[New-Poetry] Invasive species: US Poetry Consultant/Poets Laureate

[James Cervantes]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 2:59 PM, <Rsgwynn1 at cs.com> wrote:

> In a message dated 7/21/2008 2:22:14 PM Central Daylight Time,
> jforjames at aol.com writes:
>
>
> The original anthologies, seeded in hotel rooms, were donated, and
> according to this article only 6 poets
> were included...
> http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=
> 9F03E7DD103DF936A25750C0A962958260
> Finnegan
>
>
> That's the one that Joel Connaroe edited.  Apparently Brodsky's own choices
> (lots more poets--101 poems) were published in a Dover Thrift edition after
> his death.  Looks like everything in it was public domain except for Auden's
> "The Unknown Citizen," the last poem in it. The guy who established a
> project to assist Brodsky (Carrell?) also apparently got a lot of free
> individual collections from publishers that were distributed to airlines and
> hotels.  Brodsky had a good idea, I think, but probably someone could have
> come up with a cheaper way of printing up the poems--some kind of
> inexpensive pamphlet.  You look at how much throwaway paper is in most hotel
> rooms--HBO schedules, pizza menus, local events mags, etc--that poems in
> such a format could have been more widely distributed.  Would people have
> read them?  Maybe so.  I expect few travelers open the Gideon bibles unless
> they're strapped for something to read.


Well, there are some ideas floating around (mostly in my head), such as "The
Poetry Channel" on motel t.v.s, which would offer the whole range, from
readings of Tennyson at 5 a.m. Sunday mornings to Poetry Lite read by
returning students and accompanied by screen images of picturesque America,
from MTV-style formats for performance poets to talk-show formats for
academic poets, from late night resurrections of Erica Jong to Saturday
morning poetry cartoons featuring Ashbery, from call-in talk shows with
ultra-talk poets to Dr. Phil type shows for those-kinds-of-poets etc.  Of
course this is all still in the development phase.

-- Jim
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Salt River Review: http://www.poetserv.org
http://www.hamiltonstone.org/catalog.html#temporarymeaning
http://www.fieralingue.it/documenti/mr_bondo.pdf
http://www.poetserv.org/jvc/home/index.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~jvcervantes/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12364573@N08/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20080721/cfffeea5/attachment.html