I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Now, THIS is what I've been looking for in a poetry blog (or in any writing on poetry). Absolutely compelling, both in terms of selections and criticism; so spunky and smart, I enjoy every bit, including the sour, "rhubarby" flavors...
Restraint, the central emotion of Bishop’s poetry, is only necessary when there is an overwhelming pressure towards expression – in just the same way as, according to T. S. Eliot, the extinction of personality is only possible when there is a personal
And the three-year-old at the picnic / said she wanted to play the violin / and I said, just like Joe Venuti / and she said, you’re a Joe Venuti / and I said, you’re a Joe Venuti / and she pulled a tuft of grass and said, / here's some Joe
Conference room, blah blah blanket walls dissolve / and flow, a plunge in frigid water, blah blah / beat of branches warms your tingling frozen flesh, / incorporated world between two walls of ice, / ha ha horses’ heads on shivering human bodies, / da
Jampole begins with the charm of a master poet recreating stories of men or women just before a crisis begins or ends, at a precarious equipoise before a moment of change....[he] creates some of the deepest feeling people you will ever meet...then...begin
The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze at the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
Never before such a distant season of derision. Across town, the silo siren heralds an encore to panic. The lake below Mexico City shivers like a Plexiglas dance floor.
I could never face anything / without the wig. Transformed, the old vaudeville desire / struts & kicks its satiny legs, the desire to be / consumed by ruined marquees, these last drifting hotels, / to be riven, served up singing, arched & prismed / from a
From “Suite for Emily:” “...doors you (I?) might fall through to the underworld / of bars and bus stations, private rooms of / dancing girls numb-sick & cursing the wilderness / of men’s round blank faces. Spinning demons.”
I have always loved these moments of delicate transition: walking alone in a borrowed house to a slim meridian of dawn barring the pillow before the cool breeze, a curtain of rain on the iron steps, rain laving lawn chairs arranged for a conversation fini
Boundaries. Water / and singing stones, day world to night world...the waves' incantation, over and over, runnel / to ascent and crest, the torn lace of collapse. /The singing stones, the night the bandaged ward / shut down, morphine swaddles her riddled
Lynda Hull in her short life (1954-1994) wrote memorable poems, distinctive for their flamboyant shadows, a created world where pathos always has some swagger of the doomed: a quality that you might call (depending on your decade) Goth, punk, noir or maud
We could shut the door / on this vertigo, but Mother when we / come to ourselves our feet skim the tiles./ Spoons shine on the table, and Mother, / we're dancing. I'm mouthing the words / to a song I never knew...
pilgrim, i did not mean to be so loose / of tongue, so bold in all i loosely told / in my smut so smug, so overly sold./ i did not mean, pilgrim, to traduce. // ...poet, though you have the right to scold / it was highsouled you who made my mouth hold / w
So far, have managed, Not Much. So far, a few fractures, a few factions, a Few Friends. So far, a husband, a husbandry, Nothing Too complex, so far, followed the Simple Instructions.
world in the words of the os, an ode, unspoken, hole in its infancy, uncuretted, sealed, not yet yielded, nulliparous mouth, girdle against growth, inland orifice, capital O, pore, aperture to the aleph, within which all, the overstocked pond...
This is a themed blog (poems about poetry) that will lead to a print anthology. Dan Waber invited five of his favorite poets to send him an ars poetica they'd written along with the names and email addresses of five other poets. He then invited those twen
a poetry far beyond paraphrase, a poetry of direct presentation--the word, not words, words, words or expressionistic squiggles...reminiscent of permutational poems of the cabalists, the anagrams of the early Christian monks, the carmina figurata of the G
...immediately apprehended in the way a road sign or...a navigational icon is. Slipping in under the threshold of awareness, the twisting scalpel of subverted meaning can strike that much deeper...
The human brain seems hardwired, no matter what, for pattern recognition and for metaphor making. All good poetry is actively engaged in the latter. All good concrete poetry actively engages both.
By using nothing but the figure/ground relationships of letters, engaging and powerful pieces are built up through a process that is less reminiscent of collage than it is of burnishing, worrying, plying, or even kneading.
Touchon's works are constructed from distressed street posters that have been carefully edited...almost become recognizable letters or perhaps proposals for a new poetic alphabet but always slip back into forms and spaces...
Exhibition space of the Ontological Museum of the International Post-Dogmatist Group. The poetry on this site has been selected from 'CollagePoetry' postings.
The Bush administration / the people who chose / The Perfect Bacon / the game went on / the media company / The Ducks won / the Stooges brought / the tough bake-sale squares / the best place to learn [paraphrased]
...creating an actual SPIDERTANGLE font. 26 vispoets assigned a letter & a special character. visual poetry collection in a font suitcase. all-out glyphs...
The literary journal Fence, which has published both emerging and established writers such as Annie Dillard and Rick Moody since 1998, is moving from New York City to the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.
A haibun is a terse, relatively short prose poem in the haikai style, usually including both lightly humorous and more serious elements. A haibun usually ends with a haiku. Most haibun range from well under 100 words to 200 or 300. Some longer haibun may
a poet uses fragments to imitate and so to make an assertion about the nature of human perception: perception consists of fragments, fragments are what we assemble into meaningful wholes...giving haibun a sense of immediacy...
On linking haiku to prose in haibun...one might do it “’renku’ style – not a direct carry on from the prose telling some of which has already been said – no – it should lead us on – let our mind wander more...
Haibun is a form of prose poetry, developed from Basho's traveling diary style; linking haiku to prose, haibun imagistically recreate a life's moment, epiphany, pilgrimage, journey, awakening, fleet awareness, or new understanding.
Haibun is open to a huge range of expression: from the surreal and dreamlike to straight discursive narrative -- even journalism: from impressionistic writing to exposition and storytelling, meditation and the personal diary -- an exploration of the wilde
Doorstep is a jumble of debris: clay, straw, twigs. Some moments pass before I notice three baby house martins among the mess, a couple of days old, dead. An almost imperceptible motion - one of the babies is moving.
I think we're in the ghost-town whorehouse in Blackhawk. Under one roof ..........sleeping with all of them -- ....................bush clover, poker chips.
Among poets there are probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing, and so forth, but this is where we live...C D Wright, Coolin
A multilanguage blog with links and information on poetic invention – our term for exploratory/ investigative/ experimental/ radical/ conceptual poetry. [Graphic poetry, or poetic graphics...]
This feature begins with questions of fidelity: how close should the poet remain to his or her source text? What does it matter? Other contributors ask more technical questions, how to translate names, what to make of computer-generated translations, how
There's a hole in the middle of life. (the body) The flashbacks will remind us. See what the room sees. A collection of cells. Your face on that small screen. Your blonde guitar, my plaster Buddha.
She looks carved from a ghost. Takes off her dress. It's lace. A spiderweb. She is wearing a slip. Petal pink. Thin as hammered metal. She throws herself on a bed.
Whoever kissed time on its exhausted crown With filial tenderness will then Remember how time lay down to sleep In the grain snowdrift past the window.
You are so high in the tree. If you jump you will live a full life while falling. You will get married to a hummingbird and raise beautiful part- hummingbirds.
Moon burnt up in a tree limb's wobble. Heaven's sort of nimble. Not to want the origin of light, to want its myth. To want the stroke across the jaw without the fist.
His house had cracked vinyl siding, cobwebbed windowsills, and blind mammals nesting in the chimney. There was a continual scent of expired milk and a trigger-happy answering machine with messages leftover from the college years.
The man who was to fall to earth in four years' time still floated in his cloud of silvered fame...He'd been a Kon-Rad, King Bee, Manish Boy, a Lower Third. He'd be a thin white duke. He'd be a Christ, an alien, he'd be a dance club king.
Anstett glances, attempting his best alert, intelligent animal look, interested in project schedules, imagines being taxidermed, pelt propped up with sawdust and armature...
Winner of the 2001 Electronic Literature Award for poetry, Cayley's windsound is a long digital poem in QuickTime format. Poet Heather McHugh was judge of the competition.
The Tran Da Tu poem below is now up on Guernica, a very fine journal of art and politics. In the same issue are interviews with Don DeLillo and Iraqi feminist Yanar Mohammed.