Poetry Hut Blog

Poetry News:

1. — Things fall apart: is the post-9/11 imagination disintegrating? —
2. — Happy Birthday, Archibald MacLeish! —
3. — Dante, Primo Levi and the intertextualists —
4. — On other occasions he complained he looked like “a cross between an egg and a bloodhound” and “an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on” —
5. — It reminds me of the old black and white films; the mist, the looming shapes that become familiar upon approach, the necessary promise of a romantic meeting… the poem is pregnant with possibilities that remain non-specific —
6. — There’s no point in piling up a mountain of poems that no one wants to read —
7. — wikipedia’s list of American poets is strange & they have weird rules for notability. The discussions about Shanna Compton’s John Gallaher’s articles are kind of hilarious in their ignorance. I’m not a huge fan of Wikipedia…just different arbiters. —
8. — Wheaton College Prof. Resigns After School Questions Details of Divorce —

Virginia Quarterly Review apologized for publicly making fun of their slushpile & took down the offending comments. Google cached it though. I’m a Libra and I like “nice” I guess, because I am starting to get really really sick of snottiness disguised as cleverness or intellect. Or maybe it is because I didn’t really grow up in that whole middle class world? I grew up with people who mostly knew life is rough, and gave everyone else a begrudging respect at least, because of that shared experience. And if you are going to be a smart ass / asshole, you better be prepared to back it up / defend yourself. Anyway, the thing that bothered me about the post was that the prose poem genre (as a whole) was lumped in with poor writing.