My sporadic round up of poets, poems, and the people who love them:
- Caitlin Rizzo on Robert Frost's poem Nothing Gold Can Stay (dropping S. E. Hinton like an insider)
- Patti Smith's tribute to Robert Mapplethorpe
- Tennessee Willams Reads Hart Crane
- One of W. H. Auden's diaries: discovered. "But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much."
- "In 1963, America's poetic fringe came to the continent's edge to breach the walls of academia." - The Line Has Shattered
- Seth Abramson: Why Is Contemporary Poetry So Good?
- I stumbled upon Daniel Nester while trying to sneak behind the paywall of Harper's Magazine (nothin' doin'). His voice got in my head. Not sure that's healthy.
- Brilliant: Adrian Matejke's poem "The Shadow Knows"
- "Behind it all, I have accepted that I will never know if a poem is “good.” I may know that I feel a poem is done, thanks to Seamus Heaney’s test: “When it leaves you alone and you leave it alone.” - Whole Earth Poem Catalog, Jessica Greenbaum
- The Caged Bird Sings, Paul Laurence Dunbar at the Library of Congress
- "...Building the text, letter by letter, word by word, line by line,” until the printer “inhabits the work, gives that work a home.” - Kim Merker, Hand-Press Printer of Poets, NYT
- Steven Pressfield single-handedly nukes your procrastinating pity party.
- This post about blogs and their dissimilarities and similarities to essays, articles, and aphorisms is poetry disguised as a blogpost. (Cian Cruise, The Bygone Bureau)
- "In poetry, wandering is the essence of negative capability." - Elizabeth Willis, The Volta Blog
- Tom Roberge (New Directions) highlights/scans a few Pablo Neruda pieces.
So, where some see poetry as a dying art, I see it as an early and enthusiastic adopter of new technologies, partly because it has to be. Why? Well, if selling what you're making isn't going to make anyone rich, but you want to share it with those people who are interested, then you have to work out the cheapest way to do so. And right now it looks like that way is a mix of online, performance and print, with each supporting the other in a new model of publishing, one in which the printed collection is no longer the only accepted mode of publishing but remains a key part of the package. And given the apparent reluctance of most bookshops to stock verse, they'll be sold mainly online and at events. It may not be big business, but that's not what it's setting out to be. - Poetry is not drowning, but swimming into new territory, the guardian
I'd like to stay here and chat but I have a date with Ron Silliman's link post.
