Poetry Hut Blog
Jonathan Williams

Poetry News:

1. — Nancy Galbraith; Led Center For Poetry —
2. — Reversing the Tide: Professor Gives Due
 to Self-Taught Poets —
3. — Journals that take summer submissions (3 recent blog posts) —
4. — Reb Livingston is guest blogging at The Best American Poetry (where I found the link below) —
5. — 68 new reviews of poetry books. Edited by Eileen Tabios —
6. — Bosnia’s butcher poet —
7. — poetry & rss I know that dead mule has an rss feed —
8. — Soldier-Poet Brian Turner, Framing War In Verse —
9. — WordPlay 7/20 Jeffrey Beam on Jonathan Williams [mp3] —

Poetry News:

1. — Who Owns That Prayer? —
2. — Anthology traces lines of contemporary poets from across the sea —
3. — Can science explain why ABBA is so catchy? —
4. — A tribute to Jonathan Williams planned —
5. — U.S. isn’t immune from poet’s observations on injustice —
6. — Inspired by Jazz, a Poet Does ‘His Own Thing’ —
7. — Michigan poetry —
8. — her difficulty — her intransigent demand that we pay total concentration to every word — is exciting —
9. — Wordsworth Daffodils estate on the market for £3m —

You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation Within Organisations

Libertarians: A (Not So) Lunatic Fringe

Looks like Mary Oliver and “anybody but Jorie Graham” are neck-and-neck for first place in the Who is going to be the next United States Poet Laureate? poll. I’ll leave it open until the new POLUS POetLaureateoftheUS is announced. Maxine Kumin got some votes but I’m not sure if she would want to do it again?

Poetry News:

1. — If you didn’t browse the comments when I posted about M.F.A. programs last month, you really should: they veered quickly and entertainingly toward gang warfare, with the Crips arguing against such programs and the Bloods arguing for them —
2. — Mary Oliver’s ‘work is loving the world’ —
3. — Strip —
4. — A sheaf of post-April poetry and poets —
5. — If poets were cowboys, James Tate would be The Man with No Name. It would be the spaghettiest western ever; his shadow would fall across the saloon door and everything inside would go quiet. —
6. — The future of poetry magazines —

Poetry News:

1. — There should be a place for more original poetry to be posted and shared - let’s start right here —
2. — Needed: Contemporary Visual Poetry for Poetry —
3. — Psalms offer source of inspiration for prayer —
4. — University Comes To Aid Of Literary Magazine —
5. — Here are 15 short poems as animated films. They’re the first in a series from Poetry Everywhere, a fresh initiative to introduce new audiences to poetry through cinema —
6. — Custom Ringtones From Poets.org —
7. — The UK’s biggest poetry competition, founded in 1978, attracts thousands of entries – here are this year’s winners —
8. — Mr. Williams founded the Jargon Society, a small publishing house that has introduced the works of little-known writers, photographers and artists —

A Veteran MAD Man Remains in the Fold

Yay, baseball. As always, there’s free baseball poetry in a PDF chapbook here. The Nashiville Sounds’ first home game is on the 11th.

Poetry News:

1. — It’s also an opportunity to have the kind of immediate relationship with an audience that is all too often unavailable to poets, no matter how well-known they are —
2. — Book Review The Ghost Soldiers (2008) James Tate —
3. — Jonathan Williams: 1929-2008 By Jeffery Beam • Special to The Smoky Mountain News —
4. — you can post information about the work of female poets you enjoy —
5. — This is a profession that is losing its will to live —
6. — Random House has linked up with an online initiative to allow reader reviewing of rejected manuscripts - but is it as worthwhile as it sounds? —
7. — There are certain single volumes of American poetry, some of them first books or early books, which carry with them a special and spiritual power; they seem to arise from a mysterious impulse and to have been written from an enormous private or artistic need —

Poetry News:

1. — If birds come from something as bizarre as a smooth ovoid container with no exit or entry, then it’s not too far of a stretch to imagine that the backbone of a corpse becomes a snake —
2. — WordPlay - WPVM: Celebrating Jonathan Williams [links to MP3] —
3. — 2008 National Magazine Award Finalists —
4. — Interview with poet Mark Doty:A poet who goes from “Fire to Fire” & Mark Doty Video at Split This Rock —
5. — Editors Kathryn Stripling Byer and Marilyn Kallet gathered contributions from 52 female writers —
6. — Posthumously published, these poems by one of the great masters of the short story deal largely with aging and death —
7. — The sense of unknowing you feel at the end of a poem is not something you get and then get over. —
8. — Bishop’s poetry takes up about the first third of this Library of America volume; the rest is prose of varying kinds and interest — fiction and memoir, travel and literary pieces, translations and correspondence, some published for the first time —

Lest you think I’m not an idiot, I am. Before I even got my MFA I sent a poetry manuscript out to poetry contests. Even now that I’m wised up about poetry contests, there are some presses that I really like so I enter to support them (NMP’s chapbook contest deadline is coming up FYI). So yeah, I’m a hypocrite.

Thursday I’m meeting with the folks at the Vanderbilt Division of Medical Genetics. Wish me luck. I don’t know what to expect, though I know where they will be heading. Unfortunately, I’m in a lot of pain these days & didn’t help things when I slipped Saturday & fcked up my r. hip. Note to self: do not taunt Pluto.