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.

Poetry News:

1. — Catherine Breese Davis wrote of loss, abandonment, destitution, despair and decrepitude—and she knew what she was talking about —
2. — Between Poetry and Performance, a Film Finds a Rocker’s Heart —
3. — A Voice Poetry Roundup: From half-baked utopias to diabetic bitches —
4. — But if no one likes to read poetry — or so it can often seem to the discouraged poet — then putting poems in hotel nightstands or on subway cars only multiplies the public’s opportunities to ignore them —
5. — Not for Li-Young Lee are the darker recesses of poetry, the bleak places where the soul loses its way and succumbs to hopelessness —
6. — In his new book The Watchmaker’s Table, Nova Scotia poet Brian Bartlett proves that time is not, in fact, linear —
7. — Amazon policy change threatens small publishers —

It’s now time to cast your votes for the 2008 Poet Laureate of The Blogosphere