All the above for stimulating my thinking on the topic
Yesterday spent at the Poetry & Politics event on campus, with participants Taylor Brady, David Buuck, Judith Goldman, Joanne Kyger, Walter Lew, Eileen Myles, Leslie Scalapino, Jen Scappetone, Juliana Spahr, Rob Wilson, Heriberto Yepez. A very full schedule, with little time to breathe between subevents. Read the rest of this entry »
This is in reponse to comments by David Hess and others in the comment box to my post on the Poetry & Politics event held here Saturday. I meant to mention this in my original post, as a few people remarked in similar ways prior to the event on this same issue. The two observations that have arisen repeatedly are 1. of course poetry is not enough, any more than any other single thing is ever enough, and 2. poetry is always in a time of crisis, as crisis is an ongoing condition. Read the rest of this entry »
Lots of poetry reading last night. First Jen Hofer and Taylor Brady at Small Press Traffic in SF. Jen read from her new chapbook Lawless and an unpublished piece titled “One,” with a little accompaniment from Taylor. Read the rest of this entry »
Ye white antarctic birds of upper 57th street,
you gallery of white antarctic birds, you street
with white antarctic birds and cabs and white Read the rest of this entry »
I couldn’t agree more with Jonathan that Own Face is an indispensible book of poetry (I would make the same claim for at least half of everything else Coolidge has written), and that “Beyond,” which he (just slightly mis-) quotes, is one of the best poems in it: Read the rest of this entry »
Jonathan, I feel, indulges that Rhina P. Espaillat poem far more than it deserves. Even granted that the sonnet is apparently part of a longer cycle, which I haven’t read, and which looks like it has a larger thematic focus on storytelling in the abstract, thus potentially relieving the individual poem somewhat of the accusation that the story it tells isn’t interesting in itself, there’s just no excusing the arthritic prosody and trite phrasing, which are clearly not self-consciously intended. Read the rest of this entry »
In response to Ron’s Test of Poetry, and his discussion of “the question of naming & context, of anonymity & content”:
This exercise reminds me of the passage in Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Read the rest of this entry »
James counters Ron’s latest comments on Langpo & emotion. One problem here is one that gets brought up a lot at places like the Buffalo Poetics List: Read the rest of this entry »
The emotive function (set toward the addresser), as Jakobson describes it, could be seen as the least intrinsically “linguistic” of all the linguistic functions. Read the rest of this entry »
What follows began as a response in Ron’s Squawkbox comment window, but it started getting too long so I transplanted it. Read the rest of this entry »