Poetry News:

1. — So the idea that a poem can be made poetic by its structure alone is open to question, at the very least. —
2. — Joe Milford Hosts Grace Cavialeri - from The Jane Crown Show —
3. — Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour with Andrena Zawinski & Shakespeare [MP3] —
4. — Nobody reads poetry anymore —
5. — A woman who is one of the last people alive who knew writer Thomas Hardy is to perform one of his poems at the age of 102. —
6. — After two decades behind bars, Win Tin tells of life in one of the world’s toughest jails —

Adventures in reading miscomprehension

Poetry News:

1. — Pallimed: Arts & Humanities (current posts about Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, “pain poet” Jane Cave Winscom, etc.) —
2. — poets transform the mountain lit scene & article is here —
3. — Win Tin, a poet, journalist and democracy advocate, was freed Tuesday after 19 years in prison —
4. — This month’s workshop is an exercise in self-portraiture, and it takes as its starting-point a quotation from the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda —
5. — Collins are to exuviate abstergently 2,000 rarely used words from their dictionaries to make way for new ones … but can we smell an olid rattus rattus? —
6. — “Should we have had more of a business plan?” he added. “Probably. But then the publishers that did have business plans didn’t do any better.” —

“What is it about this painting that such infamous people in history have owned it?”

Poetry News:

1. — David Wagoner’s new collection of poems, “A Map of the Night,” feels like a summing-up by the author many consider the dean of Northwest poetry. —
2. — For days, I’ve trolled my poetry shelves for the right words to grieve with, the way an insomniac pharmacist — desperate for sleep — might pick through her tinctures —
3. — Film takes look at life of Emily Dickinson —
4. — But this remarkable collection by someone who perhaps invented the concept of “oversharing” long before it became fashionable, reminds us of why he mattered then, and still does now —
5. — Poets have always been fascinated with dreams. Please share yours —
6. — The poem is one of 20 that have started appearing in sidewalks since July —
7. — Burmese papers report losses due to strict policies of censor board deputy chief —

September is Pain Awareness Month. Good timing, what with the stock market & everything.

My town has been out of gasoline for a while. A lot of Nashville is out, too. A station here in town got some gasoline yesterday, Darryl said, and the Sheriff had a squad car in the parking lot & there is a huge line. Reminds me of the 1970’s lines at gasoline pumps, which I do remember. I don’t understand the CNN article that says it is panic. Kingston Springs was out of gas on the Sunday of the hurricane. I haven’t been too mobile lately so I’m not sure what the heck is going on.

Dear Onion Radio News: if you are going to make fun [MP3] of my State, at least learn how to pronounce the Governor’s name haha.

Poetry News:

1. — Soon, she was weaving together poems about the employees’ experiences in America and at work at the factory —
2. — In the meantime, his poetry is massively overrated: rhymes are amateur, scansion is sloppy and the content is unintelligible, bordering on insane —
3. — Armed with magnifying glasses and mirrors, the censors are on a mission to root out hidden political messages in poems, novels, stories and advertisements —
4. — Robert Frost, shown above circa 1915, wrote to his son that “you can say a lot in prose that verse won’t let you say.” —
5. — Toledo helped shine light on gifted black poet —
6. — “To me, this is the Grammy of poetry” —
7. — College Restores Artwork by Poet E.E. Cummings —
8. — the day Wallace Stevens punched out Ernest Hemingway —
9. — Because language isn’t simple and poetry isn’t simply language, translation is never a zero-sum game —
10. — Robert has good news, congrats —
11. — Massive gathering celebrates Stegner as bard of the West —
12. — Free online barcode generator for DIYers —
13. — Edward Limonov, a poet-turned-populist, has joined the chess master Garry Kasparov to form a threadbare alliance that constitutes the only genuine opposition to President Vladimir Putin —

Poetry News:

1. — In a sequence about T.S. Eliot in California with his love interest Emily Hale, the couple visits the In-N-Out hamburger chain —
2. — At the point where one stage of our lives draws to a close and we are about to enter the next stage, there is always room for the hope of great things —
3. — Larry Matsuda & Tess Gallagher —
4. — John Hartley Williams is impressed by the responses to his tricky exercise on adapted adages —
5. — Via extremely rare recordings, Radio Beats will also feature the voices of other seminal American poets including Anne Sexton, Beat-era godfather Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Beat icon Allen Ginsberg —
6. — The poems that Auden came to dislike, including “Spain,” “Sir, no man‘ enemy,” and “September 1, 1939,” are not to be found here —
7. — Jeffery Brown reports on how poetry publishers keep turning out new material in today’s fast-paced commercial media culture —
8. — Allen Ginsberg, American poet and Buddhist, was also eloquent about dictators like Than Schwe: In a work he called “Wichita Vortex Sutra”¦” —

“…it‘ more like copping-a-feel reading. There‘ something yucky about it ….” Well I guess that argument does apply to poetry, nowadays, above all, if you agree with his reasoning.

There’s more here at this article too, which says “… longer-standing online ventures include Blackbird [which is fresh btw], failbetter.com, storySouth, Drunken Boat, and The Barcelona Review. Newer online journals ““ Memorious, GutCult, Small Spiral Notebook ” pop up on the NewPages site.”

(This was the last short story collection I read — if you don’t count Sentence — and it was great.)

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If you self-host your blog, this is kind of fun: “Hey there –I wanted to let you know about a service called Project Honey Pot. It allows you to track and help catch spammers who harvest email addresses from your web pages. I signed up myself, added honey pots to my site, donated an MX entry to help the cause and think it might be a service you’d find useful.

You can learn more and sign up for free by visiting:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org?rf=27520”

Poetry News:

1. — Scratching poems on cell floors, or making ink from the brick powder of the walls, Burmese writers have managed to continue writing despite imprisonment and censorship —
2. — Haiku Poet Documented Life in Japanese Camps —
3. — To write vital poems, Notley has said, “it’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against … everything.” —
4. — The End of America: Naomi Wolf’s Call to Action —
5. — poetry written by English colonists before there was a United States, and by citizens of the new republic shortly after its founding —
6. — Poetry can’t topple dictatorships or stop fascist terror, but… —
7. — As human beings we should be judged by our minds, by our creativity, not by our biology —
8. — Terrible. (That looks like a good documentary.) —
9. — Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer —
10. — When You Have Ideas You Cannot Yet Execute —
11. — Walnut Hill School in Natick will name its new residence hall in honor of poet Elizabeth Bishop —
12. — He wakes from dreams and walks into the woods, sometimes for hours, reciting and memorizing the poems that come to him in his sleep —
13. — Poetry Center design an exacting, contradictory task for architects —
14. — it displays a line from one of Shelton’s poems that appears in computer punch-card code similar to that of the 1970s —
15. — You”™re a Good Prop, Cruel Muse —

Today is the Feast Day of St. Teresa of Avila, who wrote “I am more afraid of those who are terrified of the devil than I am of the devil himself” and “”May God protect me from gloomy saints.” My Grandma, Theresa (Korte) Zimba, was named after her. And I was named after my Grandma Zimba (one of my middle names is Theresa). There is a famous statue of her.

St. Teresa of Avila was a mystic and the first female Doctor of the Catholic Church & is the Patron Saint of:

headache sufferers
(protection from?) heart attacks
sick people
Spain
Pozega, Croatia
laceworkers
loss of parents
people in need of grace
people in religious orders
people ridiculed for their piety
and she could levitate

So the word of the day is transverberation

Rosmarie Waldrop — Our Moments
Thomas Sayers Ellis — Mr. Drum
Jonathan Weinert — Solving for y
Jilly Dybka — Obstacles I Have Faced in Life and How I Have Overcome Them
Mary Tautin Moloney — Damage Reflected
Nubar Alexanian — Fisheye
Greg Delanty — Prayer in Summer
Frannie Lindsay — After a Sermon on Giving Up Everything
Jeffrey McDaniel — Confessions of a Flawed Diety
Jeffrey Perkins — Squirrel
Ravi Shankar — Rodeo Cowboy No. 1, Oil on Canvas, 1978
John Caserta — Keys
Joan Houlihan — The New Cruel
Mike Perrow — In a Time of the Tendered Ocean
Don Share — Symbiosis
Bill Gallery — Chair & Palm Trees, California, 1997
Steven Cramer — Rereading Stevens in Mid-February
John Hodgen — For Mr. Grimes Who Tried to Teach Me Physics After My Father Died
Noelle Kocot — The Peace That So Lovingly Descends

hahaha I am in a funny mood. I think they’re going to take my webmaster license away for using that <blink> tag. I’m cracking myself up. That really is a beautiful journal though so go buy one.

More at this link and here.

Geez have I ever had to chill out & keep in mind what I can control and cannot control these days. Stupid wars. Stupid leaders.

Poetry News:

1. — “Poem for My Daughter Disparaging the Gossamer Depictions of the Women of Certain Southern Texts” By Adrian Blevins and a sh*tstorm of criticism LOL. Sheesh. If I ever start subbing poems again remind me to NOT send to Slate. Gee whiz. —
2. — The first reading on this program, “What is Poetry,” is an excerpt from Debra Weinstein’s novel Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z, and touches on both creative ambition and pretension [MP3] —
3. — State looks for a new poet laureate —
4. — The Poem as Comic Strip #5 —
5. — Through five collections of poetry, a short story collection and a nonfiction book, the author has celebrated the overlooked, the commonplace, the tossed-aside … —
6. — Literary self-publishing and comic self-publishing are perceived very differently —
7. — Amazon, Borders Launch Literary Contests [fiction only] —

I am rapidly losing hope. After such a joyful beginning, I now don’t believe that we will be able to change anything.

The post- post- post- post- generation.