shortlisted in 2002, writes the Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney crime fiction series under the pseudonym David Lawrence. [...]

I’ve been trying to write a story and haven’t had much luck. I don’t know if this can be called writer’s block. What exactly is writer’s block? Is it when you write something and it isn’t any good? I think of that as bad writing. Is it when you try to think of something to write and can’t? To me that’s not being able to think of something.

I'm not altogether sure how it works in the Art world but I've an artist friend who has exhibited his paintings all over London. He'd be completely baffled (he was, because I asked him) if he'd been told that no other Gallery would hang his work as he'd already shown it somewhere else. Or a photograph published in one magazine and never accepted elsewhere. How about music? Would a composer accept the fact that because the CBSO has played his work then no other orchestra would play it? Or a pop tune - played once on Radio Cumbria never to be played on Radio One.

I mean, you can discuss poetics until you’re blue in the face and be very astute at verbal proclamations, but that doesn’t mean you can write poetry well. You can also be very good at writing poetry but not have the first notion of how to describe what it is you’re doing or where you place your poetic intent on the world’s platter of poetry.

How to record your poems:

If your computer has a microphone but you do not have a recording software try downloading Audacity. Otherwise use whatever program tickles your fancy and get the job done. Okay now read this part very carefully. Are you paying attention? [...]

KING’S School Girls Division head girl Emily Middleton has won the prestigious Foyle’s Young Poet of the Year Competition. [...]

The 18th Annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! Festival will occur October 6 - 9, 2005 in Lowell, Massachusetts. [...]

Saturday will feature tributes to Hunter S. Thompson, Lucien Carr, Robert Creeley, and Philip Lamantia. There will be a talk on Allen Ginsberg by Bill Morgan as part of the Parker Lecture Series, following David Amram's Cairo to Kerouac music extravaganza at the Pollard Library. [...]

For more information see the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! website http://lckorg.tripod.com, or dial 877-Kerouac. You may also contact Lawrence Carradini, President of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! by email at lcarradini@earthlink.net, or by dialing (978) 970-0755.

So what preoccupies the nation's poets - aside from obtaining the university posts teaching creative writing that now sustain many of them? The Forward prize was explicitly set up for writers who reach out to a "general readership" [...]

MELBOURNE, Oct 4 (Bernama) -- When he's not writing scripts for his patients, Malaysian-born Stan Sim is busy penning poems which have won international acclaim.

SAPPORO -- A street poet who toured Japan selling signed poetry has been arrested on suspicion of drug possession, police said.

The poet, Hideyuki Konaka, 25, was arrested on suspicion of violating the Cannabis Control Law. When police questioned him, he reportedly told them he wanted to express regret for his actions in his poetry.

"It's extremely tough -- losing everything with this cannabis today," Konaka reportedly wrote in a poem following his arrest. [...]

Over the past few years, Konaka had toured Japan selling signed poetry that he wrote on high-quality Japanese paper. The poetry sold for between 7,000 yen and 27,000 yen apiece, and he reportedly earned between 200,000 yen and 600,000 yen a month. [...]

The editors of a forthcoming anthology would like to request your participation. The book will serve as a peek into and a celebration of the future of Philippine Poetry in English. Dr. Cirilo Bautista will be editing the project with the assistance of Ken T. Ishikawa.

If you are 35 years old and below, a Filipino, and a writer of Poetry in English, please send five of your best representative work to newphilippinepoetry @ gmail.com. Young poets who have not yet published any books are highly encouraged to send their works.

Please send each of your poems in a single file; don't put all five in one. Don't forget to include short biographical information with a scanned 1x1 photo as your profile will appear in the list of contributors. The deadline will be on November 15, 2005.

Honorarium will come in the form of a contributor's copy. Authors of accepted works will be receiving a reply in their mail.

Feel free to send us your comments and suggestions. We are looking forward to your poems.

The Editors

Do you fancy yourself as a budding poet?

Would you like the chance to have your work read by a top kid's author?

And have the chance to win a great prize too?

We're launching a poetry competition and we want YOU to write a poem on anything you like. Poems must be no more than 20 lines. [...]

The closing date is 5pm on Wednesday, 5 October. Make sure you come back here on Thursday 6 October to find out the winner!

Writing poems, Russell said in 1993, "is very simple to do. I start with the joke line and write backward."

Writers of Pakistani origin being feted at the Indian embassy in Washington showed that literature, like the weather, knows no national boundaries.

[...]

Shattering the stereotyped ‘Am-Indians’ is Vijay Sheshadri who teaches as well. He writes poetry and teaches elite college students who aspire to become poets. In America, anyone can be made, even a poet.

Poetry is not prose, but I imagine that most poets today would delete the commas after “and” and “oh”. The general shift today is away from the comma.

Arun Kolatar was a genuine major talent.

When you open a collection of poetry or attend a reading you need to know that the poems you choose to read or hear are suitable for the audience.

To help you understand what a poem is like you can look at the certificate it has been given. This poem has been classified as 18. That means this poem is unsuitable for anyone younger than 18.

...

Matt Gonzales hosts Sunday Salon this week First Hour: With the 50th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl" coming up, we'll be joined by several guests including Jonah Raskin, Professor of Communications at Sonoma State University and author of "Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation."

There are many legends about Goddess Lieu Hanh. According to one of them, Phung Khac Khoan, a scholar and mandarin at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, met a beautiful girl on West Lake one day.

The girl had a profound knowledge of poetry, and when Khoan asked for her name, she just smiled, gave him a poem and then vanished. When Khoan read the poem, he guessed that the girl was Goddess Lieu Hanh and later built a temple in Tay Ho District to worship her.

...all spoken word artists who submit CD-R tracks of their work will be considered for collaboration on The G-Man's fifth album.

A pen-and-ink sketch believed to be the only drawing of Ted Hughes by his wife Sylvia Plath is up for auction today.

MPF 2005

With only a couple of days to go - we are all getting very excited indeed at the prospect of this year's festival.

The Urban Salon events will be fantastic (John Stammers, Matthew Welton, Clare Pollard, and Daljit Nagra), the fantastic AISLE16 with their Poetry Boyband show - ripping up the text books with their hardcore stage poetry - are selling fast with coverage everywhere from the Big Issue to the Gay Times.

Joolz Denby, launching her new collection at Matt & Phred's, is going to be a top evening's entertainmner and you can see the best slam poets in the regions win a publishing contract at the Stage to Page slam final.

To round off the festival, we are delighted to present, in association with the University of Bolton, Carol Ann Duffy launching her new collection, Rapture. Carol Ann will be reading her work and offering a rare chance to listen to her poems set to music in the beautiful Royal Exchange Theatre. We can't think of a better way to round off 12 years of top class poetry. I should warn you that tickets for Carol Ann's launch are selling very quickly indeed - so get on the 'phone to the box office on 0161 833 9833 quick sharp to make sure you get a seat!

[...] For literature, Ladbrokes gave its shortest odds to the Syrian poet, Adonis; the Korean poet, Ko Un; the American novelist Joyce Carol Oates; and the Swedish poet, Tomas Trans­tromer.

“It has been a while since poetry got a Nobel Prize,” said Anna Tillgren, with Bonniers Publishing house.

The last pure poet to win the prize was Wislawa Szymborska of Poland in 1996. [...]

SHE'S been penning poems since she was a young girl and is now Wales' first national poet, but Gwyneth Lewis has never written one on what her country means to her - until now. [...]

The Cardiff-born writer's poem, published in full on this page, is a real journey through time - from the days of King Arthur to today's obsession with celebrities like Charlotte Church. [...]

Bhopal | September 30, 2005 8:45:56 PM IST

Eminent poet and Madhya Pradesh Police Section Officer Hari Vitthal Dubey today retired from the force after 40 years of service.

Mr Dubey, who was bestowed the nom de plume 'Dhoomketu' (comet) by renowned poet Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar', was given a warm farewell by officers and men including DGP Swaraj Puri. [...]

PAUL Adderley can make the girls go wild when he recites his love poems at weddings, straight out of his head. Children at local schools are mesmerised as well when he performs his poetry on stage without notes. Over the past five years, 34-year-old Mr. Adderley has written more than 6,500 poems and has just published his first book, The Winning Way. [...]

JAMMU, SEPTEMBER 30 (INF)- A condolence meeting was organized in the office chamber of Additional Secretary, J&K Cultural Academy Jammu Mr T. R Sharma on the sad demise of Sh Parshan Singh Sharaf a noted Punjabi poet of the state. He was 81 years of age. [...]

By all accounts, Billy Collins is our most popular serious poet. [...]

The poet Jane Kenyon had just reached her creative and professional prime when she was diagnosed with leukemia in 1994; she died 15 months later at the age of 47. [...]

Now, a decade after Kenyon's death, Graywolf, her longtime publisher, has released her "Collected Poems" -- a compilation of her four volumes of poetry, some uncollected work and her outstanding translations of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Here, we see the clear, progressive trajectory of her development as a poet, how she learned to better alchemize her "vulnerability" into art.

China is witnessing a boom in the number of poets and their verses published over the past decades, due to the revival of Chinese traditional culture and improving educational background of its citizens and diversity of the whole society.

"There are at least 1 million poets across China," says Sun Yiqing, president of the China Poets Society. [...]

TORONTO -- The inaugural coast-to-coast Random Acts of Poetry campaign went so well last year that it's on again for this year - and organizers have persuaded some cohorts in the United Kingdom to play along.
The premise is simple: published poets who have signed on will approach people on the streets and various other locations from Oct. 3-9 and read them a verse or two or more. The goal is to promote literacy and make people aware of poetry. [...]

Award- winning Scottish poet Don Paterson launched Scotland’s first major national poetry prize yesterday at the Scottish Book Town Festival in Wigtown.

Paterson, who believes that the prize will “stimulate the poetry economy and give it some profile”, will be the main judge of the Wigtown Poetry Competition.

The top prize, the largest in Scotland, will be £2000, with a runner-up award of £1000, and then £500 for third place. There will be 10 awards of £50, and another award of £1000 for the best poem written in Gaelic, to be judged by the poet Aonghas Macneacail. [...]

LOWELL, Mass. – The 18th annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! Festival is set for Thursday-Sunday, Oct. 6-9. This year’s theme is “Jack’s Roots,” and will examine the multi-ethnic and literary heritage that influenced the writer’s work, as well as his association with classical culture and contemporary events. [...]

• Jack Kerouac >> Official Web site
• Kerouac.com
• Kerouac Speaks
• The Kerouac Project of Orlando

A poet who spent most of her life in Palmers Green has been honoured by English Heritage.

Poet laureate Andrew Motion unveiled the blue plaque last Friday at the former home of Stevie Smith, in Avondale Road, where she lived for 65 years. [...]