From chris.lott at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 01:16:26 2009 From: chris.lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:48 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For Bob's WEPD experiment: 'Success' by Rebecca McKee In-Reply-To: <498269C0.3030409@nut-n-but.net> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com> <979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net> <7db1d01b0901291747x2e1bcec7m9d01dd35cf4c464a@mail.gmail.com> <498264C2.9000901@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0901291838h5d13c0at76e6f81377d2fbcc@mail.gmail.com> <498269C0.3030409@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <9b1b9dab0901312216l5b50da03oc09d282f1ad3af1f@mail.gmail.com> This is all very interesting, but my prediction was about which poems you would agree as being excellent, not which poems you would agree were not. There is quite a difference between the former and the latter. And I posit as evidence pretty much every conversation on this list since I first started reading it. If you start agreeing regularly it will be an amazing change from the past won't it? What characterizes this list more thoroughly than Bob's naysaying of poems submitted by others and championing of poems that almost no one seem to like? You'll need to do a few poems to start meaning anything significant... interesting that so far none of the dullard post avant poems have come up, nor visual poetry, nor anything the list bit controversial. Choosing Shakespeare, Housman and some craptacular poem that could have come from any 8th grade workshiop seems a bit like stacking the deck. But carry on. It is nice to see talk about poems here. I'll check back in a few weeks and see what happened. c From chris.lott at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 01:20:08 2009 From: chris.lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:48 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence In-Reply-To: <4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com> <49825503.6040104@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830901291741r3e52b967lbe8a9d4225a291cb@mail.gmail.com> <4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <9b1b9dab0901312220j2535f7r6f679a1634e18168@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Well, all I can say, Michael, is that I think one can use a check-list to > come close to deciding whether most poems are excellent Marcus Bales is probably falling in love with you at this very moment. At one point, at least, his mission was to rip all subjectivity from aesthetic appreciation. > I can't see how any poem can give > anyone lasting pleasure; Proof that you and I, at least, are different species. But then we knew that... c From chris.lott at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 01:28:49 2009 From: chris.lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:48 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence In-Reply-To: <9b1b9dab0901312220j2535f7r6f679a1634e18168@mail.gmail.com> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com> <49825503.6040104@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830901291741r3e52b967lbe8a9d4225a291cb@mail.gmail.com> <4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0901312220j2535f7r6f679a1634e18168@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <9b1b9dab0901312228t51dd9ed4w7061515f12b92602@mail.gmail.com> Just to be clear (since Marcus is probably scanning the mail constantly for his name)-- I know that the checklist doesn't negate subjectivity (being simply a manifestation of it)... but considering the paucity of suitors, I think it'll do. c On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 9:20 PM, Chris Lott wrote: > On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: >> Well, all I can say, Michael, is that I think one can use a check-list to >> come close to deciding whether most poems are excellent > > Marcus Bales is probably falling in love with you at this very moment. > At one point, at least, his mission was to rip all subjectivity from > aesthetic appreciation. > >> I can't see how any poem can give >> anyone lasting pleasure; > > Proof that you and I, at least, are different species. But then we knew that... > > c > -- Chris Lott From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 1 05:54:58 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:48 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For Bob's WEPD experiment: 'Success' by Rebecca McKee In-Reply-To: <9b1b9dab0901312216l5b50da03oc09d282f1ad3af1f@mail.gmail.com> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com> <979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net> <7db1d01b0901291747x2e1bcec7m9d01dd35cf4c464a@mail.gmail.com> <498264C2.9000901@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0901291838h5d13c0at76e6f81377d2fbcc@mail.gmail.com> <498269C0.3030409@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0901312216l5b50da03oc09d282f1ad3af1f@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902010254h54e064bcu769bac916d13c9e4@mail.gmail.com> Your several assumptions, reasonably, may find themselves untrue, Chris. Trying to find out what many of us think makes Excellent poems will usually reveal what many of us think has made a not-Excellent poem. Flip-sides of a coin. Further, many people [even poet-people] change their views as they learn more, widen their perspectives; and, of course, new or 'lurking' listmembers appear whose responses may differ from what you're remembering in past list-chats. And, finally, even Bob---yes, even Bob---changes his opinions, as he so often un-ego'ly and generously admits to us. I suggest that you join us in evaluating poems; offer a poem or changes in the checklist. Why not? What's there to lose? I'm finding it as frustrating and surprise-fascinating as worthwhile projects usually prove to be. Best, Judy 2009/2/1 Chris Lott > This is all very interesting, but my prediction was about which poems > you would agree as being excellent, not which poems you would agree > were not. There is quite a difference between the former and the > latter. And I posit as evidence pretty much every conversation on this > list since I first started reading it. If you start agreeing regularly > it will be an amazing change from the past won't it? What > characterizes this list more thoroughly than Bob's naysaying of poems > submitted by others and championing of poems that almost no one seem > to like? > > You'll need to do a few poems to start meaning anything significant... > interesting that so far none of the dullard post avant poems have come > up, nor visual poetry, nor anything the list bit controversial. > Choosing Shakespeare, Housman and some craptacular poem that could > have come from any 8th grade workshiop seems a bit like stacking the > deck. > > But carry on. It is nice to see talk about poems here. I'll check back > in a few weeks and see what happened. > > c > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/c1ab204a/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 1 06:40:57 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:48 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence In-Reply-To: <9b1b9dab0901312220j2535f7r6f679a1634e18168@mail.gmail.com> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com><4982550 3.6040104@nut-n-but.net><6768ac830901291741r3e52b967lbe8a9d4225a291cb@mail.gmail.com><4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0901312220j2535f7r6f679a1634e18168@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> Chris Lott wrote: > On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > >> Well, all I can say, Michael, is that I think one can use a check-list to >> come close to deciding whether most poems are excellent >> > > Marcus Bales is probably falling in love with you at this very moment. > At one point, at least, his mission was to rip all subjectivity from > aesthetic appreciation. I believe you have Marcus wrong, Chris. He believes poetry is undefinable. He definitely believe that you can't classify poetries. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/e7e6200e/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 1 06:55:16 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:48 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For Bob's WEPD experiment: 'Success' by Rebecca McKee In-Reply-To: <9b1b9dab0901312216l5b50da03oc09d282f1ad3af1f@mail.gmail.com> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com><979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net><7db1d01b 0901291747x2e1bcec7m9d01dd35cf4c464a@mail.gmail.com><498264C2.9000901@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0901291838h5d13c0at76e6f81377d2fbc c@mail.gmail.com><498269C0.3030409@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0901312216l5b50da03oc09d282f1ad3af1f@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49858DA4.4080403@nut-n-but.net> Chris Lott wrote: > This is all very interesting, but my prediction was about which poems > you would agree as being excellent, not which poems you would agree > were not. Okay. Still, I'm sure you're right that just about no group of people would agree on every case. We, however, as a group, have so far agreed on every case. > There is quite a difference between the former and the > latter. And I posit as evidence pretty much every conversation on this > list since I first started reading it. If you start agreeing regularly > it will be an amazing change from the past won't it? What > characterizes this list more thoroughly than Bob's naysaying of poems > submitted by others and championing of poems that almost no one seem > to like? > How so? Unless you require 100% agreement, which I certainly would not. > You'll need to do a few poems to start meaning anything significant... > interesting that so far none of the dullard post avant poems have come > up, nor visual poetry, nor anything the list bit controversial. > Choosing Shakespeare, Housman and some craptacular poem that could > have come from any 8th grade workshop seems a bit like stacking the > deck. > > Feel free to give us a poem, Chris. I don't care what poems we analyze, but it would prefer not to get into visual poetry because we know that only I, and maybe sometimes Judy with the proviso it isn't poetry, would consider it excellent, and I would probably not be able to resist the temptation to argue for a thousand posts. It seems reasonable to me to start with poems we all know--and, it is to be hoped--agree are excellent, to clarify just what qualifies as that by check list. I hope to post a revised check list later today. Look for it. It will be minimally objective the way most laws in countries like ours are: all kinds of borblurs, as I call them--like between manslaughter and murder. That doesn't make laws subjective. --Bob From halvard at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 11:11:02 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:48 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence In-Reply-To: <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com> <6768ac830901291741r3e52b967lbe8a9d4225a291cb@mail.gmail.com> <4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0901312220j2535f7r6f679a1634e18168@mail.gmail.com> <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: Here's a question for those of you pondering "excellence": Can you name some (maybe two or three) poems you consider excellent but which you also dislike or, even better, actively hate? Hal -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/4df58b12/attachment.html From grahamd at ripon.edu Sun Feb 1 11:58:20 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Excellence In-Reply-To: References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com> <6768ac830901291741r3e52b967lbe8a9d4225a291cb@mail.gmail.com> <4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0901312220j2535f7r6f679a1634e18168@mail.gmail.com> <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <2257855C-ABFC-4C70-A372-F4C7EBA77F6C@ripon.edu> That's a softball. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," for one. Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" for another. Then there's "The Red Wheelbarrow" . . . . Quite a lot of the Norton Anthology, in fact. I save actual hatred for people, usually (often former Presidents), but I can say that I don't much love the above poems, and never have. ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== On Feb 1, 2009, at 10:11 AM, Halvard Johnson wrote: > Here's a question for those of you pondering "excellence": Can you > name some (maybe two or three) poems you consider excellent but > which you also dislike or, even better, actively hate? > > Hal > -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/9b9983ce/attachment.html From grahamd at ripon.edu Sun Feb 1 12:15:51 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Langston Hughes Message-ID: <31EE2A7B-E2A6-4248-9216-346804B663F0@ripon.edu> Born this day in 1902. Democracy Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear. I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet And own the land. I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I?m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow?s bread. Freedom Is a strong seed Planted In a great need. I live here, too. I want freedom Just as you. --Langston Hughes. fr. "Montage of a Dream Deferred." ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/5d65084e/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 1 12:45:36 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List In-Reply-To: References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com><6768ac8 30901291741r3e52b967lbe8a9d4225a291cb@mail.gmail.com><4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net><9b1b9dab0901312220j2535f7r6f679a1634e1816 8@mail.gmail.com><49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> A poem is excellent if judged at any time ten years after its publication to be so by a hundred or more poetry experts using the following check-list--if no more than ninety-nine such experts can be found to disagree with that judgement within ten years of that judgement, a poetry expert being defined as someone who has seriously engaged the works of ten or more poets (which means having read at least fifty poems by each) including the works of at least one solitextual poet (poet whose works are solely textual) and one pluraesthetic poet (poet whose works make significant use of more than one expressive modality such as a visual poet) and has either composed fifty pages of poetry or one hundred twenty pages of poetry criticism or who has been accepted as a poetry expert by twenty or more poetry experts. An Excellent Poem: (1) expresses something importantly true or represents of something centrally beautiful-- assuming it doesn't do both; (2) is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or something that makes its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but eventually achieves Clarity; (3) has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which pulls its elements reasonably close together; (4) contains few or no superfluous words; (5) boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have such as uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual art), and imagery; (6) avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or thought; too overt Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; Comments: I added the panel of Poetry Experts after thinking over Michael's assertion that "we know that Emily's little poem is excellent because a significant number of people are still willing to give their time to reading it and thinking and writing about it." I agreed at first with this, but then decided that popularity is no real evidence of quality. Look at the religious sects still incredibly popular, for instance. And there are poems that have stood :the test of time" that most genuine lovers of poetry don't think much of, like some of Poe's. I think Poe is badly under-rated, myself, but I can't believe that all the poems still in anthologies and greatly enjoyed by many people are excellent. Note that I have proclaimed that any poem that is approved as excellent by my hundred or more experts keeps its rating forever, however later generations look on it. My reasoning is that it possible, even probable, that contemporaries will find a poem to be excellent for something about it later generations are no longer sensitive to, just as the reverse so frequently happens. But I do require ten years to pass for a poem to become eligible for evaluation to prevent fashion or prestige from being too quickly influential. Note, too, that I have ordained that a mere hundred experts can pronounce a poem excellent. That means that even if ten thousand pronounce it crap, the hundred win. My six desiderata seem objective enough to me--the way laws in a democratic society are. In each case something objective is examined and judged by professionals or the equivalent for excellence the same way deeds are examined and judged by professionals or the equivalent for lawfulness. Some subjectivity is unavoidable, but it is minimized by having specifics to judge, and expertise to counter-balance empty enthusiasm or unfair antagonism. I added "central beauty" to number one to take care of poems that have no easy "truth" to latch onto, haiku being a good example of that, and so many poems since 1900 that I feel the evolution of poetry has been toward greater and greater implicitness of meaning since its origin and especially recently. Side-comment: I believe poetry as a whole has been improving, possibly on pace with science--because of its broadening, not necessarily because of any qualitative improvement in individual poems; we have more words to work with and more techniques--any more expressive modalities, so we have an ever-increasing range of possible poems, which is a Good Thing. I think I could find something importantly true in every poem I thought excellent, but in many cases--"lighght," for instance--it doesn't seem worth the effort and representation of central beauty is usually much easier to demonstrate (I think few could disagree that light is not a central beauty of existence however little they like the poem celebrating it). Number two is an addition because the constituent, suggested by Barry Spacks, makes sense to me. Number three is also an addition, because important in my own poetics, and often--especially by otherstream poets--given short shrift. Number four is "Compactness" which I improved, I think, to "Conciseness," and someone else to "Economy of Expression" or the like before I finally settled on the words here as doing the best job of pinning it down. Number 5 is the same as it was originally, I think. Number six is new because I realized in the discussion so far that we were ignoring flaws that should keep a poem from being excellent. --Bob From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 1 12:55:30 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence In-Reply-To: References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com><6768ac8 30901291741r3e52b967lbe8a9d4225a291cb@mail.gmail.com><4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net><9b1b9dab0901312220j2535f7r6f679a1634e1816 8@mail.gmail.com><49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <4985E212.3090100@nut-n-but.net> Halvard Johnson wrote: > Here's a question for those of you pondering "excellence": Can you > name some (maybe two or three) poems you consider excellent but which > you also dislike or, even better, actively hate? > > Hal Well, I just accepted Emily's bustle poem as excellent because my check list required me to. I'm sure there are a lot of poems like that. Another by Emily that I hate is the one about London being a place she knows exists although she's never visited it, so Heaven, which she has never visited, also exists. I hate "The Inferno" for its intolerance but have to agree that it is excellent for the same reason. I'm neutral about the rest of the Divine Comedy. I can't think of any others offhand, but am sure there must be some. Generally, though, I very much like the poems up to 1900 that have been canonized. --Bob From cervantes.james at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 13:14:53 2009 From: cervantes.james at gmail.com (James Cervantes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List In-Reply-To: <4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com> <4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> <4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <648208b60902011014o14f8f7edl7eb42f1e0c656eb1@mail.gmail.com> How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui generis. - Jim On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Bob Grumman wrote: > A poem is excellent if judged at any time ten years after its publication > to be so by a > hundred or more poetry experts using the following check-list--if no more > than ninety-nine > such experts can be found to disagree with that judgement within ten years > of that > judgement, a poetry expert being defined as someone who has seriously > engaged the > works of ten or more poets (which means having read at least fifty poems by > each) > including the works of at least one solitextual poet (poet whose works are > solely textual) > and one pluraesthetic poet (poet whose works make significant use of more > than one > expressive modality such as a visual poet) and has either composed fifty > pages of poetry or > one hundred twenty pages of poetry criticism or who has been accepted as a > poetry expert > by twenty or more poetry experts. > > An Excellent Poem: > > (1) expresses something importantly true or represents of something > centrally beautiful-- > assuming it doesn't do both; > > (2) is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or something > that makes > its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but > eventually achieves Clarity; > > (3) has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which > pulls its elements > reasonably close together; > (4) contains few or no superfluous words; > > (5) boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have > such as > uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual > art), and imagery; > > (6) avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or > thought; too overt > Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; > > Comments: I added the panel of Poetry Experts after thinking over Michael's > assertion > that "we know that Emily's little poem is excellent because a significant > number of people > are still willing to give their time to reading it and thinking and writing > about it." I agreed > at first with this, but then decided that popularity is no real evidence of > quality. Look at > the religious sects still incredibly popular, for instance. And there are > poems that have > stood :the test of time" that most genuine lovers of poetry don't think > much of, like some > of Poe's. I think Poe is badly under-rated, myself, but I can't believe > that all the poems still > in anthologies and greatly enjoyed by many people are excellent. > Note that I have proclaimed that any poem that is approved as excellent by > my hundred or > more experts keeps its rating forever, however later generations look on > it. My reasoning > is that it possible, even probable, that contemporaries will find a poem to > be excellent for > something about it later generations are no longer sensitive to, just as > the reverse so > frequently happens. But I do require ten years to pass for a poem to > become eligible for > evaluation to prevent fashion or prestige from being too quickly > influential. > > Note, too, that I have ordained that a mere hundred experts can pronounce a > poem > excellent. That means that even if ten thousand pronounce it crap, the > hundred win. > > My six desiderata seem objective enough to me--the way laws in a democratic > society are. > In each case something objective is examined and judged by professionals or > the > equivalent for excellence the same way deeds are examined and judged by > professionals or > the equivalent for lawfulness. Some subjectivity is unavoidable, but it is > minimized by > having specifics to judge, and expertise to counter-balance empty > enthusiasm or unfair > antagonism. > I added "central beauty" to number one to take care of poems that have no > easy "truth" to > latch onto, haiku being a good example of that, and so many poems since > 1900 that I feel > the evolution of poetry has been toward greater and greater implicitness of > meaning since > its origin and especially recently. Side-comment: I believe poetry as a > whole has been > improving, possibly on pace with science--because of its broadening, not > necessarily > because of any qualitative improvement in individual poems; we have more > words to work > with and more techniques--any more expressive modalities, so we have an > ever-increasing > range of possible poems, which is a Good Thing. > > I think I could find something importantly true in every poem I thought > excellent, but in > many cases--"lighght," for instance--it doesn't seem worth the effort and > representation of > central beauty is usually much easier to demonstrate (I think few could > disagree that light > is not a central beauty of existence however little they like the poem > celebrating it). > > Number two is an addition because the constituent, suggested by Barry > Spacks, makes > sense to me. Number three is also an addition, because important in my own > poetics, and > often--especially by otherstream poets--given short shrift. Number four is > "Compactness" > which I improved, I think, to "Conciseness," and someone else to "Economy > of > Expression" or the like before I finally settled on the words here as doing > the best job of > pinning it down. Number 5 is the same as it was originally, I think. > Number six is new > because I realized in the discussion so far that we were ignoring flaws > that should keep a > poem from being excellent. > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- "Polish doesn't change quartz into a diamond." -Wilma Askinas ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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://www.flickr.com/photos/jamescervantes/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/d83be23e/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 1 14:19:13 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List In-Reply-To: <648208b60902011014o14f8f7edl7eb42f1e0c656eb1@mail.gmail.com> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com><4982613 A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net><4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> <648208b60902011014o14f8f7edl7eb42f1e0c656eb1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4985F5B1.6050802@nut-n-but.net> James Cervantes wrote: > How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui generis. > > - Jim You seem to be taking "sui generis" too literally, Jim. It doesn't mean in some way unlike every other poem, at least not to me; it means differing from all other poems in some fairly extreme way. My check list doesn't have that as a requirement, only that an excellent poem be special in some way. Dickinson's poems, for instance, each have a diction all its own, and like but not the same as the diction in her other poems, and unlike the diction in just about any other poet's poems, but not enough to make her poem sui generis, I don't think. Unless every good poet's oeuvre is sui generis. --Bob From halvard at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 14:21:04 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List In-Reply-To: <4985F5B1.6050802@nut-n-but.net> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com> <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> <4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> <648208b60902011014o14f8f7edl7eb42f1e0c656eb1@mail.gmail.com> <4985F5B1.6050802@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: I love chopped sui generis. Hal On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > James Cervantes wrote: > >> How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui generis. >> >> - Jim >> > You seem to be taking "sui generis" too literally, Jim. It doesn't mean in > some way unlike every other poem, at least not to me; it means differing > from all other poems in some fairly extreme way. My check list doesn't have > that as a requirement, only that an excellent poem be special in some way. > Dickinson's poems, for instance, each have a diction all its own, and like > but not the same as the diction in her other poems, and unlike the diction > in just about any other poet's poems, but not enough to make her poem sui > generis, I don't think. Unless every good poet's oeuvre is sui generis. > > > --Bob > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/ee437505/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 1 14:25:13 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List In-Reply-To: <4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com> <4982613A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> <4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902011125i3fb1f674pecf0ead217b5a6a0@mail.gmail.com> Bob, forgive your poor volunteer, Judy. I don't want to read this new version of WEPD. Having skimmed it at warp speed, I've determined that it's like the second draft of most of my poems; i.e., worse than the original because it's TOO thorough, TOO explainy, TOO boring----and most important, it's TOO lengthy. Did I mention boring? If I actually need to read, understand, and apply m'sel' to USING the new WEPD, then I resign my position as volunteer of our wonderful little WEPD experiment. Unless, of course, you send me a check [or cheque] for $50 a week throughout our experiment. carpe diem Judy 2009/2/1 Bob Grumman > A poem is excellent if judged at any time ten years after its publication > to be so by a > hundred or more poetry experts using the following check-list--if no more > than ninety-nine > such experts can be found to disagree with that judgement within ten years > of that > judgement, a poetry expert being defined as someone who has seriously > engaged the > works of ten or more poets (which means having read at least fifty poems by > each) > including the works of at least one solitextual poet (poet whose works are > solely textual) > and one pluraesthetic poet (poet whose works make significant use of more > than one > expressive modality such as a visual poet) and has either composed fifty > pages of poetry or > one hundred twenty pages of poetry criticism or who has been accepted as a > poetry expert > by twenty or more poetry experts. > > An Excellent Poem: > > (1) expresses something importantly true or represents of something > centrally beautiful-- > assuming it doesn't do both; > > (2) is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or something > that makes > its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but > eventually achieves Clarity; > > (3) has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which > pulls its elements > reasonably close together; > (4) contains few or no superfluous words; > > (5) boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have > such as > uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual > art), and imagery; > > (6) avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or > thought; too overt > Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; > > Comments: I added the panel of Poetry Experts after thinking over Michael's > assertion > that "we know that Emily's little poem is excellent because a significant > number of people > are still willing to give their time to reading it and thinking and writing > about it." I agreed > at first with this, but then decided that popularity is no real evidence of > quality. Look at > the religious sects still incredibly popular, for instance. And there are > poems that have > stood :the test of time" that most genuine lovers of poetry don't think > much of, like some > of Poe's. I think Poe is badly under-rated, myself, but I can't believe > that all the poems still > in anthologies and greatly enjoyed by many people are excellent. > Note that I have proclaimed that any poem that is approved as excellent by > my hundred or > more experts keeps its rating forever, however later generations look on > it. My reasoning > is that it possible, even probable, that contemporaries will find a poem to > be excellent for > something about it later generations are no longer sensitive to, just as > the reverse so > frequently happens. But I do require ten years to pass for a poem to > become eligible for > evaluation to prevent fashion or prestige from being too quickly > influential. > > Note, too, that I have ordained that a mere hundred experts can pronounce a > poem > excellent. That means that even if ten thousand pronounce it crap, the > hundred win. > > My six desiderata seem objective enough to me--the way laws in a democratic > society are. > In each case something objective is examined and judged by professionals or > the > equivalent for excellence the same way deeds are examined and judged by > professionals or > the equivalent for lawfulness. Some subjectivity is unavoidable, but it is > minimized by > having specifics to judge, and expertise to counter-balance empty > enthusiasm or unfair > antagonism. > I added "central beauty" to number one to take care of poems that have no > easy "truth" to > latch onto, haiku being a good example of that, and so many poems since > 1900 that I feel > the evolution of poetry has been toward greater and greater implicitness of > meaning since > its origin and especially recently. Side-comment: I believe poetry as a > whole has been > improving, possibly on pace with science--because of its broadening, not > necessarily > because of any qualitative improvement in individual poems; we have more > words to work > with and more techniques--any more expressive modalities, so we have an > ever-increasing > range of possible poems, which is a Good Thing. > > I think I could find something importantly true in every poem I thought > excellent, but in > many cases--"lighght," for instance--it doesn't seem worth the effort and > representation of > central beauty is usually much easier to demonstrate (I think few could > disagree that light > is not a central beauty of existence however little they like the poem > celebrating it). > > Number two is an addition because the constituent, suggested by Barry > Spacks, makes > sense to me. Number three is also an addition, because important in my own > poetics, and > often--especially by otherstream poets--given short shrift. Number four is > "Compactness" > which I improved, I think, to "Conciseness," and someone else to "Economy > of > Expression" or the like before I finally settled on the words here as doing > the best job of > pinning it down. Number 5 is the same as it was originally, I think. > Number six is new > because I realized in the discussion so far that we were ignoring flaws > that should keep a > poem from being excellent. > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/67bde409/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 1 14:26:46 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List In-Reply-To: References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com> <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> <4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> <648208b60902011014o14f8f7edl7eb42f1e0c656eb1@mail.gmail.com> <4985F5B1.6050802@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902011126y2d5de55bia6a3b508ef83cc6c@mail.gmail.com> and I had thought it a hog call. Judy 2009/2/1 Halvard Johnson > I love chopped sui generis. > > Hal > > > On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > >> James Cervantes wrote: >> >>> How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui generis. >>> >>> - Jim >>> >> You seem to be taking "sui generis" too literally, Jim. It doesn't mean >> in some way unlike every other poem, at least not to me; it means differing >> from all other poems in some fairly extreme way. My check list doesn't have >> that as a requirement, only that an excellent poem be special in some way. >> Dickinson's poems, for instance, each have a diction all its own, and like >> but not the same as the diction in her other poems, and unlike the diction >> in just about any other poet's poems, but not enough to make her poem sui >> generis, I don't think. Unless every good poet's oeuvre is sui generis. >> >> >> --Bob >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > > > > -- > > Halvard Johnson > ================ > halvard@gmail.com > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html > http://entropyandme.blogspot.com > http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com > http://www.hamiltonstone.org > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/931728ee/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 1 14:55:14 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902011125i3fb1f674pecf0ead217b5a6a0@mail.gmail.com> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com><4982613 A.3090806@nut-n-but.net> <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net><4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902011125i3fb1f674pecf0ead217b5a6a0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4985FE22.6070302@nut-n-but.net> You do too much at warp speed, Judy. The new check list is only 120 words in length. 270 if you count the part about the panel of experts, but you can skip that since the experiment will only use the Check-List. No one is really bothering much with it, anyway. The rest is discussion, and you seem not to like discussion too much. Strokes/folks. Anyway, I hope you stay on. I'll do the Houseman, at least, and stay on if others want to continue the project (which you were the one to suggest, by the way). --Bob From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 1 15:35:24 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List In-Reply-To: <4985FE22.6070302@nut-n-but.net> References: <4b65c2d70901282308h4d385de5ncaffb84069e5b828@mail.gmail.com> <49858A49.9000602@nut-n-but.net> <4985DFC0.4010406@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902011125i3fb1f674pecf0ead217b5a6a0@mail.gmail.com> <4985FE22.6070302@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902011235o59a5bb6eiab1944369a0b2ffd@mail.gmail.com> Do the Housman, and let's see how things go. warp speed mind Judy 2009/2/1 Bob Grumman > You do too much at warp speed, Judy. The new check list is only 120 words > in length. 270 if you count the part about the panel of experts, but you > can skip that since the experiment will only use the Check-List. No one is > really bothering much with it, anyway. The rest is discussion, and you seem > not to like discussion too much. Strokes/folks. Anyway, I hope you stay > on. I'll do the Houseman, at least, and stay on if others want to continue > the project (which you were the one to suggest, by the way). > > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/30c2b8b1/attachment.html From barry.spacks at verizon.net Sun Feb 1 15:35:46 2009 From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (Barry Spacks) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:49 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: WEPD Banana In-Reply-To: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu> References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: I maintain that poems may pass the Excellencey test even if only some of the test's criteria help to build its case. Regarding "Bananas," a sort of Zenish jeu d'esprit, working it through the whole WEPD word-grinder becomes a joke about a joke. The poem must, I feel, go elsewhere for justification. I'll put before the court an excerpt from my mini-essay on the poem, composed for a wide-ranging anthology in progress. Speaking of "the unsayable," here's an experimental piece that some may take as simply silly, an arbitrary blurt. Yet blurt is the wrong word, for the tone here is unassumingly quiet and calculatedly subversive. A "Language" poem, the piece takes to a far level Wallace Stevens dictum that poetry "should resist meaning almost successfully." Heavy emphasis, in cases like this, falls on the word "almost." The fact that Andrews' four word tease appeared in the prestigious Paris Review in 1972 has helped to gain it attention. The poem's energy lies in its oddity, running against received notions of "making sense" to free the imagination toward limitless suggestion. As Robert Pinsky writes in his short survey THE SITUATION OF POETRY, "Comic and reductive, Andrews's poem calls attention to the somewhat arbitrary nature of any connection between specific examples and general ideas...[it] might be made to exemplify nearly anything." Unique, hence unrepeatable in strategy, the poem may best earn relevance from the reader in connection with its tongue-in-cheek daring. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/18b67370/attachment.html From halvard at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 15:44:34 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:50 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: WEPD Banana In-Reply-To: References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: Never thought of relevance as something to be "earned," Barry. Hal, still learning something relevant every day On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Barry Spacks wrote: > > I maintain that poems may pass the Excellencey > test even if only some of the test's criteria help to build its case. > > Regarding "Bananas," a sort of Zenish jeu d'esprit, working it > through the whole WEPD word-grinder becomes > a joke about a joke. The poem must, I feel, go elsewhere > for justification. > > I'll put before the court an excerpt from my mini-essay on the poem, > composed for a wide-ranging anthology in progress. > > Speaking of "the unsayable," here's an experimental piece that some > may take as simply silly, an arbitrary blurt. Yet blurt is the wrong > word, for the tone here is unassumingly quiet and calculatedly subversive. > A "Language" poem, the piece takes to a far level Wallace Stevens dictum > that poetry "should resist meaning almost successfully." Heavy emphasis, in > cases like this, falls on the word "almost." > > The fact that Andrews' four word tease appeared in the prestigious Paris > Review in 1972 has helped to gain it attention. The poem's energy lies in > its oddity, running against received notions of "making sense" to free the > imagination toward limitless suggestion. > > As Robert Pinsky writes in his short survey THE SITUATION OF POETRY, "Comic > and reductive, Andrews's poem calls attention to the somewhat arbitrary > nature of any connection between specific examples and general ideas...[it] > might be made to exemplify nearly anything." > > Unique, hence unrepeatable in strategy, the poem may best earn relevance > from the reader in connection with its tongue-in-cheek daring. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/65e23026/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 1 15:54:17 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:50 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: WEPD Banana In-Reply-To: References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <49860BF9.5020504@nut-n-but.net> Barry Spacks wrote: > > I maintain that poems may pass the Excellencey > test even if only some of the test's criteria help to build its case. > > Regarding "Bananas," a sort of Zenish jeu d'esprit, working it > through the whole WEPD word-grinder becomes > a joke about a joke. The poem must, I feel, go elsewhere > for justification. I'll try the check-list on it, Barry, but not for a while. First, the Housman. Interesting essay on the Andrews, by the way. It's a jump-cut poem, though, not a language poem--unless "The Wasteland" is. --Bob From matthew.shindell at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 16:09:39 2009 From: matthew.shindell at gmail.com (Matthew Shindell) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:50 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: New-Poetry Digest, Vol 56, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: <200902011700.n11H050O013918@wiz.cath.vt.edu> References: <200902011700.n11H050O013918@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <0EEA972A-7EB3-4506-8914-30F2260CC273@gmail.com> Nick, Thanks for the comment. You're right about earlier periods of conscription. Kelly made the same comment. I'll have to look again & remind myself what was "first" about this draft. This talk is in Philadelphia. I'm assuming they will all know where Frankford PA is. But maybe I should add a sentence to clarify. Thanks again for coming. Sorry you didn't get to stay for the pizza. M (sent from my iPhone) Matthew Shindell Ph.D. Candidate Department of History Science Studies Program University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California On Feb 1, 2009, at 9:00 AM, new-poetry-request@wiz.cath.vt.edu wrote: > Send New-Poetry mailing list submissions to > new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > new-poetry-request@wiz.cath.vt.edu > > You can reach the person managing the list at > new-poetry-owner@wiz.cath.vt.edu > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of New-Poetry digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Re: Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List (Bob Grumman) > 2. Re: Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List (Halvard Johnson) > 3. Re: Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List (Judy Prince) > 4. Re: Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List (Judy Prince) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:19:13 -0500 > From: Bob Grumman > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" > > Message-ID: <4985F5B1.6050802@nut-n-but.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > James Cervantes wrote: >> How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui >> generis. >> >> - Jim > You seem to be taking "sui generis" too literally, Jim. It doesn't > mean > in some way unlike every other poem, at least not to me; it means > differing from all other poems in some fairly extreme way. My check > list doesn't have that as a requirement, only that an excellent poem > be > special in some way. Dickinson's poems, for instance, each have a > diction all its own, and like but not the same as the diction in her > other poems, and unlike the diction in just about any other poet's > poems, but not enough to make her poem sui generis, I don't think. > Unless every good poet's oeuvre is sui generis. > > --Bob > > > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 13:21:04 -0600 > From: Halvard Johnson > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, Views" > > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > I love chopped sui generis. > > Hal > > On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Bob Grumman but.net>wrote: > >> James Cervantes wrote: >> >>> How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui >>> generis. >>> >>> - Jim >>> >> You seem to be taking "sui generis" too literally, Jim. It doesn't >> mean in >> some way unlike every other poem, at least not to me; it means >> differing >> from all other poems in some fairly extreme way. My check list >> doesn't have >> that as a requirement, only that an excellent poem be special in >> some way. >> Dickinson's poems, for instance, each have a diction all its own, >> and like >> but not the same as the diction in her other poems, and unlike the >> diction >> in just about any other poet's poems, but not enough to make her >> poem sui >> generis, I don't think. Unless every good poet's oeuvre is sui >> generis. >> >> >> --Bob >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > > > > -- > > Halvard Johnson > ================ > halvard@gmail.com > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html > http://entropyandme.blogspot.com > http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com > http://www.hamiltonstone.org > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/ee437505/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 14:25:13 -0500 > From: Judy Prince > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, Views" > > Message-ID: > <7db1d01b0902011125i3fb1f674pecf0ead217b5a6a0@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Bob, forgive your poor volunteer, Judy. I don't want to read this new > version of WEPD. Having skimmed it at warp speed, I've determined > that it's > like the second draft of most of my poems; i.e., worse than the > original > because it's TOO thorough, TOO explainy, TOO boring----and most > important, > it's TOO lengthy. Did I mention boring? > If I actually need to read, understand, and apply m'sel' to USING > the new > WEPD, then I resign my position as volunteer of our wonderful little > WEPD > experiment. > > Unless, of course, you send me a check [or cheque] for $50 a week > throughout > our experiment. > > carpe diem Judy > > 2009/2/1 Bob Grumman > >> A poem is excellent if judged at any time ten years after its >> publication >> to be so by a >> hundred or more poetry experts using the following check-list--if >> no more >> than ninety-nine >> such experts can be found to disagree with that judgement within >> ten years >> of that >> judgement, a poetry expert being defined as someone who has seriously >> engaged the >> works of ten or more poets (which means having read at least fifty >> poems by >> each) >> including the works of at least one solitextual poet (poet whose >> works are >> solely textual) >> and one pluraesthetic poet (poet whose works make significant use >> of more >> than one >> expressive modality such as a visual poet) and has either composed >> fifty >> pages of poetry or >> one hundred twenty pages of poetry criticism or who has been >> accepted as a >> poetry expert >> by twenty or more poetry experts. >> >> An Excellent Poem: >> >> (1) expresses something importantly true or represents of something >> centrally beautiful-- >> assuming it doesn't do both; >> >> (2) is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or >> something >> that makes >> its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but >> eventually achieves Clarity; >> >> (3) has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like >> which >> pulls its elements >> reasonably close together; >> (4) contains few or no superfluous words; >> >> (5) boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems >> have >> such as >> uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, >> visual >> art), and imagery; >> >> (6) avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, >> imagery or >> thought; too overt >> Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; >> >> Comments: I added the panel of Poetry Experts after thinking over >> Michael's >> assertion >> that "we know that Emily's little poem is excellent because a >> significant >> number of people >> are still willing to give their time to reading it and thinking and >> writing >> about it." I agreed >> at first with this, but then decided that popularity is no real >> evidence of >> quality. Look at >> the religious sects still incredibly popular, for instance. And >> there are >> poems that have >> stood :the test of time" that most genuine lovers of poetry don't >> think >> much of, like some >> of Poe's. I think Poe is badly under-rated, myself, but I can't >> believe >> that all the poems still >> in anthologies and greatly enjoyed by many people are excellent. >> Note that I have proclaimed that any poem that is approved as >> excellent by >> my hundred or >> more experts keeps its rating forever, however later generations >> look on >> it. My reasoning >> is that it possible, even probable, that contemporaries will find a >> poem to >> be excellent for >> something about it later generations are no longer sensitive to, >> just as >> the reverse so >> frequently happens. But I do require ten years to pass for a poem to >> become eligible for >> evaluation to prevent fashion or prestige from being too quickly >> influential. >> >> Note, too, that I have ordained that a mere hundred experts can >> pronounce a >> poem >> excellent. That means that even if ten thousand pronounce it crap, >> the >> hundred win. >> >> My six desiderata seem objective enough to me--the way laws in a >> democratic >> society are. >> In each case something objective is examined and judged by >> professionals or >> the >> equivalent for excellence the same way deeds are examined and >> judged by >> professionals or >> the equivalent for lawfulness. Some subjectivity is unavoidable, >> but it is >> minimized by >> having specifics to judge, and expertise to counter-balance empty >> enthusiasm or unfair >> antagonism. >> I added "central beauty" to number one to take care of poems that >> have no >> easy "truth" to >> latch onto, haiku being a good example of that, and so many poems >> since >> 1900 that I feel >> the evolution of poetry has been toward greater and greater >> implicitness of >> meaning since >> its origin and especially recently. Side-comment: I believe poetry >> as a >> whole has been >> improving, possibly on pace with science--because of its >> broadening, not >> necessarily >> because of any qualitative improvement in individual poems; we have >> more >> words to work >> with and more techniques--any more expressive modalities, so we >> have an >> ever-increasing >> range of possible poems, which is a Good Thing. >> >> I think I could find something importantly true in every poem I >> thought >> excellent, but in >> many cases--"lighght," for instance--it doesn't seem worth the >> effort and >> representation of >> central beauty is usually much easier to demonstrate (I think few >> could >> disagree that light >> is not a central beauty of existence however little they like the >> poem >> celebrating it). >> >> Number two is an addition because the constituent, suggested by Barry >> Spacks, makes >> sense to me. Number three is also an addition, because important >> in my own >> poetics, and >> often--especially by otherstream poets--given short shrift. Number >> four is >> "Compactness" >> which I improved, I think, to "Conciseness," and someone else to >> "Economy >> of >> Expression" or the like before I finally settled on the words here >> as doing >> the best job of >> pinning it down. Number 5 is the same as it was originally, I think. >> Number six is new >> because I realized in the discussion so far that we were ignoring >> flaws >> that should keep a >> poem from being excellent. >> >> --Bob >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/67bde409/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 4 > Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 14:26:46 -0500 > From: Judy Prince > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List > To: halvard@gmail.com, "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, > Views" > Message-ID: > <7db1d01b0902011126y2d5de55bia6a3b508ef83cc6c@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > and I had thought it a hog call. > Judy > > 2009/2/1 Halvard Johnson > >> I love chopped sui generis. >> >> Hal >> >> >> On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Bob Grumman > but.net>wrote: >> >>> James Cervantes wrote: >>> >>>> How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui >>>> generis. >>>> >>>> - Jim >>>> >>> You seem to be taking "sui generis" too literally, Jim. It >>> doesn't mean >>> in some way unlike every other poem, at least not to me; it means >>> differing >>> from all other poems in some fairly extreme way. My check list >>> doesn't have >>> that as a requirement, only that an excellent poem be special in >>> some way. >>> Dickinson's poems, for instance, each have a diction all its own, >>> and like >>> but not the same as the diction in her other poems, and unlike the >>> diction >>> in just about any other poet's poems, but not enough to make her >>> poem sui >>> generis, I don't think. Unless every good poet's oeuvre is sui >>> generis. >>> >>> >>> --Bob >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> New-Poetry mailing list >>> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> >> Halvard Johnson >> ================ >> halvard@gmail.com >> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html >> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com >> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com >> http://www.hamiltonstone.org >> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/931728ee/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > End of New-Poetry Digest, Vol 56, Issue 2 > ***************************************** From matthew.shindell at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 16:13:19 2009 From: matthew.shindell at gmail.com (Matthew Shindell) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:50 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: New-Poetry Digest, Vol 56, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: <200902011700.n11H050O013918@wiz.cath.vt.edu> References: <200902011700.n11H050O013918@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: Apologies for my previous message. I was trying to respond to one of my history colleagues and somehow responded to the list instead. Thanks for understanding! M (sent from my iPhone) Matthew Shindell Ph.D. Candidate Department of History Science Studies Program University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California On Feb 1, 2009, at 9:00 AM, new-poetry-request@wiz.cath.vt.edu wrote: > Send New-Poetry mailing list submissions to > new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > new-poetry-request@wiz.cath.vt.edu > > You can reach the person managing the list at > new-poetry-owner@wiz.cath.vt.edu > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of New-Poetry digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Re: Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List (Bob Grumman) > 2. Re: Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List (Halvard Johnson) > 3. Re: Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List (Judy Prince) > 4. Re: Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List (Judy Prince) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:19:13 -0500 > From: Bob Grumman > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" > > Message-ID: <4985F5B1.6050802@nut-n-but.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > James Cervantes wrote: >> How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui >> generis. >> >> - Jim > You seem to be taking "sui generis" too literally, Jim. It doesn't > mean > in some way unlike every other poem, at least not to me; it means > differing from all other poems in some fairly extreme way. My check > list doesn't have that as a requirement, only that an excellent poem > be > special in some way. Dickinson's poems, for instance, each have a > diction all its own, and like but not the same as the diction in her > other poems, and unlike the diction in just about any other poet's > poems, but not enough to make her poem sui generis, I don't think. > Unless every good poet's oeuvre is sui generis. > > --Bob > > > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 13:21:04 -0600 > From: Halvard Johnson > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, Views" > > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > I love chopped sui generis. > > Hal > > On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Bob Grumman but.net>wrote: > >> James Cervantes wrote: >> >>> How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui >>> generis. >>> >>> - Jim >>> >> You seem to be taking "sui generis" too literally, Jim. It doesn't >> mean in >> some way unlike every other poem, at least not to me; it means >> differing >> from all other poems in some fairly extreme way. My check list >> doesn't have >> that as a requirement, only that an excellent poem be special in >> some way. >> Dickinson's poems, for instance, each have a diction all its own, >> and like >> but not the same as the diction in her other poems, and unlike the >> diction >> in just about any other poet's poems, but not enough to make her >> poem sui >> generis, I don't think. Unless every good poet's oeuvre is sui >> generis. >> >> >> --Bob >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > > > > -- > > Halvard Johnson > ================ > halvard@gmail.com > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html > http://entropyandme.blogspot.com > http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com > http://www.hamiltonstone.org > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/ee437505/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 14:25:13 -0500 > From: Judy Prince > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, Views" > > Message-ID: > <7db1d01b0902011125i3fb1f674pecf0ead217b5a6a0@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Bob, forgive your poor volunteer, Judy. I don't want to read this new > version of WEPD. Having skimmed it at warp speed, I've determined > that it's > like the second draft of most of my poems; i.e., worse than the > original > because it's TOO thorough, TOO explainy, TOO boring----and most > important, > it's TOO lengthy. Did I mention boring? > If I actually need to read, understand, and apply m'sel' to USING > the new > WEPD, then I resign my position as volunteer of our wonderful little > WEPD > experiment. > > Unless, of course, you send me a check [or cheque] for $50 a week > throughout > our experiment. > > carpe diem Judy > > 2009/2/1 Bob Grumman > >> A poem is excellent if judged at any time ten years after its >> publication >> to be so by a >> hundred or more poetry experts using the following check-list--if >> no more >> than ninety-nine >> such experts can be found to disagree with that judgement within >> ten years >> of that >> judgement, a poetry expert being defined as someone who has seriously >> engaged the >> works of ten or more poets (which means having read at least fifty >> poems by >> each) >> including the works of at least one solitextual poet (poet whose >> works are >> solely textual) >> and one pluraesthetic poet (poet whose works make significant use >> of more >> than one >> expressive modality such as a visual poet) and has either composed >> fifty >> pages of poetry or >> one hundred twenty pages of poetry criticism or who has been >> accepted as a >> poetry expert >> by twenty or more poetry experts. >> >> An Excellent Poem: >> >> (1) expresses something importantly true or represents of something >> centrally beautiful-- >> assuming it doesn't do both; >> >> (2) is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or >> something >> that makes >> its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but >> eventually achieves Clarity; >> >> (3) has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like >> which >> pulls its elements >> reasonably close together; >> (4) contains few or no superfluous words; >> >> (5) boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems >> have >> such as >> uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, >> visual >> art), and imagery; >> >> (6) avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, >> imagery or >> thought; too overt >> Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; >> >> Comments: I added the panel of Poetry Experts after thinking over >> Michael's >> assertion >> that "we know that Emily's little poem is excellent because a >> significant >> number of people >> are still willing to give their time to reading it and thinking and >> writing >> about it." I agreed >> at first with this, but then decided that popularity is no real >> evidence of >> quality. Look at >> the religious sects still incredibly popular, for instance. And >> there are >> poems that have >> stood :the test of time" that most genuine lovers of poetry don't >> think >> much of, like some >> of Poe's. I think Poe is badly under-rated, myself, but I can't >> believe >> that all the poems still >> in anthologies and greatly enjoyed by many people are excellent. >> Note that I have proclaimed that any poem that is approved as >> excellent by >> my hundred or >> more experts keeps its rating forever, however later generations >> look on >> it. My reasoning >> is that it possible, even probable, that contemporaries will find a >> poem to >> be excellent for >> something about it later generations are no longer sensitive to, >> just as >> the reverse so >> frequently happens. But I do require ten years to pass for a poem to >> become eligible for >> evaluation to prevent fashion or prestige from being too quickly >> influential. >> >> Note, too, that I have ordained that a mere hundred experts can >> pronounce a >> poem >> excellent. That means that even if ten thousand pronounce it crap, >> the >> hundred win. >> >> My six desiderata seem objective enough to me--the way laws in a >> democratic >> society are. >> In each case something objective is examined and judged by >> professionals or >> the >> equivalent for excellence the same way deeds are examined and >> judged by >> professionals or >> the equivalent for lawfulness. Some subjectivity is unavoidable, >> but it is >> minimized by >> having specifics to judge, and expertise to counter-balance empty >> enthusiasm or unfair >> antagonism. >> I added "central beauty" to number one to take care of poems that >> have no >> easy "truth" to >> latch onto, haiku being a good example of that, and so many poems >> since >> 1900 that I feel >> the evolution of poetry has been toward greater and greater >> implicitness of >> meaning since >> its origin and especially recently. Side-comment: I believe poetry >> as a >> whole has been >> improving, possibly on pace with science--because of its >> broadening, not >> necessarily >> because of any qualitative improvement in individual poems; we have >> more >> words to work >> with and more techniques--any more expressive modalities, so we >> have an >> ever-increasing >> range of possible poems, which is a Good Thing. >> >> I think I could find something importantly true in every poem I >> thought >> excellent, but in >> many cases--"lighght," for instance--it doesn't seem worth the >> effort and >> representation of >> central beauty is usually much easier to demonstrate (I think few >> could >> disagree that light >> is not a central beauty of existence however little they like the >> poem >> celebrating it). >> >> Number two is an addition because the constituent, suggested by Barry >> Spacks, makes >> sense to me. Number three is also an addition, because important >> in my own >> poetics, and >> often--especially by otherstream poets--given short shrift. Number >> four is >> "Compactness" >> which I improved, I think, to "Conciseness," and someone else to >> "Economy >> of >> Expression" or the like before I finally settled on the words here >> as doing >> the best job of >> pinning it down. Number 5 is the same as it was originally, I think. >> Number six is new >> because I realized in the discussion so far that we were ignoring >> flaws >> that should keep a >> poem from being excellent. >> >> --Bob >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/67bde409/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 4 > Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 14:26:46 -0500 > From: Judy Prince > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry: a New Check-List > To: halvard@gmail.com, "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, > Views" > Message-ID: > <7db1d01b0902011126y2d5de55bia6a3b508ef83cc6c@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > and I had thought it a hog call. > Judy > > 2009/2/1 Halvard Johnson > >> I love chopped sui generis. >> >> Hal >> >> >> On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Bob Grumman > but.net>wrote: >> >>> James Cervantes wrote: >>> >>>> How little poetry we would have if each and every poem were sui >>>> generis. >>>> >>>> - Jim >>>> >>> You seem to be taking "sui generis" too literally, Jim. It >>> doesn't mean >>> in some way unlike every other poem, at least not to me; it means >>> differing >>> from all other poems in some fairly extreme way. My check list >>> doesn't have >>> that as a requirement, only that an excellent poem be special in >>> some way. >>> Dickinson's poems, for instance, each have a diction all its own, >>> and like >>> but not the same as the diction in her other poems, and unlike the >>> diction >>> in just about any other poet's poems, but not enough to make her >>> poem sui >>> generis, I don't think. Unless every good poet's oeuvre is sui >>> generis. >>> >>> >>> --Bob >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> New-Poetry mailing list >>> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> >> Halvard Johnson >> ================ >> halvard@gmail.com >> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html >> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com >> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com >> http://www.hamiltonstone.org >> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/931728ee/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > End of New-Poetry Digest, Vol 56, Issue 2 > ***************************************** From JforJames at aol.com Sun Feb 1 17:24:29 2009 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:50 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know Message-ID: I've posted this poem before on Super Bowl Sunday. The Boss is playing at halftime, and he's a poet. Kurt Warner won a Super Bowl for the St. Louis Rams. Know QBing for the Arizona Cardinals. The St. Louis Cardinals were my team growing up. Some kind of sentimental triangulation going on. James Wright remains a foundational poet for me since I first really understood what contemporary poetry was or could be when I read his _The Branch Will Not Break_... Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grows suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other?s bodies. --James Wright **************From Wall Street to Main Street and everywhere in between, stay up-to-date with the latest news. (http://aol.com?ncid=emlcntaolcom00000023) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/a0dc6d7d/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 17:32:20 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:50 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902011432n1f99a20fpb3b7adc0d6870f2c@mail.gmail.com> It's an exceptional poem. On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 11:24 PM, wrote: > I've posted this poem before on Super Bowl Sunday. The Boss is playing at > halftime, and he's a poet. > Kurt Warner won a Super Bowl for the St. Louis Rams. Know QBing for the > Arizona Cardinals. The St. Louis Cardinals were my team growing up. Some > kind of sentimental triangulation going on. James Wright remains a > foundational poet for me since I first really understood what contemporary > poetry was or could be when I read his _The Branch Will Not Break_... > > Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio > > In the Shreve High football stadium, > I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, > And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, > And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, > Dreaming of heroes. > > All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. > Their women cluck like starved pullets, > Dying for love. > > Therefore, > Their sons grows suicidally beautiful > At the beginning of October, > And gallop terribly against each other's bodies. > > --James Wright > > ------------------------------ > From Wall Street to Main Street and everywhere in between, stay up-to-date > with the latest news . > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/fe979900/attachment.html From AlMaginnes at aol.com Sun Feb 1 17:34:44 2009 From: AlMaginnes at aol.com (AlMaginnes@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:50 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know Message-ID: James Dickey had a poem called "In the Pocket" (which may have been commissioned by the NFL) and another called "The Bee," which recalled his football days at Clemson. And Randall Jarrell, I think, had a poem about the death of Big Daddy Lipscomb. **************From Wall Street to Main Street and everywhere in between, stay up-to-date with the latest news. (http://aol.com?ncid=emlcntaolcom00000023) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/c87ef1a6/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Sun Feb 1 17:46:18 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:50 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902011432n1f99a20fpb3b7adc0d6870f2c@mail.gmail.com> References: <4b65c2d70902011432n1f99a20fpb3b7adc0d6870f2c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6768ac830902011446x59516303k1dcc33ae9bcfc972@mail.gmail.com> One of my favorite poets is Howard Nemerov ? here are the last two sections of his "Watching Footbal on TV": VI Passing and catching overcome the world, The hard condition of the world, they do Human intention honor in the world. A football wants to wobble, that's its shape And nature, and to make it spiral true 's a triumph in itself, to make it hit The patterning receiver on the hands The instant he looks back, well, that's to be For the time being in a state of grace, And move the viewers in their living rooms To lost nostalgic visions of themselves As in an earlier, other world where grim Fate in the form of gravity may be Not merely overcome, but overcome Casually and with style, and that is grace. VII Each year brings rookies and makes veterans, The have their dead by now, their wounded as well, They have Immortals in a Hall of Fame, They have the stories of the tribe, the plays And instant replays many times replayed. But even fame will tire of its fame, And immortality itself will fall asleep. It's taken many years, but yet in time, To old men crouched before the ikon's changes, Changes become reminders, all the games Are blended in one vast remembered game Of similar images simultaneous And superposed; nothing surprises us Nor can delight, though we see the tight end Stagger into the end zone again again. I posted last year at my blog ( http://www.mikesnider.org/radio/formalblog/2008/02/03.html#a769) about this poem and about TV and the Super Bowl, so I didn't have to type in what's above. I just don't have it in me to type the rest, right after a three hour band parctice, but I do love the poem. And James Wright's, too. On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Anny Ballardini wrote: > It's an exceptional poem. > > On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 11:24 PM, wrote: > >> I've posted this poem before on Super Bowl Sunday. The Boss is playing >> at halftime, and he's a poet. >> Kurt Warner won a Super Bowl for the St. Louis Rams. Know QBing for the >> Arizona Cardinals. The St. Louis Cardinals were my team growing up. Some >> kind of sentimental triangulation going on. James Wright remains a >> foundational poet for me since I first really understood what contemporary >> poetry was or could be when I read his _The Branch Will Not Break_... >> >> Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio >> >> In the Shreve High football stadium, >> I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, >> And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, >> And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, >> Dreaming of heroes. >> >> All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. >> Their women cluck like starved pullets, >> Dying for love. >> >> Therefore, >> Their sons grows suicidally beautiful >> At the beginning of October, >> And gallop terribly against each other's bodies. >> >> --James Wright >> >> ------------------------------ >> >From Wall Street to Main Street and everywhere in between, stay >> up-to-date with the latest news >> . >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > > -- > Anny Ballardini > http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome > http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html > I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing > star! > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/d4ab62cb/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Sun Feb 1 17:48:20 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:50 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902011446x59516303k1dcc33ae9bcfc972@mail.gmail.com> References: <4b65c2d70902011432n1f99a20fpb3b7adc0d6870f2c@mail.gmail.com> <6768ac830902011446x59516303k1dcc33ae9bcfc972@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6768ac830902011448p1cec3311r1a46ef18b3c0a905@mail.gmail.com> > > That last was from my old blog -- the new addy is just >> http://www.mikesnider.org/formalblog > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/37087e35/attachment.html From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 18:05:35 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <731bb17a0902011505n7b3608d9w66b24d078e0e9f34@mail.gmail.com> Gary Gildner has a poem called "First Practice." FIRST PRACTICE After the doctor checked to see we weren't ruptured, the man with the short cigar took us under the grade school, where we went in case of attack or storm, and said he was Clifford Hill, he was a man who believed dogs ate dogs, he had once killed for his country, and if there were any girls present for them to leave now. No one left. OK, he said, he said I take that to mean you are hungry men who hate to lose as much as I do. OK. Then he made two lines of us facing each other, and across the way, he said, is the man you hate most in the world, and if we are to win that title I want to see how. But I don't want to see any marks when you're dressed, he said. He said, Now. Jeff Newberry On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 5:34 PM, wrote: > James Dickey had a poem called "In the Pocket" (which may have been > commissioned by the NFL) and another called "The Bee," which recalled his > football days at Clemson. And Randall Jarrell, I think, had a poem about the > death of Big Daddy Lipscomb. > > ------------------------------ > From Wall Street to Main Street and everywhere in between, stay up-to-date > with the latest news . > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Blog: http://museoffireblog.blogspot.com Obama Myths: http://www.matthew25.org/paf/index.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/224f9921/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sun Feb 1 21:34:19 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know In-Reply-To: <731bb17a0902011505n7b3608d9w66b24d078e0e9f34@mail.gmail.com> References: <731bb17a0902011505n7b3608d9w66b24d078e0e9f34@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49865BAB.1030200@opus40.org> For me Wright wins the poetry Super Bowl. Jeff Newberry wrote: > Gary Gildner has a poem called "First Practice." > > > FIRST PRACTICE > > After the doctor checked to see > we weren't ruptured, > the man with the short cigar took us > under the grade school, > where we went in case of attack > or storm, and said > he was Clifford Hill, he was > a man who believed dogs > ate dogs, he had once killed > for his country, and if > there were any girls present > for them to leave now. > > No one > left. OK, he said, he said I take > that to mean you are hungry > men who hate to lose as much > as I do. OK. Then > he made two lines of us > facing each other, > and across the way, he said, > is the man you hate most > in the world, > and if we are to win > that title I want to see how. > But I don't want to see > any marks when you're dressed, > he said. He said, Now. > > > > Jeff Newberry > > On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 5:34 PM, > wrote: > > James Dickey had a poem called "In the Pocket" (which may have > been commissioned by the NFL) and another called "The Bee," which > recalled his football days at Clemson. And Randall Jarrell, I > think, had a poem about the death of Big Daddy Lipscomb. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >From Wall Street to Main Street and everywhere in between, stay > up-to-date with the latest news > . > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > -- > Blog: http://museoffireblog.blogspot.com > Obama Myths: http://www.matthew25.org/paf/index.htm > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Feb 1 22:26:53 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know Message-ID: Fred Chappell has good one--about watching the Redskins with Allen Tate--but I can't find it online. Ed Hirsch has a good one too, called "Last Practice." http://www.jstor.org/pss/4336194 I played the game all of my formative years but have yet to get a poem out of it. But I remain hopeful -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/fe95fb41/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Feb 1 22:28:47 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know Message-ID: In a message dated 2/1/2009 5:05:51 PM Central Standard Time, jeff.newberry@gmail.com writes: > > Gary Gildner has a poem called "First Practice." > > I have had students argue that this may be about, say, wrestling To which I say, "Bah." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/170a969c/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Feb 1 22:30:46 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know Message-ID: I think Gildner may have actually played football. I doubt that Wright did. \No denigration of Wright, of course. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/f08d703d/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Feb 1 22:33:13 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know Message-ID: In a message dated 2/1/2009 9:31:14 PM Central Standard Time, Rsgwynn1@cs.com writes: > > \No denigration of Wright, of course. > "No," I meant. After the Super Bowl one's fingers move badly. Nice game, though. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/8f0efed8/attachment.html From almaginnes at aol.com Sun Feb 1 22:34:16 2009 From: almaginnes at aol.com (almaginnes@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8CB52FE42964F9C-C60-1AA6@mblk-d23.sysops.aol.com> I think I read somewhere that Wright did play a little as a teenager. I've written a couple of bad poems about my time playing football, but hopefully no one will ever see them. -----Original Message----- From: Rsgwynn1@cs.com To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 10:30 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know I think Gildner may have actually played football.? I doubt that Wright did.? \No denigration of Wright, of course. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/644d5548/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Feb 1 22:45:41 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know Message-ID: In a message dated 2/1/2009 9:34:37 PM Central Standard Time, almaginnes@aol.com writes: > > I think I read somewhere that Wright did play a little as a teenager. I've > written a couple of bad poems about my time playing football, but hopefully no > one will ever see them. > Never have, myself, though playing up through sophomore in college. Just never could think about what to say about this mindless activity. Eventually, though. What Whitehead said: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1505.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/378d9f4e/attachment.html From barry.spacks at verizon.net Sun Feb 1 23:01:17 2009 From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (Barry Spacks) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: New-Poetry Digest, Vol 56, Issue 3 In-Reply-To: <200902020038.n120c00N020606@wiz.cath.vt.edu> References: <200902020038.n120c00N020606@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <3B325963-E722-4103-8229-A9FE9284BE17@verizon.net> On Feb 1, 2009, at 4:38 PM, Hal wrote: > > Never thought of relevance as something to be "earned," Barry. Yep, Hal, that's how we do things these now. B > > From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Feb 1 23:07:56 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence? Message-ID: I recently received this as an entry in a contest I'm judging. I thought it the best of the lot (given the generally low quality). It kind of reminded me of Craig Raine, with some genuinely um-Martian turns or phrase. Any thoughts? Obviously, I Said For example, the wheelbarrow behind the avocado pit indicates that the flatulent cloud formation gives secret financial aid to an industrial complex. If a dreamlike maelstrom usually gives a pink slip to the overpriced bowling ball, then some pig pen beyond a power drill it resembles. Some mating ritual hibernates, or a shabby tornado recognizes a cocker spaniel. Most people believe that a dolphin around a microscope gives secret financial aid to the barely bohemian maelstrom, but they need to remember how lazily the mastadon meditates. For example, a fire hydrant defined by a tornado indicates that the tabloid of the turkey almost avoids contact with a polygon. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090201/4c74bcaa/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Mon Feb 2 01:08:06 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902012208n7ba2668am1ba335637a76f2e3@mail.gmail.com> If you will indulge me, Sam. I'm often flip and jokey; my style, my joy. But p'raps this moment, the discussion about Excellent poetry, and recent news have met for seriousness. Tonight a SHAKSPER listmember, Felix de Villiers, reacting to a discussion thread on "Heroes", regarding 'Hamlet', wrote: "There is hardly a great play or novel in which the main characters don't struggle against their established social world." He quotes Hamlet and then comments: "If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story." "Telling the story is a form of resistance against destiny. Hamlet makes this plea to Horatio, but it is Shakespeare who tells the story." A truly fine poem, play or novel does not have to climb such a pinnacle, can be a beautiful wit-force or just Beauty itself. But it needs to be comprehended, or those things cannot be seen. We all are trying for in our own work, and looking for in others' work, fresh, startling, jolts of power. These jolts need something that few folks mention: They need to evoke instant awe-filled RECOGNITION. We feel the jolt because we 'see' two strange things suddenly tied together and somehow we 'recognise' something new. Magic. These fresh jolting figures inject us with utterly new news from an odd old mate suddenly given to a nother odd old mate. We have undergone Instant Analogy---logic so fleet that it's pre-logic. A stun of truth so strong it moves us, many times literally, to action. We jump. But the poem needs to be comprehended or the thing which most powers poetry---the blast of pre-logic analogy---cannot be known. A case in point is the work of Jen Hadfield. She is a genius poet. Yet, many of her most recent published works display sense-laden disconnects. She's brilliant with metaphor, an utter joy to read---if the individual figures can be comprehended, and if the several cohere. Her poems in CHAPMAN a couple years ago [sorry, not to hand, so I can't give the date] did all the magic I've described, but now she seems, unfortunately I think, to've danced off the edge of connection and coherence. And I profoundly wish she'd come back. Same thing I wish for your contest entrant. Be well, Judy 2009/2/1 > I recently received this as an entry in a contest I'm judging. I thought it > the best of the lot (given the generally low quality). It kind of reminded > me of Craig Raine, with some genuinely um-Martian turns or phrase. Any > thoughts? > > *Obviously, I Said > > *For example, the wheelbarrow behind > the avocado pit indicates that the flatulent > cloud formation gives secret financial > > aid to an industrial complex. If a dreamlike > maelstrom usually gives a pink slip > to the overpriced bowling ball, then > > some pig pen beyond a power drill it > resembles. Some mating ritual > hibernates, or a shabby > > tornado recognizes a cocker spaniel. > Most people believe that a dolphin > around a microscope gives secret > > financial aid to the barely bohemian > maelstrom, but they need to remember > how lazily the mastadon meditates. > > For example, a fire hydrant > defined by a tornado indicates that the tabloid > of the turkey almost avoids contact with a polygon. > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/d3aedcc4/attachment.html From amyhappens at yahoo.com Mon Feb 2 04:58:35 2009 From: amyhappens at yahoo.com (amy king) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fogged Clarity Message-ID: <711646.17846.qm@web83303.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> >From Ben Evans: I am writing to you to announce the launch of our new arts review, Fogged Clarity.? Our February (debut) issue is free and available at http://foggedclarity.com/.? In it you will find new work from poets Bruce Smith, Amy King, and Barry Schwabsky, experimental photography by Kyle Jones and Ryan Daly, short fiction by Dmitri Gheorgheni, and much more.?? Fogged Clarity aims to transcend the conventions of the typical literary review by incorporating music, the visual arts, interviews, and political exposition.? Our ambition is to form a community of artists whose interaction is not constrained by medium, but broadened by a collective love of expression.? Our network is extensive, and our passion for ventilation intense.? We sincerely hope you will join us as we embark on this journey. ? I wish you the best, ? Benjamin Evans Editor, Fogged Clarity _______ Amy's Alias http://amyking.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/1f14abb3/attachment.html From amyhappens at yahoo.com Mon Feb 2 05:06:08 2009 From: amyhappens at yahoo.com (amy king) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:51 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pirene's Fountain Message-ID: <82660.64332.qm@web83306.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Pirene?s Fountain January 2009, Volume 2 : Issue 4 ? ????????? ? Kim Addonizio ????????? Michelle Bitting ???????? ? Lisel Mueller ? ? Lisa Alvarado ??????????? ??????????? ? David Nelson Bradsher ???????? Anselm Brocki ?????????? Michael Brownstein ?? ??????????? ? Roberta Burnett ???????? Michael Ceraolo ???????? Rusty Childers ?????????? Alison Croggon ????????? Maggie Flanagan-Wilkie ??????? ? Maria Mazziotti Gillan ?????????? ? Ami Kaye ?????? Amy King ????? Oliver Lodge ? Joanne Lowery ?????????? ? Aine MacAodha ??????? Amy MacLennan ?????? ? Steve Meador Charles Morrison ??????? Scott Owens ? Doug Ramspeck ???????? Maria Terrone Lark Vernon ?? Julene Tripp Weaver ? ? Sam Wilding ? ? Jane Yolen ???? ? http://www.pirenesfountain.com/current_issue.html ? ? _______ Amy's Alias http://amyking.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/2ac0d899/attachment.html From amyhappens at yahoo.com Mon Feb 2 05:09:04 2009 From: amyhappens at yahoo.com (amy king) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Denver Syntax Message-ID: <937846.76991.qm@web83306.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Denver Syntax -- Winter 2009 {l i t a n y?? f o r?? r e g i f t i n g} {l i t a n y?? f o r?? t h e?? b e n e f i t s} {l i t a n y?? f o r?? i n s o m n i a} ? reb livingston ? {m i s s?? d i f a l c o} {t i m e} {u n l a c e d?? a n d?? u n t i e d} ? puma perl ? {b o o z i n g} ? jim chandler ? {3 2?? f l a v o r s?? o f?? l o v e?? a n d?? d e a t h} {w h e n?? y o u?? a r e?? c l o s e?? e n o u g h} ? john dorsey ? {s i m u l a t i o n s,?? o r?? f o r t u n e?? t a l l y i n g} ? lisa gordon ? {t h e?? b e s t} ? barton smock ? {c o l o r?? p h o t o g r a p h y} {g o o d?? t i d i n g s} {q u i c k l y?? p a s s i n g} ? luc simonic ? {a d d i c t e d?? t o?? l i v i n g} ? paul adrian mabelis ? {e x c e r p t} {d o w n} {w i n t e r?? d a w n?? s t a l l} ? matthew rounsville ? {j u s t?? t o?? m i n d?? f u c k} {t h e?? r e p r o d u c t i o n?? o f?? p r o f i l e s} {t h e?? m a r b l e?? f a u n} {t h e?? a n i m a l?? l a n g u a g e s} ? amy king ? {a?? s e r i e s?? o f?? p o e m s?? f o r?? r o b e r t?? b l y} ? ron androla http://www.denversyntax.com/issue16/poems/poems.html _______ Amy's Alias http://amyking.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/85957c05/attachment.html From browning at splitthisrock.org Mon Feb 2 05:12:54 2009 From: browning at splitthisrock.org (browning) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Call for submissions: Poetry for the Green Pages Message-ID: <962554CDC8514444825379F9CA8E4022@SBLAPTOP> Passing this on. Sarah ** Please circulate this message: The editorial board of the Green Pages--which until now has been a quarterly newspaper but is switching, at least temporarily, to a strictly web-based format--wants to begin publishing one or two poems in each issue. To see the latest issue of this publication on-line visit: http://gp.org/greenpages-blog/ Submissions should be on themes related to the ten key values of the Green Party (see below). There is no limit on length, but shorter poems will generally get preference over longer ones, all other factors being equal. You may submit one or more poems via email to: gppoetry@optimum.net. Include your name and phone number in the body of the message. Include your poem(s) as an attachment in either MSWord or text format to ensure that formatting is preserved. We will attempt to acknowledge all submissions, and of course inform those whose poetry is accepted for publication. Steve Bloom Poetry Consultant Green Pages ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------- TEN KEY VALUES OF THE GREEN PARTY 1. GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives and not be subject to the will of another. Therefore, we will work to increase public participation at every level of government and to ensure that our public representatives are fully accountable to the people who elect them. We will also work to create new types of political organizations which expand the process of participatory democracy by directly including citizens in the decision-making process. 2. SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY All persons should have the rights and opportunity to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment. We must consciously confront in ourselves, our organizations, and society at large, barriers such as racism and class oppression, sexism and homophobia, ageism and disability, which act to deny fair treatment and equal justice under the law. 3. ECOLOGICAL WISDOM Human societies must operate with the understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from nature. We must maintain an ecological balance and live within the ecological and resource limits of our communities and our planet. We support a sustainable society which utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. To this end we must practice agriculture which replenishes the soil; move to an energy efficient economy; and live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems. 4. NON-VIOLENCE It is essential that we develop effective alternatives to society's current patterns of violence. We will work to demilitarize, and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, without being naive about the intentions of other governments. We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations. We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community and global peace. 5. DECENTRALIZATION Centralization of wealth and power contributes to social and economic injustice, environmental destruction, and militarization. Therefore, we support a restructuring of social, political and economic institutions away from a system which is controlled by and mostly benefits the powerful few, to a democratic, less bureaucratic system. Decision-making should, as much as possible, remain at the individual and local level, while assuring that civil rights are protected for all citizens. 6. COMMUNITY-BASED ECONOMICS AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE We recognize it is essential to create a vibrant and sustainable economic system, one that can create jobs and provide a decent standard of living for all people while maintaining a healthy ecological balance. A successful economic system will offer meaningful work with dignity, while paying a "living wage" which reflects the real value of a person's work. Local communities must look to economic development that assures protection of the environment and workers' rights; broad citizen participation in planning; and enhancement of our "quality of life." We support independently owned and operated companies which are socially responsible, as well as co-operatives and public enterprises that distribute resources and control to more people through democratic participation. 7. FEMINISM AND GENDER EQUITY We have inherited a social system based on male domination of politics and economics. We call for the replacement of the cultural ethics of domination and control with more cooperative ways of interacting that respect differences of opinion and gender. Human values such as equity between the sexes, interpersonal responsibility, and honesty must be developed with moral conscience. We should remember that the process that determines our decisions and actions is just as important as achieving the outcome we want. 8. RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY We believe it is important to value cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual diversity, and to promote the development of respectful relationships across these lines. We believe that the many diverse elements of society should be reflected in our organizations and decision-making bodies, and we support the leadership of people who have been traditionally closed out of leadership roles. We acknowledge and encourage respect for other life forms than our own and the preservation of biodiversity. 9. PERSONAL AND GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY We encourage individuals to act to improve their personal well-being and, at the same time, to enhance ecological balance and social harmony. We seek to join with people and organizations around the world to foster peace, economic justice, and the health of the planet. 10. FUTURE FOCUS AND SUSTAINABILITY Our actions and policies should be motivated by long-term goals. We seek to protect valuable natural resources, safely disposing of or "unmaking" all waste we create, while developing a sustainable economics that does not depend on continual expansion for survival. We must counterbalance the drive for short-term profits by assuring that economic development, new technologies, and fiscal policies are responsible to future generations who will inherit the results of our actions. Ten Key Values from other state and local Greens. There is no authoritative version of the Ten Key Values of the Greens. The Ten Key Values are guiding principles that are adapted and defined to fit each state and local chapter. ** Sarah Browning Co-Director Split This Rock Poetry Festival c/o Institute for Policy Studies 1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 600 Washington, DC 20036 browning@splitthisrock.org www.splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/43b681f0/attachment.html From AlMaginnes at aol.com Mon Feb 2 06:57:43 2009 From: AlMaginnes at aol.com (AlMaginnes@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know Message-ID: Speaking of Whitehead, he wrote a nice sonnet called "Linemen Lived In A Closed World." **************Stay up to date on the latest news - from sports scores to stocks and so much more. (http://aol.com?ncid=emlcntaolcom00000022) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/dd5f23af/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Mon Feb 2 10:28:47 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8CB5362128E006E-48C-604@WEBMAIL-DY37.sysops.aol.com> Sam posted a link to it... I wish there was some more specific imagery in it, but I do like the idea of the linemen being locked in a world of endless conflict, and giving them a nobility as they ply their trade within a kind of nether space. Finnegan .... Good Linemen Live in a Closed World Good linemen live in a closed world -- they move Inside themselves to move themselves against The others and their violence -- they give To interior visions whole seasons no good sense Would approve -- their insides creak and groan, crying A thing that's trapped along the line is shrill And curious and wants out. Bodies playing Laugh and dream to gain the massive will Their trade requires. These men maintain, they attack, They suffer repetition for years and years. Part war and similar to art, their work Is sometimes elegant. Inside their fears At the closed center of one fear, they move Quickly against themselves with a massive love. ?-- James Whitehead -----Original Message----- From: AlMaginnes@aol.com To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 6:57 am Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] The only football poem I know Speaking of Whitehead, he wrote a nice sonnet called "Linemen Lived In A Closed World." Stay up to date on the latest news - from sports scores to stocks and so much more. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/f1f641d1/attachment.html From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 11:11:12 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting Message-ID: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com> I've been reading Keith Tuma's *By Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers* and his *Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry* for my comprehensive examinations. I wanted to start a conversation about a few poets that I've been reading, poets who've not been on my radar until I started reading for my exams. So, forgive me if some of my questions of observations seem elementary or self-evident. By far, one of the most fascinating poets I've come across is Basil Bunting, a name I'd never heard, despite my undergraduate and graduate years as an English major. I like *Briggflats* quite a lot, though I'm still grappling with the poem. Bunting's lines with their heavy stresses and Anglo-saxon vocabulary remind me of Pound's translation of "The Seafarer." The poem itself is a Modernist epic (I think), so I think of Eliot and Pound immediately. But Bunting's concern with a particular place contrasts with Eliot's more "universal" (not quite the right word, I know--maybe "far-reaching?") concerns. Bunting seems concerned primarily with this place (his place?): Northumbria. The poem burrows down into the landscape, carving itself into the land, not unlike the mason carving stone in the poem's opening lines. Despite his concern with landscape, however, Bunting can't help bringing in a dose of mythology in a later part of the poem. Indeed, the poem moves through seasons, cyclically, depending primarily on recieved notions--such as Spring being a time of rebirth and so on. So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on Bunting? And why on earth is he so ignored? He doesn't appear (a colleague tells me--I've not checked) in the Norton Anthology of British Literature. Perhaps he's not ignored; perhaps I've just missed him. Nonetheless, I thought I'd try to open up a conversation about a poet who really has my ear right now. Best, Jeff Newberry -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/a7a568c3/attachment.html From skip at louisiana.edu Mon Feb 2 11:42:53 2009 From: skip at louisiana.edu (Skip Fox) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting In-Reply-To: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Barbara Lesch's 1979 diss. (made into a book?) is very good on Bunting. Providing a base for a solid reading. I've not kept up with the scholarship, but it's my understanding that in the last 20 years he's received a lot more attention. For me, he's one of the central British/Irish poets along with Yeats, Auden, Thomas, Prince, & Hughes. Small corpus, but then they say he was a "master of fireplace and poker" (used to burn a lot of mss.). -----Original Message----- From: new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto:new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Jeff Newberry Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 10:11 AM To: NewPoetry Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting I've been reading Keith Tuma's By Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers and his Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry for my comprehensive examinations. I wanted to start a conversation about a few poets that I've been reading, poets who've not been on my radar until I started reading for my exams. So, forgive me if some of my questions of observations seem elementary or self-evident. By far, one of the most fascinating poets I've come across is Basil Bunting, a name I'd never heard, despite my undergraduate and graduate years as an English major. I like Briggflats quite a lot, though I'm still grappling with the poem. Bunting's lines with their heavy stresses and Anglo-saxon vocabulary remind me of Pound's translation of "The Seafarer." The poem itself is a Modernist epic (I think), so I think of Eliot and Pound immediately. But Bunting's concern with a particular place contrasts with Eliot's more "universal" (not quite the right word, I know--maybe "far-reaching?") concerns. Bunting seems concerned primarily with this place (his place?): Northumbria. The poem burrows down into the landscape, carving itself into the land, not unlike the mason carving stone in the poem's opening lines. Despite his concern with landscape, however, Bunting can't help bringing in a dose of mythology in a later part of the poem. Indeed, the poem moves through seasons, cyclically, depending primarily on recieved notions--such as Spring being a time of rebirth and so on. So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on Bunting? And why on earth is he so ignored? He doesn't appear (a colleague tells me--I've not checked) in the Norton Anthology of British Literature. Perhaps he's not ignored; perhaps I've just missed him. Nonetheless, I thought I'd try to open up a conversation about a poet who really has my ear right now. Best, Jeff Newberry -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/6b10fdfb/attachment.html From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Mon Feb 2 12:13:04 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1FF6BE56BB7E4EB09EB7216DD7159623@RobinPC> From: Skip Fox << For me, he's one of the central British/Irish poets along with Yeats, Auden, Thomas, Prince, & Hughes. Small corpus, but then they say he was a "master of fireplace and poker" (used to burn a lot of mss.). >> ... or along with David Jones and Geoffrey Hill? Very much the child of Pound. He would seem to be bigger in the UK than the US. Robin From gejs1 at rochester.rr.com Mon Feb 2 13:21:59 2009 From: gejs1 at rochester.rr.com (Gerald Schwartz) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting References: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: I've always read Briggflatts like a nineteeth-century adventure story, both victorian and modern. Few poets social activism and peregrinations reavl so much as Bunting's, who understood the rhythms and conflicts of the century and was able to translate his wisdom into verbal music so prodigious and unigue as to transfor both British and American (see Duncan, Johnson, Wiliams...) poetic landscape. Years ago, Pierre Joris, who filled me in on B. B.'s mideast espionage career, told me the rosetta stone to his work was a tiny excerpt from his "Villion,": Presision clarifying vagueness; boundary to a wilderness of detail; chisel voice smoothing the flanks of noise; catalytic making whisper and whisper run together like two drops of quicksilver Be Seeing you, Gerald S. I've been reading Keith Tuma's By Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers and his Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry for my comprehensive examinations. I wanted to start a conversation about a few poets that I've been reading, poets who've not been on my radar until I started reading for my exams. So, forgive me if some of my questions of observations seem elementary or self-evident. By far, one of the most fascinating poets I've come across is Basil Bunting, a name I'd never heard, despite my undergraduate and graduate years as an English major. I like Briggflats quite a lot, though I'm still grappling with the poem. Bunting's lines with their heavy stresses and Anglo-saxon vocabulary remind me of Pound's translation of "The Seafarer." The poem itself is a Modernist epic (I think), so I think of Eliot and Pound immediately. But Bunting's concern with a particular place contrasts with Eliot's more "universal" (not quite the right word, I know--maybe "far-reaching?") concerns. Bunting seems concerned primarily with this place (his place?): Northumbria. The poem burrows down into the landscape, carving itself into the land, not unlike the mason carving stone in the poem's opening lines. Despite his concern with landscape, however, Bunting can't help bringing in a dose of mythology in a later part of the poem. Indeed, the poem moves through seasons, cyclically, depending primarily on recieved notions--such as Spring being a time of rebirth and so on. So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on Bunting? And why on earth is he so ignored? He doesn't appear (a colleague tells me--I've not checked) in the Norton Anthology of British Literature. Perhaps he's not ignored; perhaps I've just missed him. Nonetheless, I thought I'd try to open up a conversation about a poet who really has my ear right now. Best, Jeff Newberry -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/fdb4d174/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 13:45:21 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Groundhog Day Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902021045j1bd1cf23we1eb333b1e89c456@mail.gmail.com> Happy Birthday to Bob Grumman, and from the Writer's Almanac that reminds us all things: German immigrants in Pennsylvania found that there weren't a lot of badgers in America, but there were a lot of groundhogs, so the holiday evolved into *Groundhog Day*. The first reference to Groundhog Day is from 1841, in the diary of a storekeeper in Morgantown, Pennsylvania. He wrote: "Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks' nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate." -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/3e46cfc0/attachment.html From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Mon Feb 2 13:50:33 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting In-Reply-To: References: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <89ADA28069474FF9856B6327AFF5FBBD@RobinPC> Yikes!! I've just read Bunting's "Villon", published in Poetry in 1930 ... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=8198 Unnerving. I didn't think it would have been possible to overlay the early Cantos onto snibbits from "The Testament", but there you are. I have to say, this confirms my reluctance to take Bunting at all seriously. Years ago, Pierre Joris, who filled me in on B. B.'s mideast espionage career ... Hm ... I hadn't known he was an actual spook. I carefully didn't mention the Agenda connection. Robin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/432c80e5/attachment.html From amyhappens at yahoo.com Mon Feb 2 14:47:37 2009 From: amyhappens at yahoo.com (amy king) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Millay Colony for the Arts Party at Bowery Poetry Club Message-ID: <853879.59537.qm@web83306.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> On behalf of Cara Benson: ? The Millay Colony for the Arts is hosting a party for residents of the Colony at?Bowery Poetry Club February 4 at 6:00 PM. ? Readings and performance from Damian Van Denburgh, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Katy Lederer, Peter Gil-Sheridan & Samita Sinha. Open mic follows. Drink specials and food. Cost: Free for former residents and current applicants. All others $5. Call 518-392-4144 for more information. ? Bowery Poetry Club 308 Bowery at Bleecker St., NYC ? _______ Amy's Alias http://amyking.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/8eef75a3/attachment.html From amyhappens at yahoo.com Mon Feb 2 14:58:17 2009 From: amyhappens at yahoo.com (amy king) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Not in NYC? Bill Berkson, Cindy Cruz, Aaron Fagan, Jennifer Fortin, Jean-Paul Pecqueur and Bill Rasmovicz Message-ID: <496146.78808.qm@web83308.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Video of Friday's reading You missed it? You're not in NY (and why should you be?) No problem! Bill Berkson, Cindy Cruz, Aaron Fagan, Jennifer Fortin, Jean-Paul Pecqueur and Bill Rasmovicz talking and shining in little boxes: http://stainofpoetry.wordpress.com/video/? xo! Ana and Amy _______ Amy's Alias http://amyking.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/a98d67f5/attachment.html From skip at louisiana.edu Mon Feb 2 15:45:33 2009 From: skip at louisiana.edu (Skip Fox) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:52 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting In-Reply-To: <89ADA28069474FF9856B6327AFF5FBBD@RobinPC> Message-ID: I can understand a complaint against the very early "Villon," but not much of a one against ""The Orotava Road" about "an incident" in the Canary Islands: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177185 An essence of the serious in such attentiveness and art, it seems to me. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/7a8c9024/attachment.html From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 15:50:43 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting In-Reply-To: <89ADA28069474FF9856B6327AFF5FBBD@RobinPC> References: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com> <89ADA28069474FF9856B6327AFF5FBBD@RobinPC> Message-ID: <731bb17a0902021250o1d820db0re734ee41a1639f85@mail.gmail.com> Robin, Help me out here. You're saying that "Villon" is either a) plagiarism (but, egad, what Modernist work--outside of perhaps Stein--isn't?) or b) a pale imitation of Pound, no? Can you say a bit more here? Not trying to be testy--just genuinely interested. Best, Jeff Newberry On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Robin Hamilton < robin.hamilton2@btinternet.com> wrote: > Yikes!! I've just read Bunting's "Villon", published in *Poetry* in 1930 > ... > ** > http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=8198 > > Unnerving. I didn't think it would have been possible to overlay the early > Cantos onto snibbits from "The Testament", but there you are. > > I have to say, this confirms my reluctance to take Bunting at all > seriously. > > > > Years ago, Pierre Joris, who filled me in on B. B.'s mideast espionage > career ... > > Hm ... I hadn't known he was an actual spook. > > I carefully didn't mention the *Agenda* connection. > > Robin > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > *There's nothing that interesting this far down the page. * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/2f9bfdea/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Feb 2 17:28:51 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Groundhog Day In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902021045j1bd1cf23we1eb333b1e89c456@mail.gmail.com> References: <4b65c2d70902021045j1bd1cf23we1eb333b1e89c456@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <498773A3.5050003@nut-n-but.net> Anny Ballardini wrote: > Happy Birthday to Bob Grumman, > > and from the Writer's Almanac that reminds us all things: > > German immigrants in Pennsylvania found that there weren't a lot of > badgers in America, but there were a lot of groundhogs, so the holiday > evolved into *Groundhog Day*. The first reference to Groundhog Day is > from 1841, in the diary of a storekeeper in Morgantown, Pennsylvania. > He wrote: "Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, > according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter > quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks' > nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be > moderate." Hey, Anny, what's really neat about that is that I was born exactly 100 years later! You see, you see!!!! --Bob Grumhog -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/39423d74/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Feb 2 18:15:16 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Effective-Poem Check-List, Housman In-Reply-To: <731bb17a0902021250o1d820db0re734ee41a1639f85@mail.gmail.com> References: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com><89ADA2 8069474FF9856B6327AFF5FBBD@RobinPC> <731bb17a0902021250o1d820db0re734ee41a1639f85@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49877E84.5030801@nut-n-but.net> I've had a tough day: got rained on going to a substitute teaching assignment, and have been fighting off some kind of head cold for the past few days. I did a rough draft of my Analysis of the Houseman poem yesterday but it needs a lot more work, and I'm too beat to do it today. So, I'll start by posting my paraphrase, followed by a few comments sure to bore Judy: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now The boughs of the cherry trees, which are the most beautiful trees Is hung with bloom along the bough, are laden with blossoms at this time And stands about the woodland ride and line the trail through the woods Wearing white for Eastertide. decked out in a white hue appropriate for Easter (which is the happiest time of the year) Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, At this time, twenty of the seventy years the Bible suggests I'll have are gone permanently. And take from seventy springs a score, If you subtract twenty springtimes from seventy It only leaves me fifty more. it will leave me just fifty more years of life And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, Because fifty years of springtimes don't give one much time to enjoying looking at Nature's blossomings About the woodlands I will go I'll proceed through the woods (right away) To see the cherry hung with snow. To take in (as much as I can of) the beauty of the snow-like blossoms of the cherry tree. The paraphrase is lengthy, perhaps too lengthy, but I believe a paraphrase should cover every word in the text paraphrased, and I did my best to do that. A paraphrase that says too much is better than one that fails to say all it should. I also expect to improve my paraphrase in due course. I believe my paraphrase twice goes beyond paraphrase into what is implied by the text: the connection to the Bible four score and ten makes, and the fact that Eastertide is a happy time. This brings up a question for me: I think a proper understanding of a poem requires, to begin with, a paraphrase that states in the simplest and most complete terms exactly what the poem explicitly says--AND something else that states in the simplest and most complete terms what the poem SAYS to any serious, knowledgeable engagent--which means things like the connection to the Bible, and the connotations. Question: is there a name for such an enhanced paraphrase? Or is a paraphrase expected to include what's implied? I'm inclined to call the first kind of paraphrase a "denotational paraphrase," and the second a "full paraphrase." Later I expect to try to make a full paraphrase of this poem. Okay, I've decided I should be able to give a very quick rough Judyan evaluation of the Housman, using my new check-list. So, does the poem, for me: (1) express something importantly true or represents of something centrally beautiful-- assuming it doesn't do both? It does both. Moreover, I think it expresses more than one important truth. Note: I've been thinking that an excellent poem needn't express the same important truth to two people, it's sufficient that it express /some/ important truth to both. I feel I know what the main meaning of the poem is but am not yet able to express it properly. It is some combination of "Beauty is at least as important as anything else in existence," and "Seize not the moment but the lifetime--in this case, don't even think about a fling with Persephone, marry her." Plus, "Hurrah for springtime and cherry trees." But the poem has more meanings that are of value if not perhaps Important that I want to discuss but can't yet do coherently. (2) have sufficient Thematic Misdirection, or something that makes its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but eventually achieves Clarity? The poem is weakest in this area but does, for me, have thematic indirection. I'll just mention one instance of it: simply its taking a long time getting to its (surface) point, and doing so metrically, with all kinds of poetic devices, getting in the way of a quick prose understanding of its theme. I also think its true theme is much more complex than a paraphrase of it indicates--so much so that I'm having trouble working it out. This strongly suggests some kind of misdirection is going on. (3) have a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which pulls its elements reasonably close together? Yes. I have a lot to say on this, but won't say it here. (4) contain few or no superfluous words? Not for me. At a few place ("along the bough") it has text unneeded from its prose meaning but needed for its music, which is as important. (5) boast some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have such as uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual art), and imagery? Several. One is its tonal wit, you might call it, when it uses arithmetical calculation against lyrical swoonery. (6) avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or thought; too overt Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; I don't think so. I find nothing wrong with its rhymes. None is in the love/above category, though none is brilliant. Ditto the choice of words. The use of the other sound devices is superior. The meter is pentameter and tetrameter, with weak-beats lopped at the beginning of three or four lines to energizing effect, I think. (It's not tetrameter and trimeter, Robin, so not a jingly-seeming as Dickinson's meter can seem, especially in a Serious Context like funerals, which the Housman is merrily not.) So, it's an excellent poem for me. Possible biases: I love spring, and I much prefer happy poems, healthy-seeming poems. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/4017d437/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Mon Feb 2 18:18:32 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] on the down low Message-ID: <8CB53A3B314CBFF-1184-324@webmail-dx01.sysops.aol.com> Shssss...Don't let Bob know about this blog... http://otherclutter.com/ You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the sign post up ahead, your next stop...The VizPo Zone!... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/3a0acf6a/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Mon Feb 2 19:32:39 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <6C22E8DA-CCB4-48CF-B3B0-C91388477DA3@verizon.net> References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <6C22E8DA-CCB4-48CF-B3B0-C91388477DA3@verizon.net> Message-ID: <8CB53AE0D7D0ED4-F10-193F@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. ?? ? ? Then we run into Biblical phrasing for the rather touchingly ironic feature that the speaker is so young, ?? ? ? yet concerned with last things. A bit of an air of comedy added by "only fifty more" where by tradition ?? ? ?this subject would demand a setting close to the end of partaking, that "grab what you still can while still around" motif. ?? ? ? I'd?add (forgive me) that even the obvious rhymes throughout support the "simplicity" that charms me in the poem. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. ?? ? ?I love the unpressured, quiet way the logic of the concluding statement works: given that the lovely tree is blooming ?? ? ?in the season of pain that turns to hope, and that I, the speaker, am mortal with limited days, it follows that... ?? ? I will go and partake. Anything more grand in the way of device or experiement -- their lack here lowering for ?? ? some the poem's "score" ?-- would take away from the spell of innocent affirmation (with subterrainian death-dread) ?? ? that the work enforces. ?? And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. -----Original Message----- From: Barry Spacks To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 3:51 pm Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman Applying the Check List to such a canonical piece is difficult. Here's one I've always read and loved as a key carpe diem poem that clearly falls flat (as Judy notes) in terms of innovation-areas of the Famous List TO ITS BETTERMENT, I will claim below. I take it that to give a work a Prix d'Or one remains free to assume that Excellence in this game doesn't mean that all list-categories must yield enthusiastic response. Keep them all in mind, sure, but ignore those irrelevant (how much more so, I'd guess, with "Bananas..." (?) ) That said, my case for excellence:? Telling start with an alternate foot, refreshing mastery, authority in gentle assertiveness of tone;?2nd line's alliteration pleasing, and also forwards in its simplicity the asserted loveliness of the blooming; connection to Easter in l.4 a powerful ideological note with its death & resurrection associations; I'd add, softie that I am, the sense of whiteness in the blooms (and later in "snow" as evoked) offers an additive to the emotion of perceived innocence, purity, in the affection for natural beauty. ?????????????II Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. ?? ? ? Then we run into Biblical phrasing for the rather touchingly ironic feature that the speaker is so young, ?? ? ? yet concerned with last things. A bit of an air of comedy added by "only fifty more" where by tradition ?? ? ?this subject would demand a setting close to the end of partaking, that "grab what you still can while still around" motif. ?? ? ? I'd?add (forgive me) that even the obvious rhymes throughout support the "simplicity" that charms me in the poem. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. ?? ? ?I love the unpressured, quiet way the logic of the concluding statement works: given that the lovely tree is blooming ?? ? ?in the season of pain that turns to hope, and that I, the speaker, am mortal with limited days, it follows that... ?? ? I will go and partake. Anything more grand in the way of device or experiement -- their lack here lowering for ?? ? some the poem's "score" ?-- would take away from the spell of innocent affirmation (with subterrainian death-dread) ?? ? that the work enforces. ?? And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. So my defense of the piece as EXCELLENT INDEED brings up questions about the utility of the Check List in allowing one to reach such a verdict with such a poem. ?? ? How dem professors do go on Miz Sally! ?? ? Barry = _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/b95c8067/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Mon Feb 2 19:44:45 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <8CB53AE0D7D0ED4-F10-193F@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <6C22E8DA-CCB4-48CF-B3B0-C91388477DA3@verizon.net> <8CB53AE0D7D0ED4-F10-193F@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CB53AFBE9C74E2-F10-1A07@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> Pardon again, my errant reply...Here's what I meant to chime in with: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. (Nice clean pastoral start. A sauntering diction like a horse-drawn carriage ride. And the hint of the death/ressurection dyad?as the stanza?the end.) Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. (The second stanza may be a classic example of filling things out?for sake of rime scheme. The information is all given in first two lines,?but then is?restated by reversing the mental math. It begins to sound a bit like one of those math word?problems you were tested with in grade school: "If one train traveling west left Cleveland at 10 o'clock, traveling 100 miles per hour, and twenty minutes later another train left Chicago traveling east...) And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. (In the end, the?great failure?of the poem is that something conventially seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the population--cherry trees in bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth experiencing over and over by the poet. The great poets tend to?see as beautiful the things that other's might overlook. A haiku poet would have done this poem in three lines, and saved us 9 more, pace the logic of?the second stanza.) Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Barry Spacks To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 3:51 pm Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman Applying the Check List to such a canonical piece is difficult. Here's one I've always read and loved as a key carpe diem poem that clearly falls flat (as Judy notes) in terms of innovation-areas of the Famous List TO ITS BETTERMENT, I will claim below. I take it that to give a work a Prix d'Or one remains free to assume that Excellence in this game doesn't mean that all list-categories must yield enthusiastic response. Keep them all in mind, sure, but ignore those irrelevant (how much more so, I'd guess, with "Bananas..." (?) ) That said, my case for excellence: Telling start with an alternate foot, refreshing mastery, authority in gentle assertiveness of tone; 2nd line's alliteration pleasing, and also forwards in its simplicity the asserted loveliness of the blooming; connection to Easter in l.4 a powerful ideological note with its death & resurrection associations; I'd add, softie that I am, the sense of whiteness in the blooms (and later in "snow" as evoked) offers an additive to the emotion of perceived innocence, purity, in the affection for natural beauty. ???????????? II Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. ?????? Then we run into Biblical phrasing for the rather touchingly ironic feature that the speaker is so young, ?????? yet concerned with last things. A bit of an air of comedy added by "only fifty more" where by tradition ????? this subject would demand a setting close to the end of partaking, that "grab what you still can while still around" motif. ?????? I'd add (forgive me) that even the obvious rhymes throughout support the "simplicity" that charms me in the poem. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. ????? I love the unpressured, quiet way the logic of the concluding statement works: given that the lovely tree is blooming ????? in the season of pain that turns to hope, and that I, the speaker, am mortal with limited days, it follows that... ???? I will go and partake. Anything more grand in the way of device or experiement -- their lack here lowering for ???? some the poem's "score"? -- would take away from the spell of innocent affirmation (with subterrainian death-dread) ???? that the work enforces.?? And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/1d9d93a5/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Feb 2 19:58:32 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <8CB53AFBE9C74E2-F10-1A07@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu><6C22E8DA-CCB4-48CF-B3B0-C91388477DA3@verizon.net><8CB53AE0D7D0ED4-F10-1 93F@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> <8CB53AFBE9C74E2-F10-1A07@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <498796B8.9020801@nut-n-but.net> > (The second stanza may be a classic example of filling things out for > sake of rime scheme. The information is all given in first two > lines, but then is restated by reversing the mental math. It begins to > sound a bit like one of those math word problems you were tested with > in grade school: "If one train traveling west left Cleveland at 10 > o'clock, traveling 100 miles per hour, and twenty minutes later > another train left Chicago traveling east...) Haw, James, I consider the second stanza to be what makes this poem great. Pretty much for the reasons you find it poor, although I don't think it fills things out for the sake of the rhyme scheme. The first two lines tell us the speaker is 20. It doesn't tell us that leaves him 50 more. We can do the arithmetic, yes, but the poet is directing us from the age of the poet to how many years he has left. He's making that the subject. --Bob From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Mon Feb 2 20:20:20 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmail.com> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com> <979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net> <7db1d01b0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com> <49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net> <26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC> <0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC> <7db1d01b0901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> We now have evaluations from Barry, me, Bob, and Finnegan on Housman's 'Loveliest of trees', and I wanted to let you all know more about Linda Sue Grimes' interpretation of the poem's 'message'. I had read the following paragraph of Linda Sue's, thought it intriguing and came up with my interpretation sent in two days ago, as given further below. Here's Linda Sue's paragraph, from April 1, 2007: "A.E. Housman's 'Loveliest of trees,' often misread as a carpe diem poem, actually offers a way to increase the enjoyment of beauty, not just grasp it for a while." Today I read her article which the paragraph above introduces. Here's a paragraph from the article that gets to the core of her interpretation: "In the third stanza, the speaker claims that because fifty more opportunities to enjoy these lovely trees with their luscious blossoms is not enough, he will go to observe the same trees also in winter, when they are 'hung with snow'. That way the speaker doubles his opportunities to enjoy the cherry trees 'wearing white'." The entire brief article is a clear, logical argument for her interpretation which is well worth our serious consideration. She and I find it the most logical of interpretations. The poem itself is further below, and here's the url for Linda Sue's article: http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/housmans_loveliest_of_trees Best, Judy 2009/1/31 Judy Prince > OK, here goes my paraphrase and then my evaluation of AEHousman's Loveliest > of Trees: > PARAPHRASE: > > The cherry, most beautiful of all trees, > is covered with white blossoms now as if celebrating Easter. > > Twenty of my [Biblically-promised] seventy years are spent, > so I'll only see fifty more springs--- > not enough time to enjoy blooming things; > > hence I'll walk these woods in the winters, as well, > to see the cherry boughs hung with snow. > > EVALUATION according to Bob's WEPD checklist: > > 1) Importance: Agreeing with Linda Sue Grimes, I feel it's not exactly a > carpe diem poem. I think it tells us to expect and to look for beauty > even in the starkest times. Not an insignificant observation. > > 2) Clear, uncliched devices/forms: I'd give it a ZERO for rockinghorse > cliches, rhythms, rhymes. > > 3) Word economy: Pore H, he flails around, esp in the 2nd stanza, trying > to squish and wiggle his slender meanings into a rhyming. Was this the > first poem he ever wrote? > > 4) Impressive, uncommon diction or imagery: ZERO. > > Not an Excellent poem. Not a Good poem. Maybe a sweet practice poem that > has a significant message put in impoverishedly poetic form [like this > sentence]. > > Judy considering Barry's forthput banana poem next > > 2009/1/31 Robin Hamilton > > Oops -- my bad. There's no indentation of any lines in the original, as >> my previous transcription seemed to imply. >> >> R. >> >> II >> >> Loveliest of trees, the cherry now >> Is hung with bloom along the bough, >> And stands about the woodland ride >> Wearing white for Eastertide. >> >> Now, of my threescore years and ten, >> Twenty will not come again, >> And take from seventy springs a score, >> It only leaves me fifty more. >> >> And since to look at things in bloom >> Fifty springs are little room, >> About the woodlands I will go >> To see the cherry hung with snow. >> >> A. E. Housman >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/e4ae9e49/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Mon Feb 2 20:41:38 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Alicia Stallings on rhyme Message-ID: <6768ac830902021741m41abbdb9s3c2afed0092b9c8@mail.gmail.com> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=182841 She's my hero. An excerpt: ----------- All rhymed poetry must be rhyme-driven. This is no longer to be considered pejorative. Rhyme is at the wheel. No, rhyme is the engine. Rhyme is an engine of syntax: like meter, it understands the importance of prepositions. English is not rhyme poor. It is only uninflected. On the contrary, English has a richness in rhymes across different parts of speech; whereas in many other languages, rhyme is often merely a coincident jingle of accidence. There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are not predictable unless lines are. Death and breath, womb and tomb, love and of, moon, June, spoon, all still have great poems ahead of them. -------- Huzzah! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/1e39ea05/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Feb 2 20:51:41 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com><979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net><7db1d01b 0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com><49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net><26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC><0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC><7db1d01b0 901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmail.com> <7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4987A32D.2020001@nut-n-but.net> > "In the third stanza, the speaker claims that because fifty more > opportunities to enjoy these lovely trees with their luscious blossoms > is not enough, he will go to observe the same trees also in winter, > when they are 'hung with snow'. That way the speaker doubles his > opportunities to enjoy the cherry trees 'wearing white'." Her interpretation isn't illogical, it's just wrong. That's because The poet spends a stanza describing the cherry trees right now. He's not then going to say, "So off I'll go to enjoy them this coming winter." He also says he wants to enjoy the blooms; snow isn't a bloom. Plus, he doesn't say 50 springs aren't enough, only that they are "little room." The lean seems therefore toward, I'd better make the most of what little room there is. Last observation, if the poet wants to say he wants to double his pleasure of the trees' beauty by seeing them in winter, he could have said, "About the woods I'll also go/ To see the cherry hung with snow." Oops, one more thought--that this idea is abrupt. It also seems to me to distract from the idea of enjoying them while the poet can--because it's like a solution to his problem--for all we know, enjoying them in winter as well as spring would be enough. In any case, it lessens the urgency of getting out there and enjoying them now, right away. Can't stop: cherry trees aren't going to be any more beautiful in winter than any other non-evergreen. --Bob From mandolin at mikesnider.org Mon Feb 2 20:50:53 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:53 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <8CB53AFBE9C74E2-F10-1A07@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <6C22E8DA-CCB4-48CF-B3B0-C91388477DA3@verizon.net> <8CB53AE0D7D0ED4-F10-193F@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> <8CB53AFBE9C74E2-F10-1A07@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <6768ac830902021750m186aec8kdc075fba4dfb35e0@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:44 PM, wrote: > (In the end, the great failure of the poem is that something conventially > seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the population--cherry trees in > bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth experiencing over and over by the > poet. The great poets tend to see as beautiful the things that other's might > overlook. A haiku poet would have done this poem in three lines, and saved > us 9 more, pace the logic of the second stanza.) > Finnegan, sometmes the great poets point to things the rest of us may overlook ? and sometimes thy remind us of the great common themes of human life, in langauge that ,makes it new again. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/7c5ccdc7/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Feb 2 21:01:10 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Alicia Stallings on rhyme In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902021741m41abbdb9s3c2afed0092b9c8@mail.gmail.com> References: <6768ac830902021741m41abbdb9s3c2afed0092b9c8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4987A566.3030608@nut-n-but.net> Michael Snider wrote: > http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=182841 > > She's my hero. An excerpt: > > ----------- > All rhymed poetry must be rhyme-driven. This is no longer to be > considered pejorative. > > Rhyme is at the wheel. No, rhyme is the engine. > > Rhyme is an engine of syntax: like meter, it understands the > importance of prepositions. > > English is not rhyme poor. It is only uninflected. On the contrary, > English has a richness in rhymes across different parts of speech; > whereas in many other languages, rhyme is often merely a coincident > jingle of accidence. > > There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are > not predictable unless lines are. Death and breath, womb and tomb, > love and of, moon, June, spoon, all still have great poems ahead of them. > -------- > > Huzzah! I like what she says. I think bad rhymes aren't the fault of the . . . rhymenants, I call them, but of their placement. "love/above" is often a bad rhyme not because of the two words but because "love" is misplaced in order to get it where it can end-rhyme as in "Give your love/ to God above." Or rhymes can be too expected and therefore very irritating due to the triteness of the poem they're in. If a poet has a "you" at the end of one line, then immediately brings in the sky, you know "blue" is gonna come up. Also, she exaggerates. I think great rhyming poems are in part driven, have to be driven, by rhyme, but the can be driven in part by other things--and should be. What I like most is that she makes it clear she's talking about "rhymed poetry," not "poetry." --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/5dc0ea9a/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Mon Feb 2 21:24:39 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <4987A32D.2020001@nut-n-but.net> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com> <979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net> <49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net> <26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC> <0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC> <7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> <4987A32D.2020001@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <6768ac830902021824s5550787aw1bb33bd1434d17c7@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > > Can't stop: cherry trees aren't going to be any more beautiful in winter > than any other non-evergreen. But their shapes maybe lovely ? trees of different species are not necessarily more alike without thir leaves ? and the beholding of them can be infused withthe beholders memory: "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/c533cb52/attachment.html From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Mon Feb 2 21:42:42 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com> <979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net> <7db1d01b0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com> <49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net> <26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC> <0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC> <7db1d01b0901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmail.com> <7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Funny you should send this interpretation because that's the way I've always read the poem: That the speaker, noting that there's not enough room to look at things in bloom in spring only, must also go about the woodlands in winter to look at the trees while they're hung with snow. And, to respond to Bob, yes, the cherry may look no different from any other deciduous tree in winter, but it is. Since it's a cherry tree hung with white it implies spring and the blooms. Squint and it's spring! Okay, bundle up and wear boots, and then squint and it's spring. You could argue that it's a stretch, perhaps, but I don't think it's blatantly wrong. The poem doesn't have any hard evidence against it. It doesn't even mention boots. John J ________________________________ From: Judy Prince To: Robin Hamilton ; "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, Views" Sent: Monday, February 2, 2009 8:20:20 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem We now have evaluations from Barry, me, Bob, and Finnegan on Housman's 'Loveliest of trees', and I wanted to let you all know more about Linda Sue Grimes' interpretation of the poem's 'message'. I had read the following paragraph of Linda Sue's, thought it intriguing and came up with my interpretation sent in two days ago, as given further below. Here's Linda Sue's paragraph, from April 1, 2007: "A.E. Housman's 'Loveliest of trees,' often misread as a carpe diem poem, actually offers a way to increase the enjoyment of beauty, not just grasp it for a while." Today I read her article which the paragraph above introduces. Here's a paragraph from the article that gets to the core of her interpretation: "In the third stanza, the speaker claims that because fifty more opportunities to enjoy these lovely trees with their luscious blossoms is not enough, he will go to observe the same trees also in winter, when they are 'hung with snow'. That way the speaker doubles his opportunities to enjoy the cherry trees 'wearing white'." The entire brief article is a clear, logical argument for her interpretation which is well worth our serious consideration. She and I find it the most logical of interpretations. The poem itself is further below, and here's the url for Linda Sue's article: http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/housmans_loveliest_of_trees Best, Judy 2009/1/31 Judy Prince OK, here goes my paraphrase and then my evaluation of AEHousman's Loveliest of Trees: PARAPHRASE: The cherry, most beautiful of all trees, is covered with white blossoms now as if celebrating Easter. Twenty of my [Biblically-promised] seventy years are spent, so I'll only see fifty more springs--- not enough time to enjoy blooming things; hence I'll walk these woods in the winters, as well, to see the cherry boughs hung with snow. EVALUATION according to Bob's WEPD checklist: 1) Importance: Agreeing with Linda Sue Grimes, I feel it's not exactly a carpe diem poem. I think it tells us to expect and to look for beauty even in the starkest times. Not an insignificant observation. 2) Clear, uncliched devices/forms: I'd give it a ZERO for rockinghorse cliches, rhythms, rhymes. 3) Word economy: Pore H, he flails around, esp in the 2nd stanza, trying to squish and wiggle his slender meanings into a rhyming. Was this the first poem he ever wrote? 4) Impressive, uncommon diction or imagery: ZERO. Not an Excellent poem. Not a Good poem. Maybe a sweet practice poem that has a significant message put in impoverishedly poetic form [like this sentence]. Judy considering Barry's forthput banana poem next 2009/1/31 Robin Hamilton Oops -- my bad. There's no indentation of any lines in the original, as my previous transcription seemed to imply. R. II Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. A. E. Housman _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/d7ce82bb/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Feb 2 22:18:15 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com><979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net><7db1d01b 0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com><49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net><26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC><0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC><7db1d01b0 901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmail.com><7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> <269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4987B777.9010505@nut-n-but.net> > You could argue that it's a stretch, perhaps, but I don't think it's > blatantly wrong. Agreed. > The poem doesn't have any hard evidence against it. But it does: And since because the speaker has little time "to look at things in BLOOM," he is going into the woodlands to see the cherry hung with snow. If they're literally hung with snow, they won't be in bloom. To be reminded of blooms is not looking at them. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/05bbac52/attachment.html From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Mon Feb 2 22:41:53 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com><979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net><7db1d01b 0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com><49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net><26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC><0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC><7db1d01b0 901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmail.com><7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> <269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <4987B777.9010505@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <630945.87157.qm@web54104.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Right: he has little time to look at things in bloom; therefore he must go out even when they're not in bloom and see the beauty of them when they are hung with snow. Just the way I've read it for my two score years and ten. JohnJ ________________________________ From: Bob Grumman To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" Sent: Monday, February 2, 2009 10:18:15 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem You could argue that it's a stretch, perhaps, but I don't think it's blatantly wrong. Agreed. The poem doesn't have any hard evidence against it. But it does: And since because the speaker has little time "to look at things in BLOOM," he is going into the woodlands to see the cherry hung with snow. If they're literally hung with snow, they won't be in bloom. To be reminded of blooms is not looking at them. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/7db9bf64/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Mon Feb 2 23:02:49 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902021824s5550787aw1bb33bd1434d17c7@mail.gmail.com> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com> <979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net> <49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net> <26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC> <0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC> <7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> <4987A32D.2020001@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902021824s5550787aw1bb33bd1434d17c7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4987C1E9.4070801@opus40.org> They might be, but it's still not what Housman is saying. I'm with Bob here all the way. Michael Snider wrote: > > > On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Bob Grumman > wrote: > > > Can't stop: cherry trees aren't going to be any more beautiful in > winter than any other non-evergreen. > > > But their shapes maybe lovely ? trees of different species are not > necessarily more alike without thir leaves ? and the beholding of them > can be infused withthe beholders memory: "bare ruined choirs where > late the sweet birds sang." > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Mon Feb 2 23:06:49 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <630945.87157.qm@web54104.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com><979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net><7db1d01b 0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com><49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net><26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC><0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC><7db1d01b0 901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmail.com><7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> <269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <4987B777.9010505@nut-n-but.net> <630945.87157.qm@web54104.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4987C2D9.8040403@opus40.org> That knocks the underpinnings out of the whole sense of urgency, Don't worry, it's not just the 50 springs, you have winters too. And summers and falls too...what the heck. The whole point is that for most very young men, fifty years is an eternity -- and yet, only a very young man is capable of that special kind of wonder to say that 50 springs is little room. John Jeffrey wrote: > Right: he has little time to look at things in bloom; therefore he > must go out even when they're not in bloom and see the beauty of them > when they are hung with snow. Just the way I've read it for my two > score years and ten. > > JohnJ > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > *From:* Bob Grumman > *To:* "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" > > *Sent:* Monday, February 2, 2009 10:18:15 PM > *Subject:* Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem > > >> You could argue that it's a stretch, perhaps, but I don't think it's >> blatantly wrong. > Agreed. > >> The poem doesn't have any hard evidence against it. > But it does: And since because the speaker has little time "to look at > things in BLOOM," he is going into the woodlands to see the cherry > hung with snow. If they're literally hung with snow, they won't be in > bloom. To be reminded of blooms is not looking at them. > > --Bob > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From halvard at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 23:20:30 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <4987B777.9010505@nut-n-but.net> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com> <979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net> <49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net> <26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC> <0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC> <7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> <269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <4987B777.9010505@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: If you haven't seen blossoming cherry trees hung with literal snow, Bob, you've never lived in Washington, DC. Hal On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:18 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > > You could argue that it's a stretch, perhaps, but I don't think it's > blatantly wrong. > > Agreed. > > The poem doesn't have any hard evidence against it. > > But it does: And since because the speaker has little time "to look at > things in BLOOM," he is going into the woodlands to see the cherry hung with > snow. If they're literally hung with snow, they won't be in bloom. To be > reminded of blooms is not looking at them. > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090202/d4c47f49/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Tue Feb 3 07:18:30 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com> <979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net> <7db1d01b0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com> <49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net> <26DBD3489DFB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC> <0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC> <7db1d01b0901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmail.com> <7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> <269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902030418t34bec59di27cd19244c68b3f9@mail.gmail.com> Thanks, John; I had begun to despair at folks' reading of a simple, direct text. And I thank Linda Sue Grimes for her patient, clear, logical explanation. Frankly, the interpretation that the three of us hold redeems Housman, in my eyes. As a 'seize the day' poem, oh how crashingly obvious 'twould be! Judy 2009/2/2 John Jeffrey > Funny you should send this interpretation because that's the way I've > always read the poem: That the speaker, noting that there's not enough room > to look at things in bloom in spring only, must also go about the woodlands > in winter to look at the trees while they're hung with snow. And, to > respond to Bob, yes, the cherry may look no different from any other > deciduous tree in winter, but it is. Since it's a cherry tree hung with > white it implies spring and the blooms. Squint and it's spring! Okay, > bundle up and wear boots, and then squint and it's spring. You could argue > that it's a stretch, perhaps, but I don't think it's blatantly wrong. The > poem doesn't have any hard evidence against it. It doesn't even mention > boots. > > John J > > > > > ------------------------------ > *From:* Judy Prince > *To:* Robin Hamilton ; "NewPoetry: > Contemporary Poetry News &, Views" > *Sent:* Monday, February 2, 2009 8:20:20 PM > *Subject:* Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem > > We now have evaluations from Barry, me, Bob, and Finnegan on Housman's > 'Loveliest of trees', and I wanted to let you all know more about Linda Sue > Grimes' interpretation of the poem's 'message'. I had read the following > paragraph of Linda Sue's, thought it intriguing and came up with my > interpretation sent in two days ago, as given further below. Here's Linda > Sue's paragraph, from April 1, 2007: > "A.E. Housman's 'Loveliest of trees,' often misread as a carpe diem poem, > actually offers a way to increase the enjoyment of beauty, not just grasp it > for a while." > > Today I read her article which the paragraph above introduces. Here's a > paragraph from the article that gets to the core of her interpretation: > > "In the third stanza, the speaker claims that because fifty more > opportunities to enjoy these lovely trees with their luscious blossoms is > not enough, he will go to observe the same trees also in winter, when they > are 'hung with snow'. That way the speaker doubles his opportunities to > enjoy the cherry trees 'wearing white'." > > The entire brief article is a clear, logical argument for her > interpretation which is well worth our serious consideration. She and I > find it the most logical of interpretations. The poem itself is further > below, and here's the url for Linda Sue's article: > > http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/housmans_loveliest_of_trees > > Best, > > Judy > > > > 2009/1/31 Judy Prince > >> OK, here goes my paraphrase and then my evaluation of AEHousman's >> Loveliest of Trees: >> PARAPHRASE: >> >> The cherry, most beautiful of all trees, >> is covered with white blossoms now as if celebrating Easter. >> >> Twenty of my [Biblically-promised] seventy years are spent, >> so I'll only see fifty more springs--- >> not enough time to enjoy blooming things; >> >> hence I'll walk these woods in the winters, as well, >> to see the cherry boughs hung with snow. >> >> EVALUATION according to Bob's WEPD checklist: >> >> 1) Importance: Agreeing with Linda Sue Grimes, I feel it's not exactly >> a carpe diem poem. I think it tells us to expect and to look for beauty >> even in the starkest times. Not an insignificant observation. >> >> 2) Clear, uncliched devices/forms: I'd give it a ZERO for rockinghorse >> cliches, rhythms, rhymes. >> >> 3) Word economy: Pore H, he flails around, esp in the 2nd stanza, >> trying to squish and wiggle his slender meanings into a rhyming. Was this >> the first poem he ever wrote? >> >> 4) Impressive, uncommon diction or imagery: ZERO. >> >> Not an Excellent poem. Not a Good poem. Maybe a sweet practice poem that >> has a significant message put in impoverishedly poetic form [like this >> sentence]. >> >> Judy considering Barry's forthput banana poem next >> >> 2009/1/31 Robin Hamilton >> >> Oops -- my bad. There's no indentation of any lines in the original, as >>> my previous transcription seemed to imply. >>> >>> R. >>> >>> II >>> >>> Loveliest of trees, the cherry now >>> Is hung with bloom along the bough, >>> And stands about the woodland ride >>> Wearing white for Eastertide. >>> >>> Now, of my threescore years and ten, >>> Twenty will not come again, >>> And take from seventy springs a score, >>> It only leaves me fifty more. >>> >>> And since to look at things in bloom >>> Fifty springs are little room, >>> About the woodlands I will go >>> To see the cherry hung with snow. >>> >>> A. E. Housman >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> New-Poetry mailing list >>> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >>> >> >> > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/a175faa7/attachment.html From lsgrimes at stonegulch.com Tue Feb 3 08:11:18 2009 From: lsgrimes at stonegulch.com (Linda Sue Grimes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu><6C22E8DA-CCB4-48CF-B3B0-C91388477DA3@verizon.net><8CB53AE0D7D0ED4-F10-193F@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> <8CB53AFBE9C74E2-F10-1A07@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <78BDA7461DFD49AD883C61771BE58EC5@LindaSue> "In the end, the great failure of the poem is that something conventially seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the population--cherry trees in bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth experiencing over and over by the poet." By taking literally the final line, "To see the cherry hung with snow," you eliminate this problem. lsg ----- Original Message ----- From: jforjames@aol.com To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 6:44 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman Pardon again, my errant reply...Here's what I meant to chime in with: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. (Nice clean pastoral start. A sauntering diction like a horse-drawn carriage ride. And the hint of the death/ressurection dyad as the stanza the end.) Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. (The second stanza may be a classic example of filling things out for sake of rime scheme. The information is all given in first two lines, but then is restated by reversing the mental math. It begins to sound a bit like one of those math word problems you were tested with in grade school: "If one train traveling west left Cleveland at 10 o'clock, traveling 100 miles per hour, and twenty minutes later another train left Chicago traveling east...) And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. (In the end, the great failure of the poem is that something conventially seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the population--cherry trees in bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth experiencing over and over by the poet. The great poets tend to see as beautiful the things that other's might overlook. A haiku poet would have done this poem in three lines, and saved us 9 more, pace the logic of the second stanza.) Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Barry Spacks To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 3:51 pm Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman Applying the Check List to such a canonical piece is difficult. Here's one I've always read and loved as a key carpe diem poem that clearly falls flat (as Judy notes) in terms of innovation-areas of the Famous List TO ITS BETTERMENT, I will claim below. I take it that to give a work a Prix d'Or one remains free to assume that Excellence in this game doesn't mean that all list-categories must yield enthusiastic response. Keep them all in mind, sure, but ignore those irrelevant (how much more so, I'd guess, with "Bananas..." (?) ) That said, my case for excellence: Telling start with an alternate foot, refreshing mastery, authority in gentle assertiveness of tone; 2nd line's alliteration pleasing, and also forwards in its simplicity the asserted loveliness of the blooming; connection to Easter in l.4 a powerful ideological note with its death & resurrection associations; I'd add, softie that I am, the sense of whiteness in the blooms (and later in "snow" as evoked) offers an additive to the emotion of perceived innocence, purity, in the affection for natural beauty. II Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Then we run into Biblical phrasing for the rather touchingly ironic feature that the speaker is so young, yet concerned with last things. A bit of an air of comedy added by "only fifty more" where by tradition this subject would demand a setting close to the end of partaking, that "grab what you still can while still around" motif. I'd add (forgive me) that even the obvious rhymes throughout support the "simplicity" that charms me in the poem. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. I love the unpressured, quiet way the logic of the concluding statement works: given that the lovely tree is blooming in the season of pain that turns to hope, and that I, the speaker, am mortal with limited days, it follows that... I will go and partake. Anything more grand in the way of device or experiement -- their lack here lowering for some the poem's "score" -- would take away from the spell of innocent affirmation (with subterrainian death-dread) that the work enforces. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You can't always choose whom you love, but you can choose how to find them. Start with AOL Personals. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/ae5b378f/attachment.html From amyhappens at yahoo.com Tue Feb 3 08:19:43 2009 From: amyhappens at yahoo.com (amy king) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Call for Work Message-ID: <881193.31765.qm@web83308.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> FoggedClarity.com seeks exceptional fiction and poetry ? Arts Review Fogged Clarity is now accepting submissions for our March and April editions.? Submissions should be sent to submissions@foggedclarity.com.? Our February (debut) issue is free and available at www.foggedclarity.com.? In it you will find new work from poets Bruce Smith, Amy King, and Peter Ciccariello, experimental photography by Kyle Jones and Ryan Daly, short fiction by Dmitri Gheorgheni, and much more.?? Fogged Clarity aims to transcend the conventions of the typical literary review by incorporating music, the visual arts, interviews, and political exposition.? Our ambition is to form a community of artists whose interaction is not constrained by medium, but broadened by a collective love of expression.? Our network is extensive, and our passion for ventilation intense.? We sincerely hope you will join us, and share the fruits of your own fogged clarity. ? I wish you the best, ? Benjamin Evans Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity ? ????? -- Editor, "Fogged Clarity" www.foggedclarity.com Ben Evans _______ Amy's Alias http://amyking.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/e2419c77/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 09:52:54 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:54 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <630945.87157.qm@web54104.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com><979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net><7db1d01b 0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com><49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net><49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net><26DBD3489D FB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC><0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC><7db1d01b0901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmai l.com><7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com><269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com><4987B777.90105 05@nut-n-but.net> <630945.87157.qm@web54104.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <49885A46.5070107@nut-n-but.net> John Jeffrey wrote: > Right: he has little time to look at things in bloom; therefore he > must go out even when they're not in bloom and see the beauty of them > when they are hung with snow. Just the way I've read it for my two > score years and ten. > > JohnJ > Sorry, John, but you seem to me to be arguing that Housman is saying: And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To do something other than look at cherry trees in bloom. If he'd been talking about the beauty of cherry trees, that would make more sense, but he hasn't been: he's been talking about the beauty of cherry trees/ in bloom/ (and, implicitly, about the beauty of spring). Do you not agree that my reading is at least as reasonable as yours? I've seen it that way for probably close to 50 years, but that's irrelevant; I have definitely been mistaken about some poems for longer than that. Note to Judy: The Mole is on my side, and he's worth twenty Johns and 19.5 Michaels, so phooey on you. I would add that if you only can't appreciate a poem whose most overt message is "boring," you won't be able to appreciate many of the best poems in the language. It's not a poem's message that counts, but how the poem expresses it. --Hohenprofessor Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/c6cae101/attachment.html From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Tue Feb 3 10:04:21 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <4987C2D9.8040403@opus40.org> Message-ID: <379440.51280.qm@web54103.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Funny, I see it as the opposite: that it heightens the urgency. ?Since 50 springs is little room, you need every season, not just spring. ?You need to go in both spring and winter.And that a young man is saying it, is understanding that 50 years may have little room, seems rather extraordinary, but that's where reading the rest of A Shropshire Lad gives s hint. ?The "young men" in Housman's world are a dark bunch. ?That middle stanza is proof that this is now simple youth.To me, reading this as a straight Oh-I'd-betta-go-look-at-da-pretty-twees-wite-now seems rather light, which is one of the major mistakes reading Housman's sing-song sounding poems. ?They always roll of the tongue so pretty, always rhyme so nicely, but they're generally not "pretty" or "nice." And looking at a bare tree hung with snow--since that's all you've got in winter--because you know that you may not make it to next spring is right up Housman's alley, or should I say right up his woodland ride.Just more thoughts when I should be working.JohnJ --- On Mon, 2/2/09, TheOldMole wrote: From: TheOldMole Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" Date: Monday, February 2, 2009, 11:06 PM That knocks the underpinnings out of the whole sense of urgency, Don't worry, it's not just the 50 springs, you have winters too. And summers and falls too...what the heck. The whole point is that for most very young men, fifty years is an eternity -- and yet, only a very young man is capable of that special kind of wonder to say that 50 springs is little room. John Jeffrey wrote: > Right: he has little time to look at things in bloom; therefore he must go out even when they're not in bloom and see the beauty of them when they are hung with snow. Just the way I've read it for my two score years and ten. > > JohnJ > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > *From:* Bob Grumman > *To:* "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" > *Sent:* Monday, February 2, 2009 10:18:15 PM > *Subject:* Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem > > >> You could argue that it's a stretch, perhaps, but I don't think it's blatantly wrong. > Agreed. > >> The poem doesn't have any hard evidence against it. > But it does: And since because the speaker has little time "to look at things in BLOOM," he is going into the woodlands to see the cherry hung with snow. If they're literally hung with snow, they won't be in bloom. To be reminded of blooms is not looking at them. > --Bob > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/358518e4/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 10:07:28 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <78BDA7461DFD49AD883C61771BE58EC5@LindaSue> References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu><6C22E8DA-CCB4-48CF-B3B0-C91388477DA3@verizon.net><8CB53AE0D7D0ED4-F10-1 93F@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com><8CB53AFBE9C74E2-F10-1A07@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> <78BDA7461DFD49AD883C61771BE58EC5@LindaSue> Message-ID: <49885DB0.8000501@nut-n-but.net> Linda Sue Grimes wrote: > "In the end, the great failure of the poem is that something > conventially seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the > population--cherry trees in bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth > experiencing over and over by the poet." > > By taking literally the final line, *"*To see the cherry hung with > snow*,"* you eliminate this problem. > > lsg Actually, you don't: the poet is still saying the cherry trees in bloom are worth seeing as much as one can. Your interpretation only adds that even that isn't enough: one should experience their beauty when they have snow on them as well. A great Failure, like the Great Failure of the Dickinson poem in telling us something 99.9% of the population takes as sad, the death of a loved one, will be emotionally upsetting. One reason I'm so crotchety about this is that I've been arguing with a wack who believes Oxford wrote the works of Shakespeare about "Sonnet 18." That, he is certain, can't be about its addressee's being more beautiful in appearance and disposition than a summer's day because that's "boring"; for him, it has to be comparing Queen Elizabeth to Queen Mary of Scots--it has to have important people in it. It also has to have bawdy puns in it, and if you don't agree with him that some are there, you are a Victorian prude. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/2192ebbb/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Tue Feb 3 10:08:26 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <49885A46.5070107@nut-n-but.net> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com><979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net><7db1d01b 0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com><49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net><49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net><26DBD3489D FB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC><0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC><7db1d01b0901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmai l.com><7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com><269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com><4987B777.90105 05@nut-n-but.net> <630945.87157.qm@web54104.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <49885A46.5070107@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <49885DEA.7000306@opus40.org> Bob -- I think we should get together and have a beer over this, because malt does more than Housman can, to justify Nature's ways to man, Bob Grumman wrote: > John Jeffrey wrote: >> Right: he has little time to look at things in bloom; therefore he >> must go out even when they're not in bloom and see the beauty of them >> when they are hung with snow. Just the way I've read it for my two >> score years and ten. >> >> JohnJ >> > Sorry, John, but you seem to me to be arguing that Housman is saying: > > And since to look at things in bloom > Fifty springs are little room, > About the woodlands I will go > > To do something other than look at cherry trees in bloom. > > If he'd been talking about the beauty of cherry trees, that would make > more sense, but he hasn't been: he's been talking about the beauty of > cherry trees/ in bloom/ (and, implicitly, about the beauty of spring). > > Do you not agree that my reading is at least as reasonable as yours? > I've seen it that way for probably close to 50 years, but that's > irrelevant; I have definitely been mistaken about some poems for > longer than that. > > Note to Judy: The Mole is on my side, and he's worth twenty Johns and > 19.5 Michaels, so phooey on you. I would add that if you only can't > appreciate a poem whose most overt message is "boring," you won't be > able to appreciate many of the best poems in the language. It's not a > poem's message that counts, but how the poem expresses it. > > --Hohenprofessor Bob > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Tue Feb 3 10:10:52 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <379440.51280.qm@web54103.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <4987C2D9.8040403@opus40.org> <379440.51280.qm@web54103.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902030710w2350a62en52067b1de523eac0@mail.gmail.com> I know one who'd heartily second your 'take' on AEH's Dark Side, John. And I concur about H's 'pretty' and 'simple' wrapping around Deeper Stuff. He might be a right clivver dude; I'm not sure. Might just be a nutcase. Judy enjoying your humour as well as your logic, naturally. 2009/2/3 John Jeffrey > Funny, I see it as the opposite: that it heightens the urgency. Since 50 > springs is little room, you need *every* season, not just spring. You > need to go in both spring *and* winter. > > And that a young man is saying it, is understanding that 50 years may have > little room, seems rather extraordinary, but that's where reading the rest > of A Shropshire Lad gives s hint. The "young men" in Housman's world are a > dark bunch. That middle stanza is proof that this is now simple youth. > > To me, reading this as a straight > Oh-I'd-betta-go-look-at-da-pretty-twees-wite-now seems rather light, which > is one of the major mistakes reading Housman's sing-song sounding poems. > They always roll of the tongue so pretty, always rhyme so nicely, but > they're generally not "pretty" or "nice." And looking at a bare tree hung > with snow--since that's all you've got in winter--because you know that you > may not make it to next spring is right up Housman's alley, or should I say > right up his woodland ride. > > Just more thoughts when I should be working. > > JohnJ > > --- On *Mon, 2/2/09, TheOldMole * wrote: > > From: TheOldMole > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" < > new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu> > Date: Monday, February 2, 2009, 11:06 PM > > > That knocks the underpinnings out of the whole sense of urgency, Don't > worry, it's not just the 50 springs, you have winters too. And summers and > falls too...what the heck. The whole point is that for most very young men, > fifty years is an eternity -- and yet, only a very young man is capable of that > special kind of wonder to say that 50 springs is little room. > > John Jeffrey wrote: > > Right: he has little time to look at things in bloom; therefore he must go > out even when they're not in bloom and see the beauty of them when they are > hung with snow. Just the way I've read it for my two score years and ten. > > > > JohnJ > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > *From:* Bob Grumman > > *To:* "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" > > > *Sent:* Monday, February 2, 2009 10:18:15 PM > > *Subject:* Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem > > > > > >> You could argue that it's a stretch, perhaps, but I don't > think it's blatantly wrong. > > Agreed. > > > >> The poem doesn't have any hard evidence against it. > > But it does: And since because the speaker has little time "to look > at things in BLOOM," he is going into the woodlands to see the cherry hung > with snow. If they're literally hung with snow, they won't be in bloom. > To be reminded of blooms is not looking at them. > > --Bob > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > -- Tad Richardshttp://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ > > Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR!http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing listNew-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.eduhttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/33ca21a3/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Tue Feb 3 10:13:02 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <49885DB0.8000501@nut-n-but.net> References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu><6C22E8DA-CCB4-48CF-B3B0-C91388477DA3@verizon.net><8CB53AE0D7D0ED4-F10-1 93F@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com><8CB53AFBE9C74E2-F10-1A07@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> <78BDA7461DFD49AD883C61771BE58EC5@LindaSue> <49885DB0.8000501@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <49885EFE.1020005@opus40.org> It also has to have bawdy puns in it, and if you don't agree with him that some are there, you are a Victorian prude. Doesn't everyone believe that? Bob Grumman wrote: > Linda Sue Grimes wrote: >> "In the end, the great failure of the poem is that something >> conventially seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the >> population--cherry trees in bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth >> experiencing over and over by the poet." >> >> By taking literally the final line, *"*To see the cherry hung with >> snow*,"* you eliminate this problem. >> >> lsg > Actually, you don't: the poet is still saying the cherry trees in > bloom are worth seeing as much as one can. Your interpretation only > adds that even that isn't enough: one should experience their beauty > when they have snow on them as well. A great Failure, like the Great > Failure of the Dickinson poem in telling us something 99.9% of the > population takes as sad, the death of a loved one, will be emotionally > upsetting. > > One reason I'm so crotchety about this is that I've been arguing with > a wack who believes Oxford wrote the works of Shakespeare about > "Sonnet 18." That, he is certain, can't be about its addressee's > being more beautiful in appearance and disposition than a summer's day > because that's "boring"; for him, it has to be comparing Queen > Elizabeth to Queen Mary of Scots--it has to have important people in > it. It also has to have bawdy puns in it, and if you don't agree with > him that some are there, you are a Victorian prude. > > --Bob > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Tue Feb 3 10:14:35 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902030710w2350a62en52067b1de523eac0@mail.gmail.com> References: <4987C2D9.8040403@opus40.org> <379440.51280.qm@web54103.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <7db1d01b0902030710w2350a62en52067b1de523eac0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49885F5B.1050407@opus40.org> And that a young man is saying it, is understanding that 50 years may have little room, seems rather extraordinary, but that's where reading the rest of A Shropshire Lad gives s hint. The "young men" in Housman's world are a dark bunch. That middle stanza is proof that this is now simple youth. I don't think he does really understand it, and that's part of the power of the poem. Judy Prince wrote: > I know one who'd heartily second your 'take' on AEH's Dark Side, John. > > And I concur about H's 'pretty' and 'simple' wrapping around Deeper > Stuff. He might be a right clivver dude; I'm not sure. Might just be > a nutcase. > > Judy enjoying your humour as well as your logic, naturally. > > 2009/2/3 John Jeffrey > > > Funny, I see it as the opposite: that it heightens the urgency. > Since 50 springs is little room, you need /every/ season, not > just spring. You need to go in both spring /and/ winter. > > And that a young man is saying it, is understanding that 50 years > may have little room, seems rather extraordinary, but that's where > reading the rest of A Shropshire Lad gives s hint. The "young > men" in Housman's world are a dark bunch. That middle stanza is > proof that this is now simple youth. > > To me, reading this as a straight > Oh-I'd-betta-go-look-at-da-pretty-twees-wite-now seems rather > light, which is one of the major mistakes reading Housman's > sing-song sounding poems. They always roll of the tongue so > pretty, always rhyme so nicely, but they're generally not "pretty" > or "nice." And looking at a bare tree hung with snow--since that's > all you've got in winter--because you know that you may not make > it to next spring is right up Housman's alley, or should I say > right up his woodland ride. > > Just more thoughts when I should be working. > > JohnJ > > > --- On *Mon, 2/2/09, TheOldMole / >/* wrote: > > From: TheOldMole > > > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" > > > Date: Monday, February 2, 2009, 11:06 PM > > > That knocks the underpinnings out of the whole sense of urgency, Don't > worry, it's not just the 50 springs, you have winters too. And summers and > falls too...what the heck. The whole point is that for most very young men, > fifty years is an eternity -- and yet, only a very young man is capable of that > special kind of wonder to say that 50 springs is little room. > > John Jeffrey wrote: > > Right: he has little time to look at things in bloom; therefore he must go > out even when they're not in bloom and see the beauty of them when they are > hung with snow. Just the way I've read it for my two score years and ten. > > > > JohnJ > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > *From:* Bob Grumman > > > *To:* "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" > > > > *Sent:* Monday, February 2, 2009 10:18:15 PM > > *Subject:* Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem > > > > > >> You could argue that it's a stretch, perhaps, but I don't > think it's blatantly wrong. > > Agreed. > > > >> The poem doesn't have any hard evidence against it. > > But it does: And since because the speaker has little time "to look > at things in BLOOM," he is going into the woodlands to see the cherry hung > with snow. If they're literally hung with snow, they won't be in bloom. > To be reminded of blooms is not looking at them. > > --Bob > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > -- Tad Richards > http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ > http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ > > Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! > http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Tue Feb 3 10:19:19 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <49885A46.5070107@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <930466.90778.qm@web54112.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Bob,I do agree that your reading is as reasonable as mine.? And yes, the poem talks about cherry trees in bloom--but if you're going to be that literal (not cherry trees, but cherry trees in bloom) then I would think that you'd stumble with "About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow." ?He doesn't say, "looking as if they are hung with snow." ?He specifically says "hung with snow." ?So if you're following a literal reading, then you've got a bit of a snow problem. ?But if you're going to say that the snow is metaphoric, or symbolic, or even just an image for blooms, then that would open the door for a less-literal reading of the rest of the poem.And if the Mole is worth 20 of me, then he's... ?let me think... ?20 times... carry the 4... ?hmmm. ? ?Ah, who cares. ?Math is stupit.JohnJ --- On Tue, 2/3/09, Bob Grumman wrote: From: Bob Grumman Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 9:52 AM John Jeffrey wrote: Right: he has little time to look at things in bloom; therefore he must go out even when they're not in bloom and see the beauty of them when they are hung with snow.? Just the way I've read it for my two score years and ten. JohnJ Sorry, John, but you seem to me to be arguing that Housman is saying: ??? And since to look at things in bloom ??? Fifty springs are little room, ??? About the woodlands I will go ??? To do something other than look at cherry trees in bloom. If he'd been talking about the beauty of cherry trees, that would make more sense, but he hasn't been: he's been talking about the beauty of cherry trees in bloom (and, implicitly, about the beauty of spring). Do you not agree that my reading is at least as reasonable as yours?? I've seen it that way for probably close to 50 years, but that's irrelevant; I have definitely been mistaken about some poems for longer than that. Note to Judy: The Mole is on my side, and he's worth twenty Johns and 19.5 Michaels, so phooey on you.? I would add that if you only can't appreciate a poem whose most overt message is "boring," you won't be able to appreciate many of the best poems in the language.? It's not a poem's message that counts, but how the poem expresses it. --Hohenprofessor Bob _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/631bcec8/attachment.html From editor at pavementsaw.org Tue Feb 3 10:19:50 2009 From: editor at pavementsaw.org (David Baratier) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: New-Poetry Digest, Vol 56, Issue 5 In-Reply-To: <200902021700.n12H040N010119@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <215273.47209.qm@web45608.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> >So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on Bunting? > And why on earth is > he so ignored? Bunting is too difficult for poets and their negligent attention spans. He is his own thing. If he was so similar to Pound many would read him because pomo Universities train "how to read." Bunting has little truck with Pound, in fact the word "Pound" has become the unread poets version of laziness. "It's like Pound," synonymous with too much effort. "How come I cannot find these Chinese Analytics on my new Blackberry?" If we want to offer a populist American comparison, Charles Wright has much more in common. Early Wright Americanizes "P's" influence through a faux "oriental screen," his shorter lines with stunted vocabulary and elimination of otherness in language and pictograph are typical of frontierism. Go back to mapping of poems. The key to Bunting is sound spoken aloud. Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press 321 Empire Street Montpelier OH 43543 http://pavementsaw.org Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 10:26:23 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <49885DEA.7000306@opus40.org> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com><979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net><7db1d01b 0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com><49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net><49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net><26DBD3489D FB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC><0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC><7db1d01b0901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmai l.com><7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com><269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com><4987B777.90105 05@nut-n-but.net><630945.87157.qm@web54104.mail.re2.yahoo.com><49885A46.5070107@nut-n-but.net> <49885DEA.7000306@opus40.org> Message-ID: <4988621F.9090900@nut-n-but.net> TheOldMole wrote: > Bob -- I think we should get together and have a beer over this, > because malt does more than Housman can, to justify Nature's ways to man, You're right, Mole. We should invite the opposition, too. Enough beers and we should be able to straighten everything out. --Bob From cervantes.james at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 10:29:59 2009 From: cervantes.james at gmail.com (James Cervantes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] on the down low In-Reply-To: <8CB53A3B314CBFF-1184-324@webmail-dx01.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB53A3B314CBFF-1184-324@webmail-dx01.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <648208b60902030729y172e49b9x81dc1d1081d5a413@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 4:18 PM, wrote: > Shssss...Don't let Bob know about this blog... > http://otherclutter.com/ > > You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight > and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are > that of imagination. That's the sign post up ahead, your next stop...The > VizPo Zone!... > I like the Jeff Crouch graphics, especially "pie farm." Overall, however, don't folks think these are more graphic art, and not "visual poetry," though there might be poetry in those graphics, much as we say there's "poetry in motion" in the movements of some dancers? - Jim "Polish doesn't change quartz into a diamond." -Wilma Askinas ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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://www.flickr.com/photos/jamescervantes/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/195bd644/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Tue Feb 3 10:33:08 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <4988621F.9090900@nut-n-but.net> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com> <49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net> <49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net> <0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC> <7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com> <269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <630945.87157.qm@web54104.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <49885A46.5070107@nut-n-but.net> <49885DEA.7000306@opus40.org> <4988621F.9090900@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902030733m50d40750j3fe2d39baabd323c@mail.gmail.com> Wine, maybe. Judy 2009/2/3 Bob Grumman > TheOldMole wrote: > >> Bob -- I think we should get together and have a beer over this, because >> malt does more than Housman can, to justify Nature's ways to man, >> > You're right, Mole. We should invite the opposition, too. Enough beers > and we should be able to straighten everything out. > > --Bob > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/a08d98c6/attachment.html From rwilsnac at medicine.nodak.edu Tue Feb 3 10:41:38 2009 From: rwilsnac at medicine.nodak.edu (Richard Wilsnack) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <4988621F.9090900@nut-n-but.net> References: <7db1d01b0901270721g4a8bca49jd6a83f08e82210d4@mail.gmail.com><979381F2-758D-44F5-9E13-121ADDA61233@myuw.net><7db1d01b 0901291728p64c83c29u4158f8b3f21bebb2@mail.gmail.com><49825A1F.4030206@nut-n-but.net><49825F65.4020605@nut-n-but.net><26DBD3489D FB4B12B801029837056812@RobinPC><0A779E5D7B1A452BB76FF08EA9F9F339@RobinPC><7db1d01b0901311040sef2d256i94cdbfd3f0c141af@mail.gmai l.com><7db1d01b0902021720q19d68ee0gc97f1716c0349bb8@mail.gmail.com><269329.86352.qm@web54109.mail.re2.yahoo.com><4987B777.90105 05@nut-n-but.net><630945.87157.qm@web54104.mail.re2.yahoo.com><49885A46.5070107@nut-n-but.net> <49885DEA.7000306@opus40.org> <4988621F.9090900@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <498865B2.5050100@medicine.nodak.edu> Bob Grumman wrote: > TheOldMole wrote: >> Bob -- I think we should get together and have a beer over this, >> because malt does more than Housman can, to justify Nature's ways to >> man, > You're right, Mole. We should invite the opposition, too. Enough > beers and we should be able to straighten everything out. After all, "Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think..." and "The troubles of our proud and angry dust Are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale." How should Housman's sobriety (or lack thereof?) when writing "Loveliest of trees..." affect our interpretation (if at all)? Richard W. Wilsnack rwilsnac@medicine.nodak.edu From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 10:44:38 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:55 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <930466.90778.qm@web54112.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <930466.90778.qm@web54112.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <49886666.3070107@nut-n-but.net> John Jeffrey wrote: > > Bob, > > I do agree that your reading is as reasonable as mine. And yes, the > poem talks about cherry trees/ in bloom/--but if you're going to be > that literal (not cherry trees, but cherry trees in bloom) then I > would think that you'd stumble with "About the woodlands I will go / > To see the cherry hung with snow." He doesn't say, "/looking/ as if > they are hung with snow." He specifically says "hung with snow." So > if you're following a literal reading, then you've got a bit of a snow > problem. But if you're going to say that the snow is metaphoric, or > symbolic, or even just an image for blooms, then that would open the > door for a less-literal reading of the rest of the poem. > Then what's "look at things in bloom" a metaphor for? Actually, I take it as a synecdoche for spring. It doesn't work, in my view, as any kind of trope for "the beauty of cherry trees," though the "blooms along the bough" could. I did see your argument before you presented it, but the opposite is true, too: if you take "snow" as literal, you have to take "look at things in bloom" literally by your reasoning, too, and you can't. Sorry, I can't get past "look at things in bloom." Trees with snow on them aren't in bloom. And I have given other reasons against the interpretation that I'll repeat when (or if) I get to my evaluation, which I've only just sketched, so far. > > And if the Mole is worth 20 of me, then he's... let me think... 20 > times... carry the 4... hmmm. Ah, who cares. Math is stupit. > > JohnJ > 'Cause you know I'm right! --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/446b6fdd/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Tue Feb 3 10:55:49 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902021750m186aec8kdc075fba4dfb35e0@mail.gmail.com> References: <6768ac830902021750m186aec8kdc075fba4dfb35e0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8CB542EFA7D8A1F-DF4-2C@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com> Mike, But do you think Houseman did in this case...that is,?allow us to?revisit a great common theme in a new way? I don't think he did. But I'd agree that my assertion was too narrow. It should have put it this way: Great poets see a new thing, an overlooked thing. Or they see an old thing in a?new way,?from a different/overloked angle/perspective. Finnegan Amid blossoming cherry I feel my years may be shortened. Let petals fall on me now. --A. E. Housman -----Original Message----- From: Michael Snider Sent: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 8:50 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:44 PM, wrote: (In the end, the?great failure?of the poem is that something conventially seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the population--cherry trees in? bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth experiencing over and over by the poet. The great poets tend to?see as beautiful the things that other's might overlook. A haiku poet would have done this poem in three lines, and saved us 9 more, pace the logic of?the second stanza.) Finnegan, sometmes the great poets point to things the rest of us may overlook ? and sometimes thy remind us of the great common themes of human life, in langauge that ,makes it new again. _______________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/0a68ff1c/attachment.html From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Tue Feb 3 11:05:53 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <49886666.3070107@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <661423.3545.qm@web54111.mail.re2.yahoo.com> I don't necessarily think there's a "right" on this one. ?You've got good points, and I can see your reasoning, and I'm fine with it. ?But I can also see mine. ?And there are things to point to in the poem that give each one the lie. Many poems are like this. ?Trying to point to the "real meaning" is sort of like pointing at a cloud and saying, "Look, that one looks like a dog." ?To which someone else says, "No, no, that's a barcalounger." ?And a passerby says, "What the hell are you two talking about?" Being a non-drinker, can I get a Diet Coke, or will that embarrass the rest of you? JohnJ --- On Tue, 2/3/09, Bob Grumman wrote: From: Bob Grumman Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem To: jjeffreymail@yahoo.com, "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views" Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 10:44 AM John Jeffrey wrote: Bob, I do agree that your reading is as reasonable as mine.? And yes, the poem talks about cherry trees in bloom--but if you're going to be that literal (not cherry trees, but cherry trees in bloom) then I would think that you'd stumble with "About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow." ?He doesn't say, "looking as if they are hung with snow." ?He specifically says "hung with snow." ?So if you're following a literal reading, then you've got a bit of a snow problem. ?But if you're going to say that the snow is metaphoric, or symbolic, or even just an image for blooms, then that would open the door for a less-literal reading of the rest of the poem. Then what's "look at things in bloom" a metaphor for?? Actually, I take it as a synecdoche for spring.? It doesn't work, in my view, as any kind of trope for "the beauty of cherry trees," though the "blooms along the bough" could. I did see your argument before you presented it, but the opposite is true, too: if you take "snow" as literal, you have to take "look at things in bloom" literally by your reasoning, too, and you can't.? Sorry, I can't get past "look at things in bloom."? Trees with snow on them aren't in bloom.? And I have given other reasons against the interpretation that I'll repeat when (or if) I get to my evaluation, which I've only just sketched, so far. And if the Mole is worth 20 of me, then he's... ?let me think... ?20 times... carry the 4... ?hmmm. ? ?Ah, who cares. ?Math is stupit. JohnJ 'Cause you know I'm right! --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/cf5c4ab2/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Tue Feb 3 11:19:48 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <930466.90778.qm@web54112.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <930466.90778.qm@web54112.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <49886EA4.8010102@opus40.org> Take from twenty moles a score, That leaves -- come to think of it -- not much more. John Jeffrey wrote: > > Bob, > > I do agree that your reading is as reasonable as mine. And yes, the > poem talks about cherry trees/ in bloom/--but if you're going to be > that literal (not cherry trees, but cherry trees in bloom) then I > would think that you'd stumble with "About the woodlands I will go / > To see the cherry hung with snow." He doesn't say, "/looking/ as if > they are hung with snow." He specifically says "hung with snow." So > if you're following a literal reading, then you've got a bit of a snow > problem. But if you're going to say that the snow is metaphoric, or > symbolic, or even just an image for blooms, then that would open the > door for a less-literal reading of the rest of the poem. > > And if the Mole is worth 20 of me, then he's... let me think... 20 > times... carry the 4... hmmm. Ah, who cares. Math is stupit. > > JohnJ > > > > --- On *Tue, 2/3/09, Bob Grumman //* wrote: > > From: Bob Grumman > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" > > Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 9:52 AM > > John Jeffrey wrote: >> Right: he has little time to look at things in bloom; therefore >> he must go out even when they're not in bloom and see the beauty >> of them when they are hung with snow. Just the way I've read it >> for my two score years and ten. >> >> JohnJ >> > Sorry, John, but you seem to me to be arguing that Housman is saying: > > And since to look at things in bloom > Fifty springs are little room, > About the woodlands I will go > > To do something other than look at cherry trees in bloom. > > If he'd been talking about the beauty of cherry trees, that would > make more sense, but he hasn't been: he's been talking about the > beauty of cherry trees/ in bloom/ (and, implicitly, about the > beauty of spring). > > Do you not agree that my reading is at least as reasonable as > yours? I've seen it that way for probably close to 50 years, but > that's irrelevant; I have definitely been mistaken about some > poems for longer than that. > > Note to Judy: The Mole is on my side, and he's worth twenty Johns > and 19.5 Michaels, so phooey on you. I would add that if you only > can't appreciate a poem whose most overt message is "boring," you > won't be able to appreciate many of the best poems in the > language. It's not a poem's message that counts, but how the poem > expresses it. > > --Hohenprofessor Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From jforjames at aol.com Tue Feb 3 11:23:59 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <498796B8.9020801@nut-n-but.net> References: <200901311700.n0VH040N017827@wiz.cath.vt.edu><6C22E8DA-CCB4-48CF-B3B0-C91388477DA3@verizon.net><8CB53AE0D7D0ED4-F10-193F@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com><8CB53AFBE9C74E2-F10-1A07@webmail-dg02.sysops.aol.com> <498796B8.9020801@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <8CB5432F403BA51-DF4-425@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com> Bob, by mental math, the reader should get to 50 by the first two lines of the second stanza. Then he does it again for us to get to 50 in the third and fourth lines of the same stanza. And then in the final stanza he gives us 50 years again. So that's thrice! (once implicit, twice explicit), three references to what 'may' be 50 more years for the speaker on earth. And it's all?only suppostional, because none of knows the length of our time on earth. Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Bob Grumman Sent: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 7:58 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman > (The second stanza may be a classic example of filling things out for > sake of rime scheme. The information is all given in first two > lines, but then is restated by reversing the mental math. It begins to > sound a bit like one of those math word problems you were tested with > in grade school: "If one train traveling west left Cleveland at 10 > o'clock, traveling 100 miles per hour, and twenty minutes later > another train left Chicago traveling east...)? Haw, James, I consider the second stanza to be what makes this poem great. Pretty much for the reasons you find it poor, although I don't think it fills things out for the sake of the rhyme scheme. The first two lines tell us the speaker is 20. It doesn't tell us that leaves him 50 more. We can do the arithmetic, yes, but the poet is directing us from the age of the poet to how many years he has left. He's making that the subject.? ? --Bob? ? _______________________________________________? New-Poetry mailing list? New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu? http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/a2b981c6/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 11:35:56 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] on the down low In-Reply-To: <648208b60902030729y172e49b9x81dc1d1081d5a413@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB53A3B314CBFF-1184-324@webmail-dx01.sysops.aol.com> <648208b60902030729y172e49b9x81dc1d1081d5a413@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4988726C.1060503@nut-n-but.net> Nice to see this blog. There seems to be a wide range of stuff there. Some does seem too little verbal to count as poetry, for me. But some of them are quite verbal. Anyway, I bookmarked the site. Lots of names new to me. --Bob From grahamd at ripon.edu Tue Feb 3 11:37:31 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Sounding Bunting In-Reply-To: <215273.47209.qm@web45608.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 2/3/09 9:19 AM, "David Baratier" wrote: > > Go back to mapping of poems. > The key to Bunting is sound spoken aloud. > > > Be well > > David Baratier, Editor =================================== Good point. I'd say that precisely here is the link with Pound, though. For all their fabled "difficulty" of surface & allusiveness, both Bunting and Pound are wonderful when read aloud. At their best. Four white heifers with sprawling hooves trundle the waggon. Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway. The chisel point of the goad, blue and white, glitters ahead, a flame to follow lance-high in a man?s hand who does not shave. His linen trousers like him want washing. You can see his baked skin through his shirt. He has no shoes and his hat has a hole in it. ?Hu ! vaca ! Hu ! vaca !? he says staccato without raising his voice; ?Adios caballero? legato but in the same tone. --Basil Bunting. fr. *Odes* 30: "The Or0tava Road." For what it's worth, I like Bunting much much more than Pound, myself. ==================================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/ Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ==================================================== From mandolin at mikesnider.org Tue Feb 3 11:51:17 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <8CB542EFA7D8A1F-DF4-2C@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com> References: <6768ac830902021750m186aec8kdc075fba4dfb35e0@mail.gmail.com> <8CB542EFA7D8A1F-DF4-2C@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <6768ac830902030851p12bd103cr5e9a87cb9ae6f950@mail.gmail.com> Finnegan, I was too narrow as well. Just reminding us of some deep part of our nature and our relation to the rest of the world, not necessarily in a new way, but just returning it vividly to our minds, may be a lesser thing than presenting "an old thing in a new way, from a different/overloked angle/perspective," but it's no small beer, much less failure. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 10:55 AM, wrote: > Mike, > But do you think Houseman did in this case...that is, allow us to revisit a > great common theme in a new way? > I don't think he did. But I'd agree that my assertion was too narrow. It > should have put it this way: > Great poets see a new thing, an overlooked thing. Or they see an old thing > in a new way, from a different/overloked angle/perspective. > Finnegan > > Amid blossoming cherry > I feel my years may be shortened. > Let petals fall on me now. > --A. E. Housman > > -----Original Message----- > From: Michael Snider > Sent: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 8:50 pm > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman > > On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:44 PM, wrote: > >> (In the end, the great failure of the poem is that something >> conventially seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the population--cherry >> trees in >> bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth experiencing over and over by the >> poet. The great poets tend to see as beautiful the things that other's might >> overlook. A haiku poet would have done this poem in three lines, and saved >> us209 more, pace the logic of the second stanza.) >> > > Finnegan, sometmes the great poets point to things the rest of us may > overlook ? and sometimes thy remind us of the great common themes of human > life, in langauge that ,makes it new again. > > _______________________________________________ > > > ------------------------------ > Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? *Find > out now! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/7fcae723/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 11:51:56 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <8CB542EFA7D8A1F-DF4-2C@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com> References: <6768ac830902021750m186aec8kdc075fba4dfb35e0@mail.gmail.com> <8CB542EFA7D8A1F-DF4-2C@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902030851q4e94ba4co37d992902da1090b@mail.gmail.com> Don't the petals resound of much Chinese bird/flower paintings started way down the dynasties. Isn't the beauty of the entire poem right in those petals? On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 4:55 PM, wrote: > Mike, > But do you think Houseman did in this case...that is, allow us to revisit a > great common theme in a new way? > I don't think he did. But I'd agree that my assertion was too narrow. It > should have put it this way: > Great poets see a new thing, an overlooked thing. Or they see an old thing > in a new way, from a different/overloked angle/perspective. > Finnegan > > Amid blossoming cherry > I feel my years may be shortened. > Let petals fall on me now. > --A. E. Housman > > -----Original Message----- > From: Michael Snider > Sent: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 8:50 pm > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman > > On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:44 PM, wrote: > >> (In the end, the great failure of the poem is that something >> conventially seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the population--cherry >> trees in >> bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth experiencing over and over by the >> poet. The great poets tend to see as beautiful the things that other's might >> overlook. A haiku poet would have done this poem in three lines, and saved >> us209 more, pace the logic of the second stanza.) >> > > Finnegan, sometmes the great poets point to things the rest of us may > overlook ? and sometimes thy remind us of the great common themes of human > life, in langauge that ,makes it new again. > > _______________________________________________ > > > ------------------------------ > Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? *Find > out now! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/e6d23d85/attachment.html From grahamd at ripon.edu Tue Feb 3 12:01:32 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bunting's advice Message-ID: Bunting's advice to young poets I SUGGEST 1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound. 2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus. 3. Use spoken words and syntax. 4. Fear adjective; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive. 5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape Put your poem away till you forget it, then: 6. Cut out every word you dare. 7. Do it again a week later, and again. Never explain - your reader is as smart as you. -- Source: Basil Bunting Poetry Centre http://www.dur.ac.uk/basil-bunting-poetry.centre/poems.quotes/quotes/ ==================================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/ Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ==================================================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/195bb257/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 12:07:00 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902030851q4e94ba4co37d992902da1090b@mail.gmail.com> References: <6768ac830902021750m186aec8kdc075fba4dfb35e0@mail.gmail.com><8CB542EFA7D8A1F-DF4-2C@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com> <4b65c2d70902030851q4e94ba4co37d992902da1090b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <498879B4.3080700@nut-n-but.net> Anny Ballardini wrote: > Don't the petals resound of much Chinese bird/flower paintings started > way down the dynasties. Isn't the beauty of the entire poem right in > those petals? I think so. Lots of cherry blossoms out of Japan, too. A main subject of haiku. --Bob From barry.spacks at verizon.net Tue Feb 3 12:55:51 2009 From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (Barry Spacks) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Reader more clever than poem? In-Reply-To: <200902031402.n13E2j0N002975@wiz.cath.vt.edu> References: <200902031402.n13E2j0N002975@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <9FAA8D9A-A546-47F2-8AF5-EF3FA61206B0@verizon.net> John J. wrote: >>> he must go out even when they're not in bloom >>> and see the beauty of them when they are >>> hung with snow. We just ignore, then, the setting of the poem's season: "Wearing white for EASTERTIDE"? Or we could hold on to the improved, more unusual version by reading that line as a yearning on the trees' part for resurrection by mocking up the Easter season via its snowblooms. I think Housman posits Spring as the poem's setting (wielding Ocham's razor) while we re-write in order to have blossom-like snow on the boughs strikingly at the last. For such a reading, we must think: 'wearing white AS IF THE SEASON WERE SPRING.' A more complex poem, certainly. Does it matter if it's not the poem Housman wrote? (honest question). gadflyingly, Barry From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 12:56:45 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902030851p12bd103cr5e9a87cb9ae6f950@mail.gmail.com> References: <6768ac830902021750m186aec8kdc075fba4dfb35e0@mail.gmail.com><8CB542EFA7D8A1F-DF4-2C@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com> <6768ac830902030851p12bd103cr5e9a87cb9ae6f950@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4988855D.5080306@nut-n-but.net> Michael Snider wrote: > Finnegan, I was too narrow as well. Just reminding us of some deep > part of our nature and our relation to the rest of the world, not > necessarily in a new way, but just returning it vividly to our minds, > may be a lesser thing than presenting "an old thing in a new way, from > a different/overloked angle/perspective," but it's no small beer, much > less failure. I don't believe you can make something in poetry vivid without presenting it in some new way, however small. As I hope to argue if you guys don't stop distracting me(!), the Housman does this, in my view, and not in a small new way but in more than one new way, and possibly in at least one unsmall new way. --Bob From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 13:28:25 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bunting's advice In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <731bb17a0902031028r6a9f666emdb42ecb1c47eaa28@mail.gmail.com> David, Do you know the source on this? The website you provide doesn't list one. Thanks for posting this list. Best, Jeff On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:01 PM, David Graham wrote: > Bunting's advice to young poets > > I SUGGEST > 1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound. > 2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose > impetus. > 3. Use spoken words and syntax. > 4. Fear adjective; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive. > 5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape > > Put your poem away till you forget it, then: > 6. Cut out every word you dare. > 7. Do it again a week later, and again. > > Never explain - your reader is as smart as you. > -- > Source: Basil Bunting Poetry Centre > http://www.dur.ac.uk/basil-bunting-poetry.centre/poems.quotes/quotes/ > > > > ==================================================== > David Graham > grahamd@ripon.edu > Home Page: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/ > > Poetry Library: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html > ==================================================== > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Blog: http://museoffireblog.blogspot.com Obama Myths: http://www.matthew25.org/paf/index.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/300d5080/attachment.html From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Tue Feb 3 13:43:17 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:56 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? In-Reply-To: <9FAA8D9A-A546-47F2-8AF5-EF3FA61206B0@verizon.net> Message-ID: <141249.95939.qm@web54106.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Again, though, is the problem of taking some lines/words as completely literal--"bloom" and "Eastertide"--and then not addressing "snow". Of course, it could be an early Easter, and therefore early in spring, and maybe the cherry trees actually are hung with snow. ?Maybe they've bloomed and then it snowed, like Hal's DC trees.? Or, since Housman was a Brit, maybe he didn't like snow and meant it to mean "that bloomin' snow." Still, I agree that the poem's current season is spring, and the the cherry trees are currently 9in the poem) hung with bloom--"now" as Housman says. ?My point is that the last line reads "About the woodlands I WILL go / To see the cherry hung with snow." ?That simple auxiliary will throws the sentence into the future. ?He could mean that he will go about the woodlands just after writing the poem (even though in the "now" of the poem the trees are NOT hung with snow, which makes the "hung with snow" line seem odd) or that he will also go in winter when the trees actually are hung with snow. Now, really, back to work... ?I mean it this time. JohnJ --- On Tue, 2/3/09, Barry Spacks wrote: From: Barry Spacks Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Reader more clever than poem? To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 12:55 PM John J. wrote: >>> he must go out even when they're not in bloom >>> and see the beauty of them when they are >>> hung with snow. We just ignore, then, the setting of the poem's season: "Wearing white for EASTERTIDE"? Or we could hold on to the improved, more unusual version by reading that line as a yearning on the trees' part for resurrection by mocking up the Easter season via its snowblooms. I think Housman posits Spring as the poem's setting (wielding Ocham's razor) while we re-write in order to have blossom-like snow on the boughs strikingly at the last. For such a reading, we must think: 'wearing white AS IF THE SEASON WERE SPRING.' A more complex poem, certainly. Does it matter if it's not the poem Housman wrote? (honest question). gadflyingly, Barry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/7d2b22d9/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Tue Feb 3 14:02:48 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem In-Reply-To: <661423.3545.qm@web54111.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <49886666.3070107@nut-n-but.net> <661423.3545.qm@web54111.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902031102u2b5fac10pbc33aa75959152c0@mail.gmail.com> Well, doubtless I'll be embarrassed by your drinking Diet anything. Judy 2009/2/3 John Jeffrey > I don't necessarily think there's a "right" on this one. You've got good > points, and I can see your reasoning, and I'm fine with it. But I can also > see mine. And there are things to point to in the poem that give each one > the lie. > > Many poems are like this. Trying to point to the "real meaning" is sort of > like pointing at a cloud and saying, "Look, that one looks like a dog." To > which someone else says, "No, no, that's a barcalounger." And a passerby > says, "What the hell are you two talking about?" > > Being a non-drinker, can I get a Diet Coke, or will that embarrass the rest > of you? > > > JohnJ > > > --- On *Tue, 2/3/09, Bob Grumman * wrote: > > From: Bob Grumman > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] For the WEPD experiment: Houseman's Poem > To: jjeffreymail@yahoo.com, "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views" < > new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu> > Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 10:44 AM > > > John Jeffrey wrote: > > Bob, > > I do agree that your reading is as reasonable as mine. And yes, the poem > talks about cherry trees* in bloom*--but if you're going to be that > literal (not cherry trees, but cherry trees in bloom) then I would think > that you'd stumble with "About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry > hung with snow." He doesn't say, "*looking* as if they are hung with > snow." He specifically says "hung with snow." So if you're following a > literal reading, then you've got a bit of a snow problem. But if you're > going to say that the snow is metaphoric, or symbolic, or even just an image > for blooms, then that would open the door for a less-literal reading of the > rest of the poem. > > > Then what's "look at things in bloom" a metaphor for? Actually, I take it > as a synecdoche for spring. It doesn't work, in my view, as any kind of > trope for "the beauty of cherry trees," though the "blooms along the bough" > could. > > I did see your argument before you presented it, but the opposite is true, > too: if you take "snow" as literal, you have to take "look at things in > bloom" literally by your reasoning, too, and you can't. Sorry, I can't get > past "look at things in bloom." Trees with snow on them aren't in bloom. > And I have given other reasons against the interpretation that I'll repeat > when (or if) I get to my evaluation, which I've only just sketched, so far. > > And if the Mole is worth 20 of me, then he's... let me think... 20 > times... carry the 4... hmmm. Ah, who cares. Math is stupit. > > JohnJ > > 'Cause you know I'm right! > > --Bob > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/bba91d4e/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Tue Feb 3 14:36:55 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <4988855D.5080306@nut-n-but.net> References: <6768ac830902021750m186aec8kdc075fba4dfb35e0@mail.gmail.com> <8CB542EFA7D8A1F-DF4-2C@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com> <6768ac830902030851p12bd103cr5e9a87cb9ae6f950@mail.gmail.com> <4988855D.5080306@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <6768ac830902031136p61ca31b3j793fe0130d93d79e@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Michael Snider wrote: > >> Finnegan, I was too narrow as well. Just reminding us of some deep part of >> our nature and our relation to the rest of the world, not necessarily in a >> new way, but just returning it vividly to our minds, may be a lesser thing >> than presenting "an old thing in a new way, from a different/overloked >> angle/perspective," but it's no small beer, much less failure. >> > I don't believe you can make something in poetry vivid without presenting > it in some new way, however small. As I hope to argue if you guys don't > stop distracting me(!), the Housman does this, in my view, and not in a > small new way but in more than one new way, and possibly in at least one > unsmall new way. > > --Bob > > What do you mean by new? Seems to me saying something in a memorable and > beautiful way is new enough ? unless you've plagiarized! > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/0f91eb6d/attachment.html From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 15:06:46 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Site? Message-ID: <731bb17a0902031206w528c2d30ma8ac30433dc74f5e@mail.gmail.com> A few weeks (months?) ago, I was looking for a copy of Kenner's *A Homemade World*, and one of you NewPo cats posted a fantastic link to a site that search online bookstore: everything from Abebooks to Powell's and beyond, if I remember correctly. Does anyone remember the site I was talking about? Thanks, Jeff Newberry -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/35c57c5d/attachment.html From david.weinstock at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 15:10:05 2009 From: david.weinstock at gmail.com (David Weinstock) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Site? In-Reply-To: <731bb17a0902031206w528c2d30ma8ac30433dc74f5e@mail.gmail.com> References: <731bb17a0902031206w528c2d30ma8ac30433dc74f5e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <437b1e3a0902031210jf2c7fd8o41a865bef0f0e552@mail.gmail.com> abebooks.com represents hundreds of used/rare booksellers, try that. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Jeff Newberry wrote: > A few weeks (months?) ago, I was looking for a copy of Kenner's *A > Homemade World*, and one of you NewPo cats posted a fantastic link to a > site that search online bookstore: everything from Abebooks to Powell's and > beyond, if I remember correctly. > > Does anyone remember the site I was talking about? > > Thanks, > Jeff Newberry > > -- > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- .......................................................... DAVID WEINSTOCK 240 Woodland Park, Middlebury, VT 05753 Home: 802-388-6939 Cell: 802-989-4314 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/7c4d5f59/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 15:18:54 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Site? In-Reply-To: <437b1e3a0902031210jf2c7fd8o41a865bef0f0e552@mail.gmail.com> References: <731bb17a0902031206w528c2d30ma8ac30433dc74f5e@mail.gmail.com> <437b1e3a0902031210jf2c7fd8o41a865bef0f0e552@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902031218g16eaf78ao17084d0719dc9fe@mail.gmail.com> This is a good link but not the one Jeff mentions, I remember someone sent it over but I do not have it. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:10 PM, David Weinstock wrote: > abebooks.com represents hundreds of used/rare booksellers, try that. > > > > > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Jeff Newberry wrote: > >> A few weeks (months?) ago, I was looking for a copy of Kenner's *A >> Homemade World*, and one of you NewPo cats posted a fantastic link to a >> site that search online bookstore: everything from Abebooks to Powell's and >> beyond, if I remember correctly. >> >> Does anyone remember the site I was talking about? >> >> Thanks, >> Jeff Newberry >> >> -- >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > > -- > .......................................................... > > DAVID WEINSTOCK > 240 Woodland Park, Middlebury, VT 05753 > > Home: 802-388-6939 > Cell: 802-989-4314 > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/8392d142/attachment.html From wwmorgan at ilstu.edu Tue Feb 3 15:21:20 2009 From: wwmorgan at ilstu.edu (Bill Morgan) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Site? In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902031218g16eaf78ao17084d0719dc9fe@mail.gmail.com> References: <731bb17a0902031206w528c2d30ma8ac30433dc74f5e@mail.gmail.com> <437b1e3a0902031210jf2c7fd8o41a865bef0f0e552@mail.gmail.com> <4b65c2d70902031218g16eaf78ao17084d0719dc9fe@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <004a01c9863c$fe576570$fb063050$@edu> I think Jeff and Anny may be thinking of www.bookfinder.com Bill Morgan From: new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto:new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Anny Ballardini Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 2:19 PM To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, Views Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Book Site? This is a good link but not the one Jeff mentions, I remember someone sent it over but I do not have it. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:10 PM, David Weinstock wrote: abebooks.com represents hundreds of used/rare booksellers, try that. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Jeff Newberry wrote: A few weeks (months?) ago, I was looking for a copy of Kenner's A Homemade World, and one of you NewPo cats posted a fantastic link to a site that search online bookstore: everything from Abebooks to Powell's and beyond, if I remember correctly. Does anyone remember the site I was talking about? Thanks, Jeff Newberry -- _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -- .......................................................... DAVID WEINSTOCK 240 Woodland Park, Middlebury, VT 05753 Home: 802-388-6939 Cell: 802-989-4314 _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/05f48fbf/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 15:26:21 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Site? In-Reply-To: <004a01c9863c$fe576570$fb063050$@edu> References: <731bb17a0902031206w528c2d30ma8ac30433dc74f5e@mail.gmail.com> <437b1e3a0902031210jf2c7fd8o41a865bef0f0e552@mail.gmail.com> <4b65c2d70902031218g16eaf78ao17084d0719dc9fe@mail.gmail.com> <004a01c9863c$fe576570$fb063050$@edu> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902031226n295ea0b8h13f7c7c4f196862b@mail.gmail.com> Yes, ! I put it on my blog, we have to remember: find a book, bookfinder... that easy... thanks. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:21 PM, Bill Morgan wrote: > I think Jeff and Anny may be thinking of www.bookfinder.com > > > > Bill Morgan > > > > *From:* new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto: > new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu] *On Behalf Of *Anny Ballardini > *Sent:* Tuesday, February 03, 2009 2:19 PM > *To:* NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, Views > *Subject:* Re: [New-Poetry] Book Site? > > > > This is a good link but not the one Jeff mentions, I remember someone sent > it over but I do not have it. > > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:10 PM, David Weinstock > wrote: > > abebooks.com represents hundreds of used/rare booksellers, try that. > > > > > > > > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Jeff Newberry > wrote: > > A few weeks (months?) ago, I was looking for a copy of Kenner's *A > Homemade World*, and one of you NewPo cats posted a fantastic link to a > site that search online bookstore: everything from Abebooks to Powell's and > beyond, if I remember correctly. > > Does anyone remember the site I was talking about? > > Thanks, > Jeff Newberry > > -- > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > -- > .......................................................... > > DAVID WEINSTOCK > 240 Woodland Park, Middlebury, VT 05753 > > Home: 802-388-6939 > Cell: 802-989-4314 > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > -- > Anny Ballardini > http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome > http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html > I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing > star! > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/7aa07a8c/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Tue Feb 3 16:10:58 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? In-Reply-To: <141249.95939.qm@web54106.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <9FAA8D9A-A546-47F2-8AF5-EF3FA61206B0@verizon.net> <141249.95939.qm@web54106.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6768ac830902031310i5fc84cbcq19ce53b9379aa493@mail.gmail.com> Folks, I do believe it's metaphorical snow. The most popular variety of flowering cherry has a nearly pure white blossom and blooms only for a week or so, then drops its petals so quickly it often seems like snowfall. They're a symbol in Japan for transience and mortality, among other things, and Housman would surely have known that, given the craze for Japanese culture near the turn of the last century. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:43 PM, John Jeffrey wrote: > Again, though, is the problem of taking some lines/words as completely > literal--"bloom" and "Eastertide"--and then not addressing "snow". > > Of course, it could be an early Easter, and therefore early in spring, and > maybe the cherry trees actually are hung with snow. Maybe they've bloomed > and then it snowed, like Hal's DC trees. Or, since Housman was a Brit, > maybe he didn't like snow and meant it to mean "that bloomin' snow." > > Still, I agree that the poem's current season is spring, and the the cherry > trees are currently 9in the poem) hung with bloom--"now" as Housman says. > My point is that the last line reads "About the woodlands I WILL go / To > see the cherry hung with snow." That simple auxiliary *will* throws the > sentence into the future. He could mean that he will go about the woodlands > just after writing the poem (even though in the "now" of the poem the trees > are NOT hung with snow, which makes the "hung with snow" line seem odd) or > that he will also go in winter when the trees actually are hung with snow. > > Now, really, back to work... I mean it this time. > > JohnJ > > > > --- On *Tue, 2/3/09, Barry Spacks * wrote: > > From: Barry Spacks > Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Reader more clever than poem? > To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 12:55 PM > > > John J. wrote: > > >>> he must go out even when they're not in bloom > >>> and see the beauty of them when they are > >>> hung with snow. > > We just ignore, then, the setting of the poem's season: > "Wearing white for EASTERTIDE"? > > Or we could hold on to the improved, more > unusual version by reading that line as > a yearning on the trees' part for resurrection > by mocking up the Easter season via its snowblooms. > > I think Housman posits Spring as the poem's setting > (wielding Ocham's razor) while we re-write in order to have > blossom-like snow on the boughs strikingly at the last. > > For such a reading, we must think: 'wearing white > AS IF THE SEASON WERE SPRING.' > > A more complex poem, certainly. Does it matter if > it's not the poem Housman wrote? (honest question). > > gadflyingly, > > Barry > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing listNew-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.eduhttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/ea0220f3/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 16:13:03 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902031136p61ca31b3j793fe0130d93d79e@mail.gmail.com> References: <6768ac830902021750m186aec8kdc075fba4dfb35e0@mail.gmail.com><8CB542EFA7D8A1F-DF4-2C@WEBMAIL-MY40.sysops.aol.com><6768 ac830902030851p12bd103cr5e9a87cb9ae6f950@mail.gmail.com><4988855D.5080306@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902031136p61ca31b3j793fe0130d93d79e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4988B35F.8040703@nut-n-but.net> Michael Snider wrote: > > > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Bob Grumman > wrote: > > Michael Snider wrote: > > Finnegan, I was too narrow as well. Just reminding us of some > deep part of our nature and our relation to the rest of the > world, not necessarily in a new way, but just returning it > vividly to our minds, may be a lesser thing than presenting > "an old thing in a new way, from a different/overloked > angle/perspective," but it's no small beer, much less failure. > > I don't believe you can make something in poetry vivid without > presenting it in some new way, however small. As I hope to argue > if you guys don't stop distracting me(!), the Housman does this, > in my view, and not in a small new way but in more than one new > way, and possibly in at least one unsmall new way. > > --Bob > > What do you mean by new? Seems to me saying something in a > memorable and beautiful way is new enough ? unless you've > plagiarized! > I think I'm saying that in order to say something in a memorable and beautiful way, you have to say it in some new way--that can be as small as using some ordinary word in a just slightly different way. One possible newness of Housman's poem is its use of arithmetic, I think. Not that arithmetic hadn't been used before, but his use of it seems different from all others I'm familiar with. I'll elaborate in due course, I hope. I'm arguing a Very Minor Semantics point. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/4777f870/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Tue Feb 3 16:20:50 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Site? In-Reply-To: <731bb17a0902031206w528c2d30ma8ac30433dc74f5e@mail.gmail.com> References: <731bb17a0902031206w528c2d30ma8ac30433dc74f5e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8CB545C6C57CCCC-1D0-1067@webmail-me19.sysops.aol.com> I've had good luck with this site...it's searches several databases, like Alibris, abebooks, Powells, Biblio, etc. You have to click on the Search Used link... http://www.addall.com/ In fact yesterday I ordered I got The Prophets of Paris, for $8 plus shipping. Which will be coming to me from Night Heron Books in Laramie Wyoming. Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Newberry To: NewPoetry Sent: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 3:06 pm Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Site? A few weeks (months?) ago, I was looking for a copy of Kenner's A Homemade World, and one of you NewPo cats posted a fantastic link to a site that search online bookstore:? everything from Abebooks to Powell's and beyond, if I remember correctly. Does anyone remember the site I was talking about? Thanks, Jeff Newberry -- _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/ec47471c/attachment.html From reneea at verizon.net Tue Feb 3 16:21:22 2009 From: reneea at verizon.net (Renee Ashley) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Site? References: <731bb17a0902031206w528c2d30ma8ac30433dc74f5e@mail.gmail.com> <437b1e3a0902031210jf2c7fd8o41a865bef0f0e552@mail.gmail.com> <4b65c2d70902031218g16eaf78ao17084d0719dc9fe@mail.gmail.com> <004a01c9863c$fe576570$fb063050$@edu> <4b65c2d70902031226n295ea0b8h13f7c7c4f196862b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <003d01c98645$5da994f0$0201a8c0@Barnette> You could also try http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/ best, Renee Ashley -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/2cdcd845/attachment.html From barry.spacks at verizon.net Tue Feb 3 16:35:27 2009 From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (Barry Spacks) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:57 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> On Feb 3, 2009, at 9:00 AM, John J. wrote: > the trees are NOT hung with snow, which makes the "hung with snow" > line seem odd) goshes, John, not odd unless metaphor itself is always so. The cherry's blossoms LOOK like snow. To evoke the blooms with this particular metaphor lets the ubi sunt motif click in a bit: blooming is evanescent, gone in a twink like 70 years of life, so we're reminded of winter even in the glory of spring, adding even more urgency as to the carpe diem guiding idea of the piece. definitively, Barry > From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 17:08:32 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> Message-ID: <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> Quick question for anyone more knowledgeable than I about Housman's work: how metaphoric a poet is he? --Bob From jforjames at aol.com Tue Feb 3 17:21:35 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <8CB5464E88E0CB3-D68-2F4@webmail-me19.sysops.aol.com> Housman was a?well-built Victorian of about 3000 square feet, 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. No garage. Stayed away from the Painted Ladies. -----Original Message----- From: Bob Grumman Sent: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 5:08 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... Quick question for anyone more knowledgeable than I about Housman's work: how metaphoric a poet is he?? ? --Bob? ? _______________________________________________? New-Poetry mailing list? New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu? http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/4d787e8a/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Tue Feb 3 17:49:07 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <8CB5464E88E0CB3-D68-2F4@webmail-me19.sysops.aol.com> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> <8CB5464E88E0CB3-D68-2F4@webmail-me19.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902031449u271bc529qd43a000deac7de4e@mail.gmail.com> ;-) 2009/2/3 > Housman was a well-built Victorian of about 3000 square feet, 3 bedrooms > and 2 baths. No garage. Stayed away from the Painted Ladies. > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Bob Grumman > Sent: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 5:08 pm > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... > > Quick question for anyone more knowledgeable than I about Housman's work: > how metaphoric a poet is he? > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > ------------------------------ > Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? *Find > out now! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/82c43606/attachment.html From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Tue Feb 3 18:13:22 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: > Quick question for anyone more knowledgeable than I about Housman's work: > how metaphoric a poet is he? > > --Bob It's metaphors all the way down, Bob. Housman's Shropshire is an intensely *literary construct, melded together from scraps and echoes of Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Rubaiyat. (Would "Loveliest of trees ..." exist without Sonnet 18? -- Summer's lease hath all too short a date.) It's got nothing at all to do with any existing England, and everything to do with Housman's state of mind. He's profoundly derivative of better poems, and poets, as the comparison below suggests. Within his narrow range, he *is powerful, but finally his imaginative world is tightly resticted. The laureate of whinge. He attempts to justify this in "Terence, this is stupid stuff ...", but the justification itself simply enacts the complaint he's trying to address. The speaker of Poem VIII, "Farewell to barn and stack and tree ..." is the archetypical Housman figure, who has just returned from murdering someone (in this case his brother), and is uncertain whether to join the army, commit suicide, or be hanged for murder. Other than Mithradates, no one dies old in Housman -- in this Shropshire of the mind, growing old is a sign of failure: XIX: "To An Athlete Dying Young": The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. To-day, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad, to slip betimes away >From fields where glory does not stay, And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose. (To add to this catalogue, Housman has a very restricted and repetitive vocabulary, laced and loaded with semi-archaisms.) My favourite Housman poem, and the one through which I tend to read the rest of his work, is "Hughley Steeple": LXI HUGHLEY STEEPLE The vane on Hughley steeple Veers bright, a far-known sign, And there lie Hughley people, And there lie friends of mine. Tall in their midst the tower Divides the shade and sun, And the clock strikes the hour And tells the time to none. To south the headstones cluster, The sunny mounds lie thick; The dead are more in muster At Hughley than the quick. North, for a soon-told number, Chill graves the sexton delves, And steeple-shadowed slumber The slayers of themselves. To north, to south, lie parted, With Hughley tower above, The kind, the single-hearted, The lads I used to love. And, south or north, 'tis only A choice of friends one knows, And I shall ne'er be lonely Asleep with these or those. Incidentally, Project Gutenberg has copies of both _The Shropshire Lad_ and _Last Poems_, while all the poems can be found here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~martinh/poems/complete_housman.html Robin HOUSMAN AND SHAKESPEARE Poem XXXI WITH rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipt maiden And many a lightfoot lad. By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid; The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade. Song from _The Winter's Tale_ FEAR no more the heat o' the sun Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta'en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Fear no more the frown o' the great, Thou art past the tyrant's stroke; Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Tue Feb 3 18:25:09 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net><4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <5D7117D1C2A3447D8FA1DF0761D1F688@RobinPC> Oops, sorry -- _Pericles_, of course. Well, one Shakespearean Late Romance is very much like another .. (And there's an irony in that in the context of the play, it's sung over the body of the cross-dressed Fidele, who isn't actually dead. By her brothers, who at that point don't know they are her brothers. Weird!) R. > Song from _The Winter's Tale_ > > FEAR no more the heat o' the sun > Nor the furious winter's rages; From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Tue Feb 3 18:29:01 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <5D7117D1C2A3447D8FA1DF0761D1F688@RobinPC> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net><4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> <5D7117D1C2A3447D8FA1DF0761D1F688@RobinPC> Message-ID: > Oops, sorry -- _Pericles_, of course. > > Well, one Shakespearean Late Romance is very much like another .. I spoke there truer than I meant, and I'd like to pretend (though this is not the case) that the mistake or mistakes was or were deliberate. So one last time ... CYMBELINE From editor at eratiopostmodernpoetry.com Tue Feb 3 19:00:31 2009 From: editor at eratiopostmodernpoetry.com (=?iso-8859-1?Q?e=B7ratio?=) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Correspondance (a sketchbook) New Digital Art Eratio Editions Message-ID: <61531.74.73.224.204.1233705631.squirrel@webmail1.web.com> e? E?ratio Editions is happy to announce the publication of Correspondance (a sketchbook) by Joseph F. Keppler. Correspondance (a sketchbook) by Joseph F. Keppler. Digital art. ?What can I call this work? Neither painting nor critique yet informed by art, the following are sketches to me. Rather than executed on paper, they?re drawings designed using the pervasive computer. These graphics approach oeuvre subjectively, not as meticulous copies or art history illustrations, but as some poetic efforts. My laptop simply opens a new capacity for thinking about art and drawing it. As studies these are (a)musing tributes as well as appropriate(d) attributes.? ?Joseph F. Keppler, from the introduction. What the cognoscenti are saying about Correspondance (a sketchbook): ?Readability and meaning construction, as well as the relation between the visual and the literary, have been concerns of Joe?s for many years. In Correspondance we see Joe, who is also an astute critic on both literary and visual art, take an artist?s approach, a visual poet?s approach, a visual artist?s approach. Joe Keppler is very unusual in his deep engagement both with art history and the literary. He?s a poet, a visual poet, a sound poet, a sculptor of steel, a photographer, a painter, a polyartist. Not only in his practice but in his wide reading and viewing of contemporary and historical work. I don?t know anybody else as voracious as he is not only in his own artistic practice but in learning about art and philosophy. He is an incredibly learned man as well as an important poet and artist. He shows us what it now means to be literate.? ?Jim Andrews Vispo-Langu(im)age ?Correspondance is suffused with correspondence, bright exchanges between artist and subject, playful responses between form, light, color, and art history. Poet and sculptor, Joe Keppler brings both mediums to bear, poetry and sculpture, word and material, hand in hand. Keppler adds a third-dimension to the graceful dance (Joe the humble artist says, ?bump?) through his lifelong study of painting and sculpture: allusions to significant works, quotations of style, and adaptations that bring old works to new life. In this series of sketches, poet, artist, and art will wheel you across the dance floors of the page.? ?Crag Hill Poetry Scorecard http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/eratioeditions.html Also available from E?ratio Editions: #5. Six Comets Are Coming by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino. Volume I of the collected works including Go and Go Mirrored, with revised introductions, corrected text and restored original font. #4. The Logoclasody Manifesto. Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino on logoclasody, logoclastics, eidetics and pannarrativity. Addenda include the Crash Course in Logoclastics, Concrete to Eidetic (on visual poetry) and On Mathematical Poetry. #3. Waves by M?rton Kopp?ny. ?These works are minimalist by design, but should we paraphrase the thought channeled therein, the effect would be encyclopedic, ranging through philosophy, psychology, politics, and the human emotions.? #2. Mending My Black Sweater and other poems by Mary Ann Sullivan. Poems of making conscious, of acceptance and of self-remembering, and of personal responsibility. #1. Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino joins John M. Bennett In the Bennett Tree. Collaborative poems, images, an introduction and a full-length critical essay pay homage to American poet John M. Bennett. http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/eratioeditions.html E?ratio Editions, a series of elegantly produced, quick loading e-chaps, is reading for poetry, innovative narrative prose, critical and theoretical essays, and digital art. Please see the Contact page for further guidelines and where to send. Query editor with sample. taxis de pasa logos e? From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Tue Feb 3 19:09:46 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> Message-ID: <997098.69731.qm@web54110.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Sigh... This is the sort of email back&forth that exhausts me, all these qualifications on small points. Anyway, I have no problem with metaphor. I dated one back in the eighties--or thought I did. My point was part of a larger discussion: That if the rest of the poem is read in a solely literally way, then how would the snow be explained? To me, the snow is either a) the blooms look like snow (a fanciful description or an out-n-out metaphor) or b) the speaker is talking about winter, when the branches actually are hung with snow (which could still be read metaphorically). Food calls. I can smell it. And that's no metaphor. John J ________________________________ From: Barry Spacks To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 4:35:27 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... On Feb 3, 2009, at 9:00 AM, John J. wrote: > the trees are NOT hung with snow, which makes the "hung with snow" line seem odd) goshes, John, not odd unless metaphor itself is always so. The cherry's blossoms LOOK like snow. To evoke the blooms with this particular metaphor lets the ubi sunt motif click in a bit: blooming is evanescent, gone in a twink like 70 years of life, so we're reminded of winter even in the glory of spring, adding even more urgency as to the carpe diem guiding idea of the piece. definitively, Barry > _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/5abf0837/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Tue Feb 3 19:14:03 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <997098.69731.qm@web54110.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <997098.69731.qm@web54110.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6768ac830902031614i67f5eccya8424341be2e10b9@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 7:09 PM, John Jeffrey wrote: > > > To me, the snow is either a) the blooms look like snow (a fanciful > description or an out-n-out metaphor) or b) the speaker is talking about > winter, when the branches actually are hung with snow (which could still be > read metaphorically). > an out and out metaphor, and a pretty common one. It's not just that popular varieties of flowering cherry are virtually all white, but that they last a week or so at most (like other snow i spring, unless you ive in New Hampshire), and that when they fall they look like snow falling ? and not just a flurry. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/75b7198a/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Feb 3 19:15:02 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? Message-ID: In a message dated 2/3/2009 3:11:20 PM Central Standard Time, mandolin@mikesnider.org writes: > > Folks, I do believe it's metaphorical snow. The most popular variety of > flowering cherry has a nearly pure white blossom and blooms only for a week or > so, then drops its petals so quickly it often seems like snowfall. They're a > symbol in Japan for transience and mortality, among other things, and Housman > would surely have known that, given the craze for Japanese culture near the > turn of the last century. > > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:43 PM, John Jeffrey wrote: > >> Again, though, is the problem of taking some lines/words as completely >> literal--"bloom" and "Eastertide"--and then not addressing "snow". >> >> Of course, it could be an early Easter, and therefore early in spring, and >> maybe the cherry trees actually are hung with snow. Maybe they've bloomed >> and then it snowed, like Hal's DC trees. Or, since Housman was a Brit, maybe >> he didn't like snow and meant it to mean "that bloomin' snow." >> >> Still, I agree that the poem's current season is spring, and the the cherry >> trees are currently 9in the poem) hung with bloom--"now" as Housman says. >> My point is that the last line reads "About the woodlands I WILL go / To see >> the cherry hung with snow." That simple auxiliary willthrows the sentence >> into the future. He could mean that he will go about the woodlands just >> after writing the poem (even though in the "now" of the poem the trees are NOT >> hung with snow, which makes the "hung with snow" line seem odd) or that he >> will also go in winter when the trees actually are hung with snow. >> >> Now, really, back to work... I mean it this time. >> >> JohnJ >> >> >> >> >> > > I agree with Mike. Look at the tenses. Starts in the present and then shifts to future, both distant and near. The "snow" is a metaphor; it doesn't snow that much in England anyway, witness the recent news of London totally bogged down by 8". But it does bring a nice metaphoric note of mortality in at the end of the poem. He could have said something like "And through the woodlands I'll go round / To see the cherry fleeced and downed." But he didn't. The repetition of "woodland(s)" indicates that he'll keep on doing in the immediate future just what he's doing in the present, enjoying the cherry blossoms. Besides, a cherry tree covered with real snow would be indistinguishable from any other tree, wouldn't it? It's only the lovely blossoms that make it stand out from other shrubberies, after all. This has the past-present-future structure of many famous lyrics: Frost's "The Road Not Taken," for example. I did it; I'm thinking about it now; I'll resolve to do something in the future. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/1d01b889/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Feb 3 19:20:34 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... Message-ID: And he does repeat "springs" as well. Maybe a synecdoche (an easy one) but literally a reference to the cherry hung with blossoms at the appropriate time of year. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/20e52b04/attachment.html From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Tue Feb 3 19:26:41 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <997098.69731.qm@web54110.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <997098.69731.qm@web54110.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1751654B1FA64B7AA5FD1528EE1E8487@RobinPC> From: John Jeffrey: << My point was part of a larger discussion: That if the rest of the poem is read in a solely literally way, then how would the snow be explained? >> Well, the poem has, as early as the first stanza, the cherry tree as a metaphorical bride, "Wearing white for Eastertide." (There are other possibilities for the lady in white, but for various reasons, this is the one I'd go for.) So blossom-as-wedding-dress transmutes into the blossom as snow in the final stanza. As for "hung with bloom ... hung with snow ... ," if spring comes, can winter be far behind? For some reason, Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" springs, or falls, to mind. R. << To me, the snow is either a) the blooms look like snow (a fanciful description or an out-n-out metaphor) or b) the speaker is talking about winter, when the branches actually are hung with snow (which could still be read metaphorically). Food calls. I can smell it. And that's no metaphor. John J >> From: Barry Spacks To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 4:35:27 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... On Feb 3, 2009, at 9:00 AM, John J. wrote: > the trees are NOT hung with snow, which makes the "hung with snow" line > seem odd) goshes, John, not odd unless metaphor itself is always so. The cherry's blossoms LOOK like snow. To evoke the blooms with this particular metaphor lets the ubi sunt motif click in a bit: blooming is evanescent, gone in a twink like 70 years of life, so we're reminded of winter even in the glory of spring, adding even more urgency as to the carpe diem guiding idea of the piece. definitively, Barry > _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 19:37:55 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902031614i67f5eccya8424341be2e10b9@mail.gmail.com> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net><997098.69731.qm@web54 110.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <6768ac830902031614i67f5eccya8424341be2e10b9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4988E363.2080805@nut-n-but.net> I read/hear the poem working toward a climactic metaphor. Again I ask, is Housman one to use many metaphors in his poems? --Bob From mandolin at mikesnider.org Tue Feb 3 19:36:41 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <4988E363.2080805@nut-n-but.net> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <6768ac830902031614i67f5eccya8424341be2e10b9@mail.gmail.com> <4988E363.2080805@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <6768ac830902031636p5f6ed2b1yfd533a25c604cf2@mail.gmail.com> Yes. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > I read/hear the poem working toward a climactic metaphor. Again I ask, is > Housman one to use many metaphors in his poems? > > --Bob > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/5de9ca2e/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Tue Feb 3 19:57:12 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:58 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902031636p5f6ed2b1yfd533a25c604cf2@mail.gmail.com> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <6768ac830902031614i67f5eccya8424341be2e10b9@mail.gmail.com> <4988E363.2080805@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902031636p5f6ed2b1yfd533a25c604cf2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6768ac830902031657g5e3bbd39kcdf3d2fc37aacfcd@mail.gmail.com> All right that was too flippant. But I open the collected at random and here's the second of twostwo stanzas in number XX of Last Poems: Fall, winwinter, fall; for he, Prompt hand and headpiece clever, Has woven winter robe And made of earth and sea His overcoat for ever, And wears the turning globe. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Michael Snider wrote: > Yes. > > > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > >> I read/hear the poem working toward a climactic metaphor. Again I ask, is >> Housman one to use many metaphors in his poems? >> >> --Bob >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/974a2592/attachment.html From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Tue Feb 3 20:27:16 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? References: Message-ID: <639101.14866.qm@web54112.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Seeing Gwynn's name reminded me of a piece of paper I have tucked in a book... a poem I've always loved that ends this way: Glazed with ice, Greenness shatters, brittle as an ancient bone, And our own Stunned camellia stands, white petals shed below-- Snow on snow. ________________________________ From: "Rsgwynn1@cs.com" To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 7:15:02 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? In a message dated 2/3/2009 3:11:20 PM Central Standard Time, mandolin@mikesnider.org writes: Folks, I do believe it's metaphorical snow. The most popular variety of flowering cherry has a nearly pure white blossom and blooms only for a week or so, then drops its petals so quickly it often seems like snowfall. They're a symbol in Japan for transience and mortality, among other things, and Housman would surely have known that, given the craze for Japanese culture near the turn of the last century. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:43 PM, John Jeffrey wrote: Again, though, is the problem of taking some lines/words as completely literal--"bloom" and "Eastertide"--and then not addressing "snow". Of course, it could be an early Easter, and therefore early in spring, and maybe the cherry trees actually are hung with snow. Maybe they've bloomed and then it snowed, like Hal's DC trees. Or, since Housman was a Brit, maybe he didn't like snow and meant it to mean "that bloomin' snow." Still, I agree that the poem's current season is spring, and the the cherry trees are currently 9in the poem) hung with bloom--"now" as Housman says. My point is that the last line reads "About the woodlands I WILL go / To see the cherry hung with snow." That simple auxiliary willthrows the sentence into the future. He could mean that he will go about the woodlands just after writing the poem (even though in the "now" of the poem the trees are NOT hung with snow, which makes the "hung with snow" line seem odd) or that he will also go in winter when the trees actually are hung with snow. Now, really, back to work... I mean it this time. JohnJ I agree with Mike. Look at the tenses. Starts in the present and then shifts to future, both distant and near. The "snow" is a metaphor; it doesn't snow that much in England anyway, witness the recent news of London totally bogged down by 8". But it does bring a nice metaphoric note of mortality in at the end of the poem. He could have said something like "And through the woodlands I'll go round / To see the cherry fleeced and downed." But he didn't. The repetition of "woodland(s)" indicates that he'll keep on doing in the immediate future just what he's doing in the present, enjoying the cherry blossoms. Besides, a cherry tree covered with real snow would be indistinguishable from any other tree, wouldn't it? It's only the lovely blossoms that make it stand out from other shrubberies, after all. This has the past-present-future structure of many famous lyrics: Frost's "The Road Not Taken," for example. I did it; I'm thinking about it now; I'll resolve to do something in the future. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/ed90a18d/attachment.html From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Tue Feb 3 20:34:23 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? Message-ID: <147419.90313.qm@web54101.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Crap! I sent it before I finished.... Seeing Gwynn's name reminded me of a piece of paper I have tucked in a book... a poem I've always loved that ends this way: Glazed with ice, Greenness shatters, brittle as an ancient bone, And our own Stunned camellia stands, white petals shed below-- Snow on snow. It's one of Gywnn's poems, and since it's similar to Housman's, I say Sam is disqualified from commenting on the Housman. (Besides, he disagreed with my view. And since I really like Sam's work, I just can't have someone I admire disagreeing with me, so there you go. Disqualified! Sorry.) John ________________________________ From: "Rsgwynn1@cs.com" To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 7:15:02 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? In a message dated 2/3/2009 3:11:20 PM Central Standard Time, mandolin@mikesnider.org writes: Folks, I do believe it's metaphorical snow. The most popular variety of flowering cherry has a nearly pure white blossom and blooms only for a week or so, then drops its petals so quickly it often seems like snowfall. They're a symbol in Japan for transience and mortality, among other things, and Housman would surely have known that, given the craze for Japanese culture near the turn of the last century. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:43 PM, John Jeffrey wrote: Again, though, is the problem of taking some lines/words as completely literal--"bloom" and "Eastertide"--and then not addressing "snow". Of course, it could be an early Easter, and therefore early in spring, and maybe the cherry trees actually are hung with snow. Maybe they've bloomed and then it snowed, like Hal's DC trees. Or, since Housman was a Brit, maybe he didn't like snow and meant it to mean "that bloomin' snow." Still, I agree that the poem's current season is spring, and the the cherry trees are currently 9in the poem) hung with bloom--"now" as Housman says. My point is that the last line reads "About the woodlands I WILL go / To see the cherry hung with snow." That simple auxiliary willthrows the sentence into the future. He could mean that he will go about the woodlands just after writing the poem (even though in the "now" of the poem the trees are NOT hung with snow, which makes the "hung with snow" line seem odd) or that he will also go in winter when the trees actually are hung with snow. Now, really, back to work... I mean it this time. JohnJ I agree with Mike. Look at the tenses. Starts in the present and then shifts to future, both distant and near. The "snow" is a metaphor; it doesn't snow that much in England anyway, witness the recent news of London totally bogged down by 8". But it does bring a nice metaphoric note of mortality in at the end of the poem. He could have said something like "And through the woodlands I'll go round / To see the cherry fleeced and downed." But he didn't. The repetition of "woodland(s)" indicates that he'll keep on doing in the immediate future just what he's doing in the present, enjoying the cherry blossoms. Besides, a cherry tree covered with real snow would be indistinguishable from any other tree, wouldn't it? It's only the lovely blossoms that make it stand out from other shrubberies, after all. This has the past-present-future structure of many famous lyrics: Frost's "The Road Not Taken," for example. I did it; I'm thinking about it now; I'll resolve to do something in the future. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/aefccb71/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Tue Feb 3 20:36:37 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8CB548027F84B5D-1598-1E7C@MBLK-M33.sysops.aol.com> I believe that all the readings of the poem could be plotted and would resolve around a mean. Something like the Gaussian standard distribution. It's not that variant readings are wrong, but that when you plot enough readings (large?sample) they begin to stack up?around some kind 'peak reading'; which could be the 'right' or just the 'popular' response to the poem. Anyway, that is how literature gets built...with shared responses, each somewhat in error pointing to that?'perfect reading' (which is not attainable, except in theory). Literature is not built from thousands of wildly variant (idiosyncratic) readings skewed in all directions. Today I would say that there are blossoms and not real snow on that peak. Finnegan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/67b24f9a/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 3 21:28:10 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? In-Reply-To: <147419.90313.qm@web54101.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <147419.90313.qm@web54101.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4988FD3A.8090708@nut-n-but.net> John Jeffrey wrote: > Crap! I sent it before I finished.... > > > ** > Seeing Gwynn's name reminded me of a piece of paper I have tucked in a > book... a poem I've always loved that ends this way: > > Glazed with ice, > Greenness shatters, brittle as an ancient bone, > And our own > Stunned camellia stands, white petals shed below-- > Snow on snow. > > It's one of Gywnn's poems, and since it's similar to Housman's, I say > Sam is disqualified from commenting on the Housman. (Besides, he > disagreed with my view. And since I really like Sam's work, I just > can't have someone I admire disagreeing with me, so there you go. > Disqualified! Sorry.) > > John Hmm, since Mole and I also disagree with you, it means . . . --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/50351370/attachment.html From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Tue Feb 3 22:02:30 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? References: <147419.90313.qm@web54101.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <4988FD3A.8090708@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <484676.30050.qm@web54102.mail.re2.yahoo.com> ...it means I'm going to bed. ________________________________ From: Bob Grumman To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 9:28:10 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? John Jeffrey wrote: Crap! I sent it before I finished.... Seeing Gwynn's name reminded me of a piece of paper I have tucked in a book... a poem I've always loved that ends this way: Glazed with ice, Greenness shatters, brittle as an ancient bone, And our own Stunned camellia stands, white petals shed below-- Snow on snow. It's one of Gywnn's poems, and since it's similar to Housman's, I say Sam is disqualified from commenting on the Housman. (Besides, he disagreed with my view. And since I really like Sam's work, I just can't have someone I admire disagreeing with me, so there you go. Disqualified! Sorry.) John Hmm, since Mole and I also disagree with you, it means . . . --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/8036744c/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Feb 4 00:05:36 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? Message-ID: In a message dated 2/3/2009 7:27:41 PM Central Standard Time, jjeffreymail@yahoo.com writes: > > Seeing Gwynn's name reminded me of a piece of paper I have tucked in a > book... a poem I've always loved that ends this way: > > Glazed with ice, > Greenness shatters, brittle as an ancient bone, > And our own > Stunned camellia stands, white petals shed below-- > Snow on snow. > > > > How nice! Many thanks! We got four inches of snow down her in mid-December, first time in over 20 years. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/d5439a8a/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Feb 4 00:08:39 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reader more clever than poem? Message-ID: In a message dated 2/3/2009 7:34:41 PM Central Standard Time, jjeffreymail@yahoo.com writes: > > Crap! I sent it before I finished.... > > > > Seeing Gwynn's name reminded me of a piece of paper I have tucked in a > book... a poem I've always loved that ends this way: > > Glazed with ice, > Greenness shatters, brittle as an ancient bone, > And our own > Stunned camellia stands, white petals shed below-- > Snow on snow. > > It's one of Gywnn's poems, and since it's similar to Housman's, I say Sam is > disqualified from commenting on the Housman. (Besides, he disagreed with my > view. And since I really like Sam's work, I just can't have someone I > admire disagreeing with me, so there you go. Disqualified! Sorry.) > > John > > > > > > But, dammit, this was literal. It really did snow after the camellia started blooming (though that silly plant always started blooming in January). We've moved since, but I trust it continues blooming in all kinds of weather! It's not uncommon for azaleas to bloom down here and get nipped by a late frost. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/e979077f/attachment.html From GrahamD at ripon.edu Wed Feb 4 00:17:18 2009 From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bunting's advice In-Reply-To: <731bb17a0902031028r6a9f666emdb42ecb1c47eaa28@mail.gmail.com> References: <731bb17a0902031028r6a9f666emdb42ecb1c47eaa28@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1A33D87E-C4D1-496F-9DFC-698D5EC14932@ripon.edu> Wish I did, but no. The Bunting site did seem to be legit, anyway. So perhaps one could contact the archivist there? David Graham Grahamd@Ripon.edu On Feb 3, 2009, at 12:28 PM, "Jeff Newberry" wrote: > David, > > Do you know the source on this? The website you provide doesn't > list one. > > Thanks for posting this list. > > Best, > Jeff > > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:01 PM, David Graham > wrote: > Bunting's advice to young poets > > I SUGGEST > 1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound. > 2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to > lose impetus. > 3. Use spoken words and syntax. > 4. Fear adjective; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive. > 5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape > > Put your poem away till you forget it, then: > 6. Cut out every word you dare. > 7. Do it again a week later, and again. > > Never explain - your reader is as smart as you. > -- > Source: Basil Bunting Poetry Centre > http://www.dur.ac.uk/basil-bunting-poetry.centre/poems.quotes/quotes/ > > > > ==================================================== > David Graham > grahamd@ripon.edu > Home Page: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/ > > Poetry Library: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html > ==================================================== > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > -- > Blog: http://museoffireblog.blogspot.com > Obama Myths: http://www.matthew25.org/paf/index.htm > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090203/28abb4ef/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Wed Feb 4 11:00:06 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> I am curious to know if USAmericans on this list have heard or read the word that Robin uses below, "whinge". I hadn't heard it until fairly recently, and still have a tough time reasoning out examples of it. It's a lovely word, but I can't nail how a whinge is different from complaining or 'bitching' [a commonly used but not lovely word, I think]. I've been told that a 'whinge' is used for things about which nothing can be done, like bad weather. But apart from the weather example, I can't identify a whinge as different from complaining or 'bitching'. BTW, Robin's reference to "Terence" is for AEH's #62, the second to last poem, in _The Shropshire Lad_ [which can be found at Project Gutenberg]. Judy 2009/2/3 Robin Hamilton > > Within his narrow range, he *is powerful, but finally his imaginative world > is tightly resticted. The laureate of whinge. He attempts to justify this > in "Terence, this is stupid stuff ...", but the justification itself simply > enacts the complaint he's trying to address. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/5ec47165/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Wed Feb 4 11:09:39 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6768ac830902040809t22d89771w242e32b68c64e92c@mail.gmail.com> I've read it and even used it, Judy, but I'm not sure I've ever heard it from another's mouth. Come to think of it, I believe the summer I traveled with Fred Truner (1974) may have been where I got it. There's and explanation here ( http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/03/on-whinge-and-whine.html ) which matches my usage. It's not incompatible with what Robin says, I think ? Robin? On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Judy Prince wrote: > I am curious to know if USAmericans on this list have heard or read the > word that Robin uses below, "whinge". I hadn't heard it until fairly > recently, and still have a tough time reasoning out examples of it. It's a > lovely word, but I can't nail how a whinge is different from complaining or > 'bitching' [a commonly used but not lovely word, I think]. I've been told > that a 'whinge' is used for things about which nothing can be done, like bad > weather. But apart from the weather example, I can't identify a whinge as > different from complaining or 'bitching'. > BTW, Robin's reference to "Terence" is for AEH's #62, the second to last > poem, in _The Shropshire Lad_ [which can be found at Project Gutenberg]. > > Judy > > 2009/2/3 Robin Hamilton > > > > > >> >> Within his narrow range, he *is powerful, but finally his imaginative >> world is tightly resticted. The laureate of whinge. He attempts to justify >> this in "Terence, this is stupid stuff ...", but the justification itself >> simply enacts the complaint he's trying to address. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/c11cecb5/attachment.html From wwmorgan at ilstu.edu Wed Feb 4 11:16:33 2009 From: wwmorgan at ilstu.edu (Bill Morgan) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902040809t22d89771w242e32b68c64e92c@mail.gmail.com> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> <6768ac830902040809t22d89771w242e32b68c64e92c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <012701c986e3$f2d4a490$d87dedb0$@edu> It's a favorite word of several of my favorite UK friends (I'm from the US)-and it usually seems to assign a degree of self-pity and peevishness to the person who is said to be "whingeing." Bill Morgan From: new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto:new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Michael Snider Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 10:10 AM To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, Views Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... I've read it and even used it, Judy, but I'm not sure I've ever heard it from another's mouth. Come to think of it, I believe the summer I traveled with Fred Truner (1974) may have been where I got it. There's and explanation here ( http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/03/on-whinge-and-whine.html ) which matches my usage. It's not incompatible with what Robin says, I think - Robin? On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Judy Prince wrote: I am curious to know if USAmericans on this list have heard or read the word that Robin uses below, "whinge". I hadn't heard it until fairly recently, and still have a tough time reasoning out examples of it. It's a lovely word, but I can't nail how a whinge is different from complaining or 'bitching' [a commonly used but not lovely word, I think]. I've been told that a 'whinge' is used for things about which nothing can be done, like bad weather. But apart from the weather example, I can't identify a whinge as different from complaining or 'bitching'. BTW, Robin's reference to "Terence" is for AEH's #62, the second to last poem, in _The Shropshire Lad_ [which can be found at Project Gutenberg]. Judy 2009/2/3 Robin Hamilton Within his narrow range, he *is powerful, but finally his imaginative world is tightly resticted. The laureate of whinge. He attempts to justify this in "Terence, this is stupid stuff ...", but the justification itself simply enacts the complaint he's trying to address. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/8dafcd87/attachment.html From susan.holahan at sbcglobal.net Wed Feb 4 11:19:39 2009 From: susan.holahan at sbcglobal.net (Susan Holahan) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Isn't "whinge" very close to "whine"? But isn't "whinge" still wholly a Brit locution? So any distinctions in how it's used can't really be appreciated, this side of the water? Susan H. Cruel thing to say about AEH, anyway, after spending so much time on him. On Feb 4, 2009, at 11:00 AM, Judy Prince wrote: > I am curious to know if USAmericans on this list have heard or read > the word that Robin uses below, "whinge". I hadn't heard it until > fairly recently, and still have a tough time reasoning out examples > of it. It's a lovely word, but I can't nail how a whinge is > different from complaining or 'bitching' [a commonly used but not > lovely word, I think]. I've been told that a 'whinge' is used for > things about which nothing can be done, like bad weather. But apart > from the weather example, I can't identify a whinge as different > from complaining or 'bitching'. > > BTW, Robin's reference to "Terence" is for AEH's #62, the second to > last poem, in _The Shropshire Lad_ [which can be found at Project > Gutenberg]. > > Judy > > 2009/2/3 Robin Hamilton > > > > > Within his narrow range, he *is powerful, but finally his > imaginative world is tightly resticted. The laureate of whinge. He > attempts to justify this in "Terence, this is stupid stuff ...", but > the justification itself simply enacts the complaint he's trying to > address. > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/2aaf53d4/attachment.html From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Wed Feb 4 11:30:54 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:49:59 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902040809t22d89771w242e32b68c64e92c@mail.gmail.com> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net><4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> <6768ac830902040809t22d89771w242e32b68c64e92c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <332421DC0E8D4621B25B27FB9929FD11@RobinPC> << ( http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/03/on-whinge-and-whine.html ) which matches my usage. It's not incompatible with what Robin says, I think ? Robin? >> Pretty much how I'd see it, Michael, with the proviso that it's generally northern English and mostly Scots. {Hm -- whinging would overlap between northern England and Scotland, while girning would be locally Scottish.} The OED doesn't flag "whinge (V)" as a peculiarly Scottish usage, but most of the examples given there are from Scots texts, and there's a long entry in the DSL. Robin From jjeffreymail at yahoo.com Wed Feb 4 11:52:58 2009 From: jjeffreymail at yahoo.com (John Jeffrey) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <332421DC0E8D4621B25B27FB9929FD11@RobinPC> Message-ID: <915188.31956.qm@web54105.mail.re2.yahoo.com> I've got family living in Wales (near the England border) and they use whinge all the time, especially my ex, talking about the kids. ?It's a word used to describe kids--or kid-like complaining, "whinging about cleaning his room... ?about doing homework... ?about not getting any sweets at Tesco," which is why it's associated closer to whine. I've never heard it here in the U.S. (New England). But I don't know if I agree that Housman whinges, unless you mean the man and not his poetry. ?Then again, I've had enough of talking about Housman for a while. ?(And, yes, I still think that snow can mean snow as well as a methaphor!) JohnJ P.S. Another favorite Brit phrase is "taking the piss." ?That always cracks me up. --- On Wed, 2/4/09, Robin Hamilton wrote: From: Robin Hamilton Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" Date: Wednesday, February 4, 2009, 11:30 AM << ( http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/03/on-whinge-and-whine.html ) which matches my usage. It's not incompatible with what Robin says, I think ? Robin? >> Pretty much how I'd see it, Michael, with the proviso that it's generally northern English and mostly Scots. {Hm -- whinging would overlap between northern England and Scotland, while girning would be locally Scottish.} The OED doesn't flag "whinge (V)" as a peculiarly Scottish usage, but most of the examples given there are from Scots texts, and there's a long entry in the DSL. Robin _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/ec94f6d0/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Wed Feb 4 12:12:20 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <915188.31956.qm@web54105.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <332421DC0E8D4621B25B27FB9929FD11@RobinPC> <915188.31956.qm@web54105.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902040912n225ee9bet84eaf066e30fcff2@mail.gmail.com> Hey, John, actually the #62's quite funny, whether intentionally or not, I dunno. It has a poet called "Terence" jibe'ly addressed by a bloke who thinks his poetry's pitiful, then Terence's response, the interpretations of which I'd be curious to find out from some of you [but you, John, can take a break, of course from all this AEH interp stuff]. How much irony AEH uses, I can't be certain. Last night I read as much as Google Books would allow of Graves' fascinating biog of Housman, and it does anchor rather firmly his reasons for melancholy and obsession with deaths, loss of loves and so on. Back to talk of 'whinge': Your examples are great! HOWEVER, I still think that the English have a [to them not] subtle different situational use for the word. It's that difference in the understanding of how it's applied that I wanted to get, but apparently NP has no [few?] English folk. Bloody shame! And now to advance a nother odd [at least it used to be, to me] English syntax which I'd never heard 'til recently, but which's apparently used in some places in the USAmerican northeast. Examples: "Jane wants picked up at the train station" or "The bedroom needs cleaned". More typical in the USA for would be "Jane wants TO BE picked up...." or "The bedroom needs CLEANING". Best and enjoying this, Judy 2009/2/4 John Jeffrey > I've got family living in Wales (near the England border) and they use > whinge all the time, especially my ex, talking about the kids. It's a word > used to describe kids--or kid-like complaining, "whinging about cleaning his > room... about doing homework... about not getting any sweets at Tesco," > which is why it's associated closer to whine. > > I've never heard it here in the U.S. (New England). > > But I don't know if I agree that Housman whinges, unless you mean the man > and not his poetry. Then again, I've had enough of talking about Housman > for a while. (And, yes, I still think that snow can mean snow as well as a > methaphor!) > > JohnJ > > P.S. Another favorite Brit phrase is "taking the piss." That always cracks > me up. > > > > --- On *Wed, 2/4/09, Robin Hamilton *wrote: > > From: Robin Hamilton > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" < > new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu> > Date: Wednesday, February 4, 2009, 11:30 AM > > > << > ( http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/03/on-whinge-and-whine.html ) which > matches my usage. It's not incompatible with what Robin says, I think ? > Robin? > >> > > Pretty much how I'd see it, Michael, with the proviso that it's > generally northern English and mostly Scots. > > {Hm -- whinging would overlap between northern England and Scotland, while > girning would be locally Scottish.} > > The OED doesn't flag "whinge (V)" as a peculiarly Scottish usage, > but most of the examples given there are from Scots texts, and there's a > long entry in the DSL. > > Robin > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing listNew-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.eduhttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/76e3fd1f/attachment.html From editor at arrowheadpress.co.uk Wed Feb 4 12:20:33 2009 From: editor at arrowheadpress.co.uk (Roger Collett) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... References: <332421DC0E8D4621B25B27FB9929FD11@RobinPC><915188.31956.qm@web54105.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <7db1d01b0902040912n225ee9bet84eaf066e30fcff2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <027401c986ec$e49cb990$6501a8c0@ROCKY> This particular syntax is Northern English, particularly Cumbria and Scottish, Dumfries and Galloway (and Ayrshire? Robin?) Roger Collett Arrowhead Press http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality." Jules de Gaultier ----- Original Message ----- From: Judy Prince To: jjeffreymail@yahoo.com ; NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &,Views Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 5:12 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... And now to advance a nother odd [at least it used to be, to me] English syntax which I'd never heard 'til recently, but which's apparently used in some places in the USAmerican northeast. Examples: "Jane wants picked up at the train station" or "The bedroom needs cleaned". More typical in the USA for would be "Jane wants TO BE picked up...." or "The bedroom needs CLEANING". Best and enjoying this, Judy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/a6b96614/attachment.html From lsgrimes at stonegulch.com Wed Feb 4 12:27:23 2009 From: lsgrimes at stonegulch.com (Linda Sue Grimes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net> <4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <2FD0BC5100BA4313B6AF6BC57C04127E@LindaSue> No very... lsg ----- Original Message ----- From: Bob Grumman To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 4:08 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... Quick question for anyone more knowledgeable than I about Housman's work: how metaphoric a poet is he? --Bob _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/7fc3e85f/attachment.html From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Wed Feb 4 12:31:01 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net><4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: From: Susan Holahan << Cruel thing to say about AEH, anyway, after spending so much time on him. >> There are variant versions of the traditional song, "Isn't It Grand, Boys?", but while it post-dates Housman, it could have been composed with him in mind. {I had a student once who coined the term "sentimental pessimism" to dismiss George Crabbe. Struck me at the time that it was even more appropriate to Housman.} Follows a short version ... Robin Isn't It Grand, Boys? Look at the coffin, with golden handles Isn't it grand, boys, to be bloody-well dead? Let's not have a sniffle, let's have a bloody-good cry And always remember: The longer you live The sooner you'll bloody-well die Look at the flowers, all bloody withered Isn't it grand, boys, to be bloody-well dead? Let's not have a sniffle, let's have a bloody-good cry And always remember: The longer you live The sooner you'll bloody-well die. Look at the mourners, bloody-great hypocrites Isn't it grand, boys, to be bloody-well dead? From lsgrimes at stonegulch.com Wed Feb 4 12:35:49 2009 From: lsgrimes at stonegulch.com (Linda Sue Grimes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Housman and Metaphors References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net><997098.69731.qm@web54110.mail.re2.yahoo.com><6768ac830902031614i67f5eccya8424341be2e10b9@mail.gmail.com> <4988E363.2080805@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <89710077C9264E45BB2F19348E662EC2@LindaSue> No, Housman does not use many metaphors...most of his poems are narrative and quite literal...even when referring to the afterlife as in "Is my team ploughing," "Bredon Hill," and "To an athlete dying young" lsg ----- Original Message ----- From: Bob Grumman To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 6:37 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... I read/hear the poem working toward a climactic metaphor. Again I ask, is Housman one to use many metaphors in his poems? --Bob _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/984fd03e/attachment.html From susan.holahan at sbcglobal.net Wed Feb 4 12:37:06 2009 From: susan.holahan at sbcglobal.net (Susan Holahan) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902040912n225ee9bet84eaf066e30fcff2@mail.gmail.com> References: <332421DC0E8D4621B25B27FB9929FD11@RobinPC> <915188.31956.qm@web54105.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <7db1d01b0902040912n225ee9bet84eaf066e30fcff2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <458B69AE-09D2-4D85-9353-BCC890FE3F8F@sbcglobal.net> On Feb 4, 2009, at 12:12 PM, Judy Prince wrote: > > And now to advance a nother odd [at least it used to be, to me] > English syntax which I'd never heard 'til recently, but which's > apparently used in some places in the USAmerican northeast. > Examples: "Jane wants picked up at the train station" or "The > bedroom needs cleaned". More typical in the USA for would be "Jane > wants TO BE picked up...." or "The bedroom needs CLEANING". > > Judy, where on earth? I've lived in lots of places in the Northeast and never come across that bit of weirdness. "Jane wants picking up. . ." --or that style of thing-- I've heard from Brits, and New Yorker writers used to borrow Brit style. Otherwise. . . In the hills of west-central Vermont, a handyman type, warning me about a project, would say, "That'll be very spendy." Not syntax, of course, just vocab. But sweet. Susan H. From susan.holahan at sbcglobal.net Wed Feb 4 12:41:25 2009 From: susan.holahan at sbcglobal.net (Susan Holahan) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net><4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <855B59AE-F006-4A99-83E1-428E1A1C5145@sbcglobal.net> Gee. Composed by a post-modern laureate of whinge, no doubt. Thanks for sharing. Crabbe, at least, fulfilled the destiny his name announced for him. Susan H. On Feb 4, 2009, at 12:31 PM, Robin Hamilton wrote: > From: Susan Holahan > > << > Cruel thing to say about AEH, anyway, after spending so much time on > him. >>> > > There are variant versions of the traditional song, "Isn't It Grand, > Boys?", but while it post-dates Housman, it could have been composed > with him in mind. > > {I had a student once who coined the term "sentimental pessimism" to > dismiss George Crabbe. Struck me at the time that it was even more > appropriate to Housman.} > > Follows a short version ... > > Robin > > Isn't It Grand, Boys? > > Look at the coffin, with golden handles > Isn't it grand, boys, to be bloody-well dead? > > Let's not have a sniffle, let's have a bloody-good cry > And always remember: The longer you live > The sooner you'll bloody-well die > > Look at the flowers, all bloody withered > Isn't it grand, boys, to be bloody-well dead? > > Let's not have a sniffle, let's have a bloody-good cry > And always remember: The longer you live > The sooner you'll bloody-well die. > > Look at the mourners, bloody-great hypocrites > Isn't it grand, boys, to be bloody-well dead? > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Wed Feb 4 12:57:24 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <855B59AE-F006-4A99-83E1-428E1A1C5145@sbcglobal.net> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net><4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> <855B59AE-F006-4A99-83E1-428E1A1C5145@sbcglobal.net> Message-ID: <5AEF12F8004D4825AD002AF30578706F@RobinPC> From: "Susan Holahan" > Gee. Composed by a post-modern laureate of whinge, no doubt. Probably more music hall than post-modern. The other resonant text which draws on the same tone is, "She Was Poor But Honest": "It's the same the whole world over, It's the poor what gets the blame, It's the rich what gets the pleasure, Isn't it a bloody shame?" I'm not sure how the chronology runs, but this can be set beside Thomas Hardy's "The Ruined Maid": "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" "My dear - a raw country girl, such as you be, Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she. Robin ************************* She Was Poor But Honest She was poor but she was honest, Victim of a rich man's game. First he loved her, then he left her, And she lost her maiden name. Then she ran away to London For to hide her grief and shame. There she met an Army captain, And she lost her name again. "It's the same the whole world over. It's the poor that gets the blame. It's the rich that gets the pleasure. Ain't it all a bleeding shame?" See him riding in a carriage Past the gutter where she stands. He has made a stylish marriage, While she wrings her ringless hands. See him there at the theatre, In the front row with the best, While the girl that he has ruined Entertains a sordid guest. "It's the same the whole world over. It's the poor that gets the blame. It's the rich that gets the pleasure. Ain't it all a bleeding shame?" See her on the bridge at midnight, Crying "Farewell, blighted love". Then a scream, a splash, and . . Goodness! What is she a-doing of? When they dragged her from the river Water from her clothes they wrung. Though they thought that she was drownded, Still her corpse got up and sung: "It's the same the whole world over, It's the poor what gets the blame, It's the rich what gets the pleasure, Isn't it a blooming shame?" **************************** Thomas Hardy: "The Ruined Maid" "O Melia, my dear, this does everything crown! Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" "O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she. "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks, Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks; And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" "Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she. "At home in the barton you said 'thee' and 'thou,' And 'thik oon,' and 'the?s oon,'' and 't'other'; but now Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!"-- "Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she. "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek, And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" "We never do work when we're ruined," said she. "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream, And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" "True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she. "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" "My dear - a raw country girl, such as you be, Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she. From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Wed Feb 4 13:02:29 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <027401c986ec$e49cb990$6501a8c0@ROCKY> References: <332421DC0E8D4621B25B27FB9929FD11@RobinPC><915188.31956.qm@web54105.mail.re2.yahoo.com><7db1d01b0902040912n225ee9bet84eaf066e30fcff2@mail.gmail.com> <027401c986ec$e49cb990$6501a8c0@ROCKY> Message-ID: << This particular syntax is Northern English, particularly Cumbria and Scottish, Dumfries and Galloway (and Ayrshire? Robin?) >> I think throughout central Scotland, Roger, certainly Ayrshire and Glasgow. Pretty much Received Standard Spoken Scots -- I was already quite old before I was forced to realise it wasn't also RSE. Robin From editor at arrowheadpress.co.uk Wed Feb 4 13:11:46 2009 From: editor at arrowheadpress.co.uk (Roger Collett) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... References: <332421DC0E8D4621B25B27FB9929FD11@RobinPC><915188.31956.qm@web54105.mail.re2.yahoo.com><7db1d01b0902040912n225ee9bet84eaf066e30fcff2@mail.gmail.com><027401c986ec$e49cb990$6501a8c0@ROCKY> Message-ID: <02a501c986f4$0c291150$6501a8c0@ROCKY> Ah well, the Scots always did claim Carlisle as theirs. Back to lurking. Just keeping an eye on what Judy's up to, as per instructions from Beijing. Roger ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robin Hamilton" To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views" Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 6:02 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... > << > This particular syntax is Northern English, particularly Cumbria and > Scottish, Dumfries and Galloway > (and Ayrshire? Robin?) >>> > > I think throughout central Scotland, Roger, certainly Ayrshire and Glasgow. > > Pretty much Received Standard Spoken Scots -- I was already quite old before > I was forced to realise it wasn't also RSE. > > Robin > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Wed Feb 4 14:24:21 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <02a501c986f4$0c291150$6501a8c0@ROCKY> References: <332421DC0E8D4621B25B27FB9929FD11@RobinPC> <915188.31956.qm@web54105.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <7db1d01b0902040912n225ee9bet84eaf066e30fcff2@mail.gmail.com> <027401c986ec$e49cb990$6501a8c0@ROCKY> <02a501c986f4$0c291150$6501a8c0@ROCKY> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902041124l65a072e0h22a2287e59fe195d@mail.gmail.com> "I ain't been ruined", if that's wot you mean, Roger. But must confess that a recent Morrisey piccie in the Groan has certain fascinatin' um rhythms........ Ah but then that's Irish, innit? Not Scottish. squirrulfoot 2009/2/4 Roger Collett > Ah well, the Scots always did claim Carlisle as theirs. > Back to lurking. Just keeping an eye on what Judy's up to, as per > instructions from Beijing. > > Roger > > > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robin Hamilton" < > robin.hamilton2@btinternet.com> > To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views" < > new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu> > Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 6:02 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... > > > << >> >> This particular syntax is Northern English, particularly Cumbria and >> Scottish, Dumfries and Galloway >> (and Ayrshire? Robin?) >> >>> >>>> >> I think throughout central Scotland, Roger, certainly Ayrshire and >> Glasgow. >> >> Pretty much Received Standard Spoken Scots -- I was already quite old >> before I was forced to realise it wasn't also RSE. >> >> Robin >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/e5a7e638/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Wed Feb 4 15:20:51 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fan Ogilvie Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902041220l79f471b9lbd25249e84ada67f@mail.gmail.com> I do recommend this book, dearly! http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/you-life----new-book/story.aspx?guid={9CD1E0EC-C8FC-465F-BEEE-CB93152C4B19}&dist=msr_2 -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/3cbf16f3/attachment.html From susan.holahan at sbcglobal.net Wed Feb 4 19:54:38 2009 From: susan.holahan at sbcglobal.net (Susan Holahan) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:00 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: one man's snow... In-Reply-To: <5AEF12F8004D4825AD002AF30578706F@RobinPC> References: <200902031700.n13H040N011090@wiz.cath.vt.edu><830C85DC-86F6-47CE-838C-1F1010BC3CF0@verizon.net><4988C060.4060602@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902040800h1c5c4e50y85116a35599f0e95@mail.gmail.com> <855B59AE-F006-4A99-83E1-428E1A1C5145@sbcglobal.net> <5AEF12F8004D4825AD002AF30578706F@RobinPC> Message-ID: Who would part with the moment when the poor-but-honest one, apparently dead, rises to give us the chorus one more? The Hardy is marvelously twisty, as he often is. And your resources for discussion are remarkable. Thanks. Susan H. On Feb 4, 2009, at 12:57 PM, Robin Hamilton wrote: > From: "Susan Holahan" > >> Gee. Composed by a post-modern laureate of whinge, no doubt. > > Probably more music hall than post-modern. The other resonant text > which draws on the same tone is, "She Was Poor But Honest": > > "It's the same the whole world over, > It's the poor what gets the blame, > It's the rich what gets the pleasure, > Isn't it a bloody shame?" > > I'm not sure how the chronology runs, but this can be set beside > Thomas Hardy's "The Ruined Maid": > > "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, > And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" > "My dear - a raw country girl, such as you be, > Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she. > > Robin > > ************************* > > She Was Poor But Honest > > > She was poor but she was honest, > Victim of a rich man's game. > First he loved her, then he left her, > And she lost her maiden name. > > Then she ran away to London > For to hide her grief and shame. > There she met an Army captain, > And she lost her name again. > > "It's the same the whole world over. > It's the poor that gets the blame. > It's the rich that gets the pleasure. > Ain't it all a bleeding shame?" > > See him riding in a carriage > Past the gutter where she stands. > He has made a stylish marriage, > While she wrings her ringless hands. > > See him there at the theatre, > In the front row with the best, > While the girl that he has ruined > Entertains a sordid guest. > > "It's the same the whole world over. > It's the poor that gets the blame. > It's the rich that gets the pleasure. > Ain't it all a bleeding shame?" > > See her on the bridge at midnight, > Crying "Farewell, blighted love". > Then a scream, a splash, and . . Goodness! > What is she a-doing of? > > When they dragged her from the river > Water from her clothes they wrung. > Though they thought that she was drownded, > Still her corpse got up and sung: > > "It's the same the whole world over, > It's the poor what gets the blame, > It's the rich what gets the pleasure, > Isn't it a blooming shame?" > > **************************** > > Thomas Hardy: "The Ruined Maid" > > "O Melia, my dear, this does everything crown! > Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? > And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" > "O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she. > > "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks, > Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks; > And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" > "Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she. > > "At home in the barton you said 'thee' and 'thou,' > And 'thik oon,' and 'the?s oon,'' and 't'other'; but now > Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!"-- > "Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she. > > "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak > But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek, > And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" > "We never do work when we're ruined," said she. > > "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream, > And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem > To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" > "True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she. > > "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, > And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" > "My dear - a raw country girl, such as you be, > Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she. > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From jforjames at aol.com Wed Feb 4 20:04:48 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] History of Flarf Message-ID: <8CB5544E0771331-110C-F73@MBLK-M22.sysops.aol.com> http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/02/books/flarf-from-glory-days-to-glory-hole ?It was a full year-and-a-half before the next book, Drew Gardner?s Petroleum Hat (Roof, 2005), saw publication, and with it came the first serious Flarf blowback. A glowing review of Gardner?s book by Joyelle McSweeny in the Constant Critic compared one of his poems, ?Chicks Dig War,? to Allen Ginsberg?s ?Howl?: ?More women than men are enjoying the war [?] Phallocentric chicks:/They dig guys with big wars.? This did not go down so well with some poets, for whom Ginsberg is a kind of Christ figure. On a listserv based in North Carolina, one poet railed against ?Chicks Dig War,? likening Flarf, generally, to ?gang-bang pornos.? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/85ad4ba9/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Wed Feb 4 20:55:04 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] ursprache is 3 Message-ID: <8CB554BE5DAF204-110C-1213@MBLK-M22.sysops.aol.com> Last week my blog had its third anniversary... http://ursprache.blogspot.com/ A recent quote post... Together with alliteration and formulaic phrasing, Old English poetry used patterns of repetition, echo, and interlacement to create powerfully resonant blocks of verse. There is an aesthetic quality to this poetry, a quality of intricate word weaving that moves the reader, or the listener, through the narrative or descriptive moment. In fact, one of the expressions used for making poetry in Old English was wordum wrixlan?to weave together words. There was a fabric of language for the Anglo-Saxons, a patterning of sounds and sense that matched the intricate patterning of their visual arts: serpentine designs and complex interlocking geometric forms in manuscript illumination or in metalwork are the visual equivalent of the interlocking patterns of the verse. ?Seth Lerer, ?Caedmon Learns to Sing,? Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007) My m.o. is that you have read a handful of my aphoristic musings ars poetica?to get to a posted quote. Finnegan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090204/e2951347/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Wed Feb 4 23:39:30 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bon Jovi, Shaq, Doc Williams and old Walt...where's Ginsberg? Message-ID: <498A6D82.2040309@opus40.org> Among the inevitable roster of athletes and entertainers inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame on Monday, three literary luminaries were recognized by the state for their contributions. From a shortlist of nominees, New Jersey residents selected Pulitzer Prize?winning poet William Carlos Williams, who also served the community as a physician; Walt Whitman, who lived in Camden during the latter part of his life; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who attended school in Hackensack. Williams?s granddaughter, Daphne Fox-Williams, who lives in the poet?s hometown of Rutherford, told the /Star-Ledger /that the honor was anticipated. ?He contributed his life to New Jersey as much as anybody else who's ever lived here,? Fox-Williams said of her grandfather. ?The recognition is long overdue.? The writers join astronomer Carl Sagan, musician Jon Bon Jovi, and basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal, as well as seven others, in the Hall of Fame's second round of inductions. Toni Morrison was among the first honorees in 2007. A formal induction ceremony will take place on May 3 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. ?This group of hall of famers embodies the spirit of New Jersey, a combination of drive, determination and creativity that has led them to greatness,? New Jersey governor Jon Corzine said in a statement. ?The New Jersey hall should serve as a reminder that the people of New Jersey strive for excellence and engage in myriad productive and rewarding activities that help society and give back to mankind.? -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Thu Feb 5 01:39:46 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] ursprache is 3 In-Reply-To: <8CB554BE5DAF204-110C-1213@MBLK-M22.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB554BE5DAF204-110C-1213@MBLK-M22.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902042239x4552f34dvb4e5d890eca8e1d1@mail.gmail.com> A poem by itself. On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 2:55 AM, wrote: > Last week my blog had its third anniversary... > http://ursprache.blogspot.com/ > > A recent quote post... > > Together with alliteration and formulaic phrasing, Old English poetry used > patterns of repetition, echo, and interlacement to create powerfully > resonant blocks of verse. There is an aesthetic quality to this poetry, a > quality of intricate word weaving that moves the reader, or the listener, > through the narrative or descriptive moment. In fact, one of the expressions > used for making poetry in Old English was *wordum wrixlan*?to weave > together words. There was a fabric of language for the Anglo-Saxons, a > patterning of sounds and sense that matched the intricate patterning of > their visual arts: serpentine designs and complex interlocking geometric > forms in manuscript illumination or in metalwork are the visual equivalent > of the interlocking patterns of the verse. > > ?Seth Lerer, "Caedmon Learns to Sing," *Inventing English: A Portable > History of the Language* (Columbia University Press, 2007) > > My m.o. is that you have read a handful of my aphoristic musings ars > poetica to get to a posted quote. > Finnegan > > > > ------------------------------ > Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? *Find > out now! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/17df118e/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Thu Feb 5 01:40:31 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] ursprache is 3 In-Reply-To: <8CB554BE5DAF204-110C-1213@MBLK-M22.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB554BE5DAF204-110C-1213@MBLK-M22.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902042240uc529a11l57125de82580adab@mail.gmail.com> And Happiest Birthday to _ursprache_! On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 2:55 AM, wrote: > Last week my blog had its third anniversary... > http://ursprache.blogspot.com/ > > A recent quote post... > > Together with alliteration and formulaic phrasing, Old English poetry used > patterns of repetition, echo, and interlacement to create powerfully > resonant blocks of verse. There is an aesthetic quality to this poetry, a > quality of intricate word weaving that moves the reader, or the listener, > through the narrative or descriptive moment. In fact, one of the expressions > used for making poetry in Old English was *wordum wrixlan*?to weave > together words. There was a fabric of language for the Anglo-Saxons, a > patterning of sounds and sense that matched the intricate patterning of > their visual arts: serpentine designs and complex interlocking geometric > forms in manuscript illumination or in metalwork are the visual equivalent > of the interlocking patterns of the verse. > > ?Seth Lerer, "Caedmon Learns to Sing," *Inventing English: A Portable > History of the Language* (Columbia University Press, 2007) > > My m.o. is that you have read a handful of my aphoristic musings ars > poetica to get to a posted quote. > Finnegan > > > > ------------------------------ > Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? *Find > out now! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/366e7468/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 5 09:27:48 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bon Jovi, Shaq,Doc Williams and old Walt...where's Ginsberg? In-Reply-To: <498A6D82.2040309@opus40.org> References: <498A6D82.2040309@opus40.org> Message-ID: <498AF764.3040109@nut-n-but.net> TheOldMole wrote: > Among the inevitable roster of athletes and entertainers inducted into > the New Jersey Hall of Fame on Monday, three literary luminaries were > recognized by the state for their contributions. From a shortlist of > nominees, New Jersey residents selected Pulitzer Prize?winning poet > William Carlos Williams, who also served the community as a physician; > Walt Whitman, who lived in Camden during the latter part of his life; > and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who attended school in Hackensack. > > Williams?s granddaughter, Daphne Fox-Williams, who lives in the poet?s > hometown of Rutherford, told the /Star-Ledger /that the honor was > anticipated. ?He contributed his life to New Jersey as much as anybody > else who's ever lived here,? Fox-Williams said of her grandfather. > ?The recognition is long overdue.? > > The writers join astronomer Carl Sagan, musician Jon Bon Jovi, and > basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal, as well as seven others, in the > Hall of Fame's second round of inductions. Toni Morrison was among the > first honorees in 2007. A formal induction ceremony will take place on > May 3 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. > > ?This group of hall of famers embodies the spirit of New Jersey, a > combination of drive, determination and creativity that has led them > to greatness,? New Jersey governor Jon Corzine said in a statement. > ?The New Jersey hall should serve as a reminder that the people of New > Jersey strive for excellence and engage in myriad productive and > rewarding activities that help society and give back to mankind.? > I understand David Graham has been invited to the presentation to do a reading of "The Red Wheelbarrow." --Bob From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Thu Feb 5 11:01:17 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bon Jovi, Shaq,Doc Williams and old Walt...where's Ginsberg? In-Reply-To: <498AF764.3040109@nut-n-but.net> References: <498A6D82.2040309@opus40.org> <498AF764.3040109@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <498B0D4D.5000903@opus40.org> Will they pay by the word? Bob Grumman wrote: > TheOldMole wrote: >> Among the inevitable roster of athletes and entertainers inducted >> into the New Jersey Hall of Fame on Monday, three literary luminaries >> were recognized by the state for their contributions. From a >> shortlist of nominees, New Jersey residents selected Pulitzer >> Prize?winning poet William Carlos Williams, who also served the >> community as a physician; Walt Whitman, who lived in Camden during >> the latter part of his life; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who attended >> school in Hackensack. >> >> Williams?s granddaughter, Daphne Fox-Williams, who lives in the >> poet?s hometown of Rutherford, told the /Star-Ledger /that the honor >> was anticipated. ?He contributed his life to New Jersey as much as >> anybody else who's ever lived here,? Fox-Williams said of her >> grandfather. ?The recognition is long overdue.? >> >> The writers join astronomer Carl Sagan, musician Jon Bon Jovi, and >> basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal, as well as seven others, in the >> Hall of Fame's second round of inductions. Toni Morrison was among >> the first honorees in 2007. A formal induction ceremony will take >> place on May 3 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. >> >> ?This group of hall of famers embodies the spirit of New Jersey, a >> combination of drive, determination and creativity that has led them >> to greatness,? New Jersey governor Jon Corzine said in a statement. >> ?The New Jersey hall should serve as a reminder that the people of >> New Jersey strive for excellence and engage in myriad productive and >> rewarding activities that help society and give back to mankind.? >> > I understand David Graham has been invited to the presentation to do a > reading of "The Red Wheelbarrow." > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Thu Feb 5 11:46:16 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bon Jovi, Shaq, Doc Williams and old Walt...where's Ginsberg? In-Reply-To: <498B0D4D.5000903@opus40.org> References: <498A6D82.2040309@opus40.org> <498AF764.3040109@nut-n-but.net> <498B0D4D.5000903@opus40.org> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902050846i1e7ce557k62a87171477ab899@mail.gmail.com> You terrible long tongues (as they say in Italy), I loved it instead, and I think they should keep it up! On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 5:01 PM, TheOldMole wrote: > Will they pay by the word? > > > Bob Grumman wrote: > >> TheOldMole wrote: >> >>> Among the inevitable roster of athletes and entertainers inducted into >>> the New Jersey Hall of Fame on Monday, three literary luminaries were >>> recognized by the state for their contributions. From a shortlist of >>> nominees, New Jersey residents selected Pulitzer Prize?winning poet William >>> Carlos Williams, who also served the community as a physician; Walt Whitman, >>> who lived in Camden during the latter part of his life; and F. Scott >>> Fitzgerald, who attended school in Hackensack. >>> >>> Williams's granddaughter, Daphne Fox-Williams, who lives in the poet's >>> hometown of Rutherford, told the /Star-Ledger /that the honor was >>> anticipated. "He contributed his life to New Jersey as much as anybody else >>> who's ever lived here," Fox-Williams said of her grandfather. "The >>> recognition is long overdue." >>> >>> The writers join astronomer Carl Sagan, musician Jon Bon Jovi, and >>> basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal, as well as seven others, in the Hall of >>> Fame's second round of inductions. Toni Morrison was among the first >>> honorees in 2007. A formal induction ceremony will take place on May 3 at >>> the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. >>> >>> "This group of hall of famers embodies the spirit of New Jersey, a >>> combination of drive, determination and creativity that has led them to >>> greatness," New Jersey governor Jon Corzine said in a statement. "The New >>> Jersey hall should serve as a reminder that the people of New Jersey strive >>> for excellence and engage in myriad productive and rewarding activities that >>> help society and give back to mankind." >>> >>> I understand David Graham has been invited to the presentation to do a >> reading of "The Red Wheelbarrow." >> >> --Bob >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > -- > Tad Richards > http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ > http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ > > Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! > http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/da27d98d/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 5 14:10:12 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bon Jovi, Shaq, Doc Williams and old Walt...where'sGinsberg? In-Reply-To: <498B0D4D.5000903@opus40.org> References: <498A6D82.2040309@opus40.org> <498AF764.3040109@nut-n-but.net> <498B0D4D.5000903@opus40.org> Message-ID: <498B3994.5030205@nut-n-but.net> TheOldMole wrote: > Will they pay by the word? Well, I heard they offered David ten thousand, but but he turned it down, memorably saying that the poem was so good, he'd pay /them/ to let him read it. So if we don't hear from him for a while, it'll be because he's practicing. --Bob > > Bob Grumman wrote: >> TheOldMole wrote: >>> Among the inevitable roster of athletes and entertainers inducted >>> into the New Jersey Hall of Fame on Monday, three literary >>> luminaries were recognized by the state for their contributions. >>> From a shortlist of nominees, New Jersey residents selected Pulitzer >>> Prize?winning poet William Carlos Williams, who also served the >>> community as a physician; Walt Whitman, who lived in Camden during >>> the latter part of his life; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who attended >>> school in Hackensack. >>> >>> Williams?s granddaughter, Daphne Fox-Williams, who lives in the >>> poet?s hometown of Rutherford, told the /Star-Ledger /that the honor >>> was anticipated. ?He contributed his life to New Jersey as much as >>> anybody else who's ever lived here,? Fox-Williams said of her >>> grandfather. ?The recognition is long overdue.? >>> >>> The writers join astronomer Carl Sagan, musician Jon Bon Jovi, and >>> basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal, as well as seven others, in the >>> Hall of Fame's second round of inductions. Toni Morrison was among >>> the first honorees in 2007. A formal induction ceremony will take >>> place on May 3 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. >>> >>> ?This group of hall of famers embodies the spirit of New Jersey, a >>> combination of drive, determination and creativity that has led them >>> to greatness,? New Jersey governor Jon Corzine said in a statement. >>> ?The New Jersey hall should serve as a reminder that the people of >>> New Jersey strive for excellence and engage in myriad productive and >>> rewarding activities that help society and give back to mankind.? >>> >> I understand David Graham has been invited to the presentation to do >> a reading of "The Red Wheelbarrow." >> >> --Bob >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/9cb26c39/attachment.html From grahamd at ripon.edu Thu Feb 5 14:11:18 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bon Jovi, Shaq, Doc Williams and old Walt...where'sGinsberg? In-Reply-To: <498B3994.5030205@nut-n-but.net> References: <498A6D82.2040309@opus40.org> <498AF764.3040109@nut-n-but.net> <498B0D4D.5000903@opus40.org> <498B3994.5030205@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <74DC637B-6600-4735-BEB1-0BCFB930EA61@ripon.edu> Old joke about the famously laconic Calvin Coolidge: Citizen: "Mr. President, I've made a bet that I can get you to say more than two words. What do you think of that?" President Coolidge: "You lose." -------- William Carlos Williams?: what a blabbermouth. . . . ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== On Feb 5, 2009, at 1:10 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > TheOldMole wrote: >> >> Will they pay by the word? > Well, I heard they offered David ten thousand, but but he turned it > down, memorably saying that the poem was so good, he'd pay them to > let him read it. So if we don't hear from him for a while, it'll > be because he's practicing. > > --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/5283bdfa/attachment.html From skip at louisiana.edu Thu Feb 5 14:13:09 2009 From: skip at louisiana.edu (Skip Fox) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Payment for Poetry In-Reply-To: <881193.31765.qm@web83308.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8F79F9039A4D452692CE20D0047F1342@win.louisiana.edu> What I often tell graduate students: "Hell, you damn near have to pay people to read it* any more. That's why they invented creative writing in grad school." *poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/f4aa6d35/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Thu Feb 5 14:20:46 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:01 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bon Jovi, Shaq, Doc Williams and old Walt...where'sGinsberg? In-Reply-To: <498B3994.5030205@nut-n-but.net> References: <498A6D82.2040309@opus40.org> <498AF764.3040109@nut-n-but.net> <498B0D4D.5000903@opus40.org> <498B3994.5030205@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <498B3C0E.5010801@opus40.org> SO much depends.... so MUCH depends.... so much dePENDS.... ah, the agony of it! Bob Grumman wrote: > TheOldMole wrote: >> Will they pay by the word? > Well, I heard they offered David ten thousand, but but he turned it > down, memorably saying that the poem was so good, he'd pay /them/ to > let him read it. So if we don't hear from him for a while, it'll be > because he's practicing. > > --Bob > > >> >> Bob Grumman wrote: >>> TheOldMole wrote: >>>> Among the inevitable roster of athletes and entertainers inducted >>>> into the New Jersey Hall of Fame on Monday, three literary >>>> luminaries were recognized by the state for their contributions. >>>> From a shortlist of nominees, New Jersey residents selected >>>> Pulitzer Prize?winning poet William Carlos Williams, who also >>>> served the community as a physician; Walt Whitman, who lived in >>>> Camden during the latter part of his life; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, >>>> who attended school in Hackensack. >>>> >>>> Williams?s granddaughter, Daphne Fox-Williams, who lives in the >>>> poet?s hometown of Rutherford, told the /Star-Ledger /that the >>>> honor was anticipated. ?He contributed his life to New Jersey as >>>> much as anybody else who's ever lived here,? Fox-Williams said of >>>> her grandfather. ?The recognition is long overdue.? >>>> >>>> The writers join astronomer Carl Sagan, musician Jon Bon Jovi, and >>>> basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal, as well as seven others, in the >>>> Hall of Fame's second round of inductions. Toni Morrison was among >>>> the first honorees in 2007. A formal induction ceremony will take >>>> place on May 3 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. >>>> >>>> ?This group of hall of famers embodies the spirit of New Jersey, a >>>> combination of drive, determination and creativity that has led >>>> them to greatness,? New Jersey governor Jon Corzine said in a >>>> statement. ?The New Jersey hall should serve as a reminder that the >>>> people of New Jersey strive for excellence and engage in myriad >>>> productive and rewarding activities that help society and give back >>>> to mankind.? >>>> >>> I understand David Graham has been invited to the presentation to do >>> a reading of "The Red Wheelbarrow." >>> >>> --Bob >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> New-Poetry mailing list >>> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >>> >> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 5 14:31:54 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Kevin Davies & the state of the art Message-ID: <8CB55DF896C8E7A-15B8-170F@WEBMAIL-DZ18.sysops.aol.com> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090223/davis Happy Thoughts!: The Poetry of Kevin Davies By Jordan Davis This article appeared in the February 23, 2009 edition of The Nation. February 4, 2009 Since the decline of patronage and the rise of the English department, high-minded poets from Ezra Pound and Charles Olson on through the Language poets have spent much of the energy they might otherwise have devoted to vocables and sense to writing essays of noisy, semicomprehensible worry--about poetry's place in society, society's place in poetry, poetry's place in poetry. Davies's poetry is mercifully free of that kind of self-regard, which it has replaced with an even better, more archaic form of self-regard: alienation and self-loathing. This is actually a promising development. For all its proclaimed devotion to negativity, the poetic avant-garde has until now had no curmudgeon with the charm or persistence of a Philip Larkin or Dorothy Parker. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/669c424e/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Thu Feb 5 14:56:04 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Payment for Poetry In-Reply-To: <8F79F9039A4D452692CE20D0047F1342@win.louisiana.edu> References: <881193.31765.qm@web83308.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <8F79F9039A4D452692CE20D0047F1342@win.louisiana.edu> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902051156i4eb62d9chad4db8c7948fbecc@mail.gmail.com> I often thought the same thing, and it also came out clearly when some people did not want to read their poems On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Skip Fox wrote: > What I often tell graduate students: "Hell, you damn near have to pay > people to read it* any more. That's why they invented creative writing in > grad school." > > > > *poetry > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/701fab1d/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 5 15:27:07 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book of note, plus various books on craft and writing poetry Message-ID: <8CB55E73FD66716-15B8-1BB5@WEBMAIL-DZ18.sysops.aol.com> I just encountered this book on the WomPo list, I thought I'd pass it on...looks like it could be good: Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/BID1508.htm Also, they had a thread going on craft books...here's the list compiled & posted by Joan Mazza: Addonizio, Kim and Laux, Dorianne. The Poet?s Companion: A Guide to Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Norton. 1997 Allen, Donald. Poetics of the New American Poetry. Grove Press. 1974. Arp, Thomas R. Perrine?s Sound and Sense. Harcourt Brace. 1997. Behn, Robin. The Practice of Poetry. HarperPerennial. 1992 Bender, Sheila. Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems From Your Life Experiences. Writer?s Digest Books. 1998 Buckley, Christopher and Christopher Merrill, eds. What Will Suffice: Contemporary Poets on the Art of Poetry. Salt Lake City. 1995. Bugeja, Michael J. The Art and Craft of Poetry. Writer?s Digest Books. 1994. Bugeja, Michael J. Poet?s Guide: How to Publish and Perform Your Work. Story Line Press. 1995. Citino, David. The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of Poetry. Oxford University Press. 2002 Cook, Jon, ed. Poetry in Theory: Anthology 1900 ? 2000. Wiley-Blackwell. 2004. Corn, Alfred. The Poem?s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody. Story Line Press. 2003. Dobyns, Stephen. Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry. St. Martin?s Griffin. 1997. Drake, Barbara. Writing Poetry. Harco urt Brace. 1983. Drury, John. Creating Poetry. Writer?s Digest Books. 1991 Drury, John. The Poetry Dictionary. Writer?s Digest Books. 1995. Elledge, Jim. Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry. Indiana University Press. 1994 Ellmann, Richard. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Norton. 1988 Ferguson, Margaret. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Norton. 1996 Finch, Annie, ed. A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women. Story Line Press. 1194 Fiske, Robert Hartwell and Laura Cherry, eds. Poem, Revised: 54 Poems, Revisions, Discussions. Marion Street Press. 2008 Fox, John. Finding What You Didn?t Lose: Expressing Your Truth and Creativity Through Poem-Making. Tarcher/Putnam. 1995. Fox, John. Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making. Tarcher/Putnam. 1997. Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. McGraw-Hill. 1979. Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Shambhala. 1986. Hall, Donald. Claims for Poetry. University of Michigan. 1982. Hass, Robert. Twentieth Century Pleasures. W.W. Norton. 1985. Hirsch, Edward. How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. Harvest. 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (Essays). HarperCollins. 1997. Hollander, John. Rhyme?s Reason. Yale University Press. 1981. Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. Norton. 1979. Kinzie, Mary. A Poet?s Guide to Poetry. T he University of Chicago Press. 1999. Kooser, Ted. The Poetry Home Repair Manual. University of Nebraska Press. 2005. Kowit, Steve. In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet?s Portable Workshop. Norton. 1997. Lammon, Martin. Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets on Poetry. University of Michigan. 1996. Lehman, David. Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems. Collier/Macmillan. 1987. Longenbach, James. The Art of the Poetic Line. Graywolf. 2007. Mayes, Frances. The Discovery of Poetry. Harvest/Harcourt. 2001. Myers, Jack. The Portable Poetry Workshop. Thomson/Wadsworth. 2005. Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Harvest Original. 1995. Oliver, Mary. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. Mariner/Houghton Mifflin. 1998 Oliver, Mary. Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems. Mariner Books. 2000. Orr, Gregory. Poetry as Survival. University of Georgia Press. 2002 Orr, Gregory & Ellen Bryant Voigt. Poets Teaching Poets, Self, and the World. University of Michigan Press. 1996. Packard, William. The Art of Poetry Writing. St. Martin?s Press. 1992 Padgett, Ron. Handbook of Poetic Forms. Teachers & Writers Collaborative. 1987. Paschen, Elise. Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath. Sourcebooks MediaFusion. 2001. Reeves, Judy. A Writer?s Book of Days: A Spirited Companion and Lively Muse for the Writing Life. New World L ibrary. 1999. Richards, Mary Caroline. Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. Wesleyan. 1989. Roethke, Theodore. David Wagoner, Intro. Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke. Copper Canyon Press. 2006 Roethke, Theodore. On Poetry and Craft. Copper Canyon Press. 2001. Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Paris Press. 1996. Snodgrass, W.D. De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Bad. Graywolf Press. 2001. Sontag, Kate and David Graham, eds. After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography. Graywolf Press. 2001 Stafford, William. Writing the Australian Crawl. University of Michigan Press. 1978. Stafford, William. You Must Revise Your Life. University of Michigan Press. 1987. Stafford, William. Crossing Unmarked Snow. University of Michigan Press. 1998. Stafford, William. The Answers are Inside the Mountains. University of Michigan Press. 2003. Sweeney, Matthew. Writing Poetry and Getting Published. NTC Publishing. 1997. Turco, Lewis. The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. UPNE. 2000. Wallace, Robert. Writing Poems. HarperCollinsCollegePublishers. 1996. Webster?s Compact Rhyming Dictionary. Miriam-Webster, Inc. 1987 Woolridge, Susan G. Poemcrazy: freeing your life with words. Clarkson Potter. 1996. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/476a2243/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 5 16:14:17 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] =?utf-8?q?Richard_Howard=E2=80=99s_Jewish_Roots?= Message-ID: <8CB55EDD6DCCCC7-B78-CDF@WEBMAIL-MA17.sysops.aol.com> Praising Sacred Places: Richard Howard?s Jewish Roots By Benjamin Ivry Tue. Feb 03, 2009 For a half-century, the poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard has been an expert investigator of artistic motivations and inspirations, yet his own roots, as a product of Cleveland?s Jewish middle class, have rarely been explored. On Feb 8, Howard will give a reading at New York?s Metropolitan Museum to introduce the new Pierre Bonnard exhibit, logically enough, since he translated ?Bonnard/Matisse: Letters Between Friends? (Abrams,1992), among hundreds of other books. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/95e39e66/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Thu Feb 5 16:26:19 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book of note, plus various books on craft and writing poetry In-Reply-To: <8CB55E73FD66716-15B8-1BB5@WEBMAIL-DZ18.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB55E73FD66716-15B8-1BB5@WEBMAIL-DZ18.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <498B597B.4050402@opus40.org> 50 Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process -Alberta Turner jforjames@aol.com wrote: > I just encountered this book on the WomPo list, I thought I'd pass it > on...looks like it could be good: > > Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry > *http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/BID1508.htm* > > > Also, they had a thread going on craft books...here's the list > compiled & posted by Joan Mazza: > > Addonizio, Kim and Laux, Dorianne. The Poet?s Companion: A Guide to > Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Norton. 1997 > > Allen, Donald. Poetics of the New American Poetry. Grove Press. 1974. > > Arp, Thomas R. Perrine?s Sound and Sense. Harcourt Brace. 1997. > > Behn, Robin. The Practice of Poetry. HarperPerennial. 1992 > > Bender, Sheila. Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems From Your Life > > Experiences. Writer?s Digest Books. 1998 > > Buckley, Christopher and Christopher Merrill, eds. What Will Suffice: > > Contemporary Poets on the Art of Poetry. Salt Lake City. 1995. > > Bugeja, Michael J. The Art and Craft of Poetry. Writer?s Digest Books. > 1994. > Bugeja, Michael J. Poet?s Guide: How to Publish and Perform Your Work. > Story > Line Press. 1995. > > Citino, David. The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of > Poetry. Oxford Unive rsity Press. 2002 > > Cook, Jon, ed. Poetry in Theory: Anthology 1900 ? 2000. Wiley-Blackwell. > 2004. > > Corn, Alfred. The Poem?s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody. Story Line > Press. > 2003. > > Dobyns, Stephen. Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry. St. Martin?s > Griffin. 1997. > > Drake, Barbara. Writing Poetry. Harcourt Brace. 1983. > > Drury, John. Creating Poetry. Writer?s Digest Books. 1991 > Drury, John. The Poetry Dictionary. Writer?s Digest Books. 1995. > > Elledge, Jim. Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American > Poetry. Indiana University Press. 1994 > > Ellmann, Richard. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Norton. 1988 > > Ferguson, Margaret. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Norton. 1996 > > Finch, Annie, ed. A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary > Women. Story Line Press. 1194 > > Fiske, Robert Hartwell and Laura Cherry, eds. Poem, Revised: 54 Poems, > Revisions, Discussions. Marion Street Press. 2008 > > Fox, John. Finding What You Didn?t Lose: Expressing Your Truth and > Creativity Through Poem-Making. Tarcher/Putnam. 1995. > > Fox, John. Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making. > Tarcher/Putnam. > 1997. > > Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. McGraw-Hill. 1979. > > Goldberg, Natalie. Wr iting Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. > Shambhala. 1986. > > Hall, Donald. Claims for Poetry. University of Michigan. 1982. > > Hass, Robert. Twentieth Century Pleasures. W.W. Norton. 1985. > > Hirsch, Edward. How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. Harvest. > 1999. > > Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (Essays). > HarperCollins. 1997. > > Hollander, John. Rhyme?s Reason. Yale University Press. 1981. > > Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and > Writing. Norton. 1979. > > Kinzie, Mary. A Poet?s Guide to Poetry. The University of Chicago Press. > 1999. > > Kooser, Ted. The Poetry Home Repair Manual. University of Nebraska Press. > 2005. > > Kowit, Steve. In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet?s Portable Workshop. > Norton. 1997. > > Lammon, Martin. Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of > Poets on > Poetry. University of Michigan. 1996. > > Lehman, David. Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading > Contemporary > Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems. Collier/Macmillan. 1987. > > Longenbach, James. The Art of the Poetic Line. Graywolf. 2007. > > Mayes, Frances. The Discovery of Poetry. Harvest/Harcourt. 2001. > > Myers, Jack. The Portable Poetry Workshop. Thomson/Wadsworth. 2005. > > Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Harvest Original. 1995. > Oliver, Mary. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading > Metrical Verse. Mariner/Houghton Mifflin. 1998 > Oliver, Mary. Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems. Mariner Books. > 2000. > > Orr, Gregory. Poetry as Survival. University of Georgia Press. 2002 > Orr, Gregory & Ellen Bryant Voigt. Poets Teaching Poets, Self, and the > World. University of Michigan Press. 1996. > > Packard, William. The Art of Poetry Writing. St. Martin?s Press. 1992 > > Padgett, Ron. Handbook of Poetic Forms. Teachers & Writers Collaborative. > 1987. > > Paschen, Elise. Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from > Tennyson to Plath. Sourcebooks MediaFusion. 2001. > > Reeves, Judy. A Writer?s Book of Days: A Spirited Companion and Lively > Muse > for the Writing Life. New World Library. 1999. > > Richards, Mary Caroline. Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. > Wesleyan. 1989. > > Roethke, Theodore. David Wagoner, Intro. Straw for the Fire: From the > Notebooks of Theodore Roethke. Copper Canyon Press. 2006 > Roethke, Theodore. On Poetry and Craft. Copper Canyon Press. 2001. > > Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Paris Press. 1996. > > Snodgrass, W.D. De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Bad. Graywolf Press. > 2001. > 0A > > Sontag, Kate and David Graham, eds. After Confession: Poetry as > Autobiography. Graywolf Press. 2001 > > Stafford, William. Writing the Australian Crawl. University of Michigan > Press. 1978. > Stafford, William. You Must Revise Your Life. University of Michigan > Press. > 1987. > Stafford, William. Crossing Unmarked Snow. University of Michigan Press. > 1998. > Stafford, William. The Answers are Inside the Mountains. University of > Michigan Press. 2003. > > Sweeney, Matthew. Writing Poetry and Getting Published. NTC Publishing. > 1997. > > Turco, Lewis. The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. UPNE. 2000. > > Wallace, Robert. Writing Poems. HarperCollinsCollegePublishers. 1996. > > Webster?s Compact Rhyming Dictionary. Miriam-Webster, Inc. 1987 > > Woolridge, Susan G. Poemcrazy: freeing your life with words. Clarkson > Potter. 1996. > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? > *Find out now! > * > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From editor at pavementsaw.org Thu Feb 5 17:40:29 2009 From: editor at pavementsaw.org (David Baratier) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: History of Flarf In-Reply-To: <200902051700.n15H060N003134@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <25357.44874.qm@web45604.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> We published the first book of Flarf, Rodney Koeneke's Rouge State, which was followed by Mike Magee's MS (spuyten duyvil)and Kasey's Deer Head Nation (tougher disguises). Or the first pre-Flarf book of Flarf depending on your angle. That one poet on a listserv based in North Carolina should stop spouting so much seed to gang-bang pornos to make metonomy about flarf. Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press 321 Empire Street Montpelier OH 43543 http://pavementsaw.org Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 5 17:49:52 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Picasso and the Allure of Language Message-ID: <8CB55FB312F5BDA-115C-1563@Webmail-mg16.sim.aol.com> http://www.courant.com/entertainment/museums/galleries/hc-picasso.artfeb05,0,2972604.story Picasso and the Allure of Language" draws on the university's rich collection of donated Picassos, now numbering more than 100 pieces. It's the first major show there to bring together the various holdings on campus ? from the art gallery as well as the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It represents the first reunion of the Picasso works originally owned by Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo Stein in the gallery's collections, with materials from the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas papers in the Beinecke Library, which range from postcards and letters to an audio recording of Stein reading her written accounts of Picasso. http://artgallery.yale.edu/pages/info/renovations_upcoming.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/334663ec/attachment.html From halvard at gmail.com Thu Feb 5 18:03:51 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book of note, plus various books on craft and writing poetry In-Reply-To: <498B597B.4050402@opus40.org> References: <8CB55E73FD66716-15B8-1BB5@WEBMAIL-DZ18.sysops.aol.com> <498B597B.4050402@opus40.org> Message-ID: Oy, makes me drowsy just looking at that list. Hal On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 3:26 PM, TheOldMole wrote: > 50 Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process < > http://www.amazon.com/50-Contemporary-Poets-Creative-Process/dp/0679303170/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233868699&sr=1-6> > -Alberta Turner > > jforjames@aol.com wrote: > >> I just encountered this book on the WomPo list, I thought I'd pass it >> on...looks like it could be good: >> >> Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry >> *http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/BID1508.htm* >> >> >> Also, they had a thread going on craft books...here's the list compiled & >> posted by Joan Mazza: >> >> Addonizio, Kim and Laux, Dorianne. The Poet's Companion: A Guide to >> Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Norton. 1997 >> >> Allen, Donald. Poetics of the New American Poetry. Grove Press. 1974. >> >> Arp, Thomas R. Perrine's Sound and Sense. Harcourt Brace. 1997. >> >> Behn, Robin. The Practice of Poetry. HarperPerennial. 1992 >> >> Bender, Sheila. Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems From Your Life >> >> Experiences. Writer's Digest Books. 1998 >> >> Buckley, Christopher and Christopher Merrill, eds. What Will Suffice: >> >> Contemporary Poets on the Art of Poetry. Salt Lake City. 1995. >> >> Bugeja, Michael J. The Art and Craft of Poetry. Writer's Digest Books. >> 1994. >> Bugeja, Michael J. Poet's Guide: How to Publish and Perform Your Work. >> Story >> Line Press. 1995. >> >> Citino, David. The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of >> Poetry. Oxford Unive rsity Press. 2002 >> >> Cook, Jon, ed. Poetry in Theory: Anthology 1900 ? 2000. Wiley-Blackwell. >> 2004. >> >> Corn, Alfred. The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody. Story Line Press. >> 2003. >> >> Dobyns, Stephen. Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry. St. Martin's >> Griffin. 1997. >> >> Drake, Barbara. Writing Poetry. Harcourt Brace. 1983. >> >> Drury, John. Creating Poetry. Writer's Digest Books. 1991 >> Drury, John. The Poetry Dictionary. Writer's Digest Books. 1995. >> >> Elledge, Jim. Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American >> Poetry. Indiana University Press. 1994 >> >> Ellmann, Richard. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Norton. 1988 >> >> Ferguson, Margaret. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Norton. 1996 >> >> Finch, Annie, ed. A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary >> Women. Story Line Press. 1194 >> >> Fiske, Robert Hartwell and Laura Cherry, eds. Poem, Revised: 54 Poems, >> Revisions, Discussions. Marion Street Press. 2008 >> >> Fox, John. Finding What You Didn't Lose: Expressing Your Truth and >> Creativity Through Poem-Making. Tarcher/Putnam. 1995. >> >> Fox, John. Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making. >> Tarcher/Putnam. >> 1997. >> >> Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. McGraw-Hill. 1979. >> >> Goldberg, Natalie. Wr iting Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. >> Shambhala. 1986. >> >> Hall, Donald. Claims for Poetry. University of Michigan. 1982. >> >> Hass, Robert. Twentieth Century Pleasures. W.W. Norton. 1985. >> >> Hirsch, Edward. How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. Harvest. >> 1999. >> >> Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (Essays). >> HarperCollins. 1997. >> >> Hollander, John. Rhyme's Reason. Yale University Press. 1981. >> >> Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and >> Writing. Norton. 1979. >> >> Kinzie, Mary. A Poet's Guide to Poetry. The University of Chicago Press. >> 1999. >> >> Kooser, Ted. The Poetry Home Repair Manual. University of Nebraska Press. >> 2005. >> >> Kowit, Steve. In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop. >> Norton. 1997. >> >> Lammon, Martin. Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets >> on >> Poetry. University of Michigan. 1996. >> >> Lehman, David. Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading >> Contemporary >> Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems. Collier/Macmillan. 1987. >> >> Longenbach, James. The Art of the Poetic Line. Graywolf. 2007. >> >> Mayes, Frances. The Discovery of Poetry. Harvest/Harcourt. 2001. >> >> Myers, Jack. The Portable Poetry Workshop. Thomson/Wadsworth. 2005. >> >> Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Harvest Original. 1995. >> Oliver, Mary. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading >> Metrical Verse. Mariner/Houghton Mifflin. 1998 >> Oliver, Mary. Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems. Mariner Books. >> 2000. >> >> Orr, Gregory. Poetry as Survival. University of Georgia Press. 2002 >> Orr, Gregory & Ellen Bryant Voigt. Poets Teaching Poets, Self, and the >> World. University of Michigan Press. 1996. >> >> Packard, William. The Art of Poetry Writing. St. Martin's Press. 1992 >> >> Padgett, Ron. Handbook of Poetic Forms. Teachers & Writers Collaborative. >> 1987. >> >> Paschen, Elise. Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from >> Tennyson to Plath. Sourcebooks MediaFusion. 2001. >> >> Reeves, Judy. A Writer's Book of Days: A Spirited Companion and Lively >> Muse >> for the Writing Life. New World Library. 1999. >> >> Richards, Mary Caroline. Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. >> Wesleyan. 1989. >> >> Roethke, Theodore. David Wagoner, Intro. Straw for the Fire: From the >> Notebooks of Theodore Roethke. Copper Canyon Press. 2006 >> Roethke, Theodore. On Poetry and Craft. Copper Canyon Press. 2001. >> >> Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Paris Press. 1996. >> >> Snodgrass, W.D. De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Bad. Graywolf Press. >> 2001. >> 0A >> >> Sontag, Kate and David Graham, eds. After Confession: Poetry as >> Autobiography. Graywolf Press. 2001 >> >> Stafford, William. Writing the Australian Crawl. University of Michigan >> Press. 1978. >> Stafford, William. You Must Revise Your Life. University of Michigan >> Press. >> 1987. >> Stafford, William. Crossing Unmarked Snow. University of Michigan Press. >> 1998. >> Stafford, William. The Answers are Inside the Mountains. University of >> Michigan Press. 2003. >> >> Sweeney, Matthew. Writing Poetry and Getting Published. NTC Publishing. >> 1997. >> >> Turco, Lewis. The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. UPNE. 2000. >> >> Wallace, Robert. Writing Poems. HarperCollinsCollegePublishers. 1996. >> >> Webster's Compact Rhyming Dictionary. Miriam-Webster, Inc. 1987 >> >> Woolridge, Susan G. Poemcrazy: freeing your life with words. Clarkson >> Potter. 1996. >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? *Find >> out now! < >> http://shopping.aol.com/articles/2009/02/02/flowers-by-meanings/?ncid=AOLCOMMshopdrspwebf0001>* >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > -- > Tad Richards > http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ > http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ > > Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! > http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/fe49c650/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 5 18:41:41 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book of note, plus various books on craft and writing poetry In-Reply-To: References: <8CB55E73FD66716-15B8-1BB5@WEBMAIL-DZ18.sysops.aol.com><498B597B.4050402@opus40.org> Message-ID: <498B7935.9030901@nut-n-but.net> Funny, Jerry--thanks. --Bob From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 5 18:41:47 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] ubi sunt - blogs that shuffled off this virtual coil (at least for now) Message-ID: <8CB560271A2357A-115C-1883@Webmail-mg16.sim.aol.com> Having hit three years of blogging,?I got thinking about blogging and wondering whether or how long?I'd keep it up, and that got me thinking about some of the blogs on my blogroll that seem to be defunct: Reginald Shepherd really did die. A stalwart blogger who will be missed...and yet his mate does continue to post now & again in his memory... http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/ Rachel Loden, who has popped up on?NewPoetry?from time to time, was an occasional blogger but she seemed to stop for good?after posting an?obit to another poet... http://wordstrumpet.blogspot.com/ And Chris Lott, also of this list, says he's done...Maybe he'll say more about why he no longer feels the cyber magic? http://www.cosmopoetica.com/blog/ Simon DeDeo, a frequent commentator on poetry/poetics, a poetry and science guy, fell into a black hole back in March... http://rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com/ Then there is Alfred Corn who announced he was finished with blogging, but retracted of late, saying he'd blog, but less... http://alfredcornsweblog.blogspot.com/ Well, I guess new blogs will pop up?to fill the virtual voids left by the late and?dearly departed. Finnegan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/c57b11a9/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 5 19:34:09 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book of note, plus various books on craft and writingpoetry In-Reply-To: <498B7935.9030901@nut-n-but.net> References: <8CB55E73FD66716-15B8-1BB5@WEBMAIL-DZ18.sysops.aol.com><498B597B.4050402@opus40.org> <498B7935.9030901@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <498B8581.3070508@nut-n-but.net> Ooops, a misfire. --Bob From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 5 19:36:58 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:02 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] ubi sunt - blogs that shuffled off this virtual coil(at least for now) In-Reply-To: <8CB560271A2357A-115C-1883@Webmail-mg16.sim.aol.com> References: <8CB560271A2357A-115C-1883@Webmail-mg16.sim.aol.com> Message-ID: <498B862A.1020200@nut-n-but.net> I turned my blog off for three months this past summer after over three years of daily posts. But I'm back to daily--and getting as many as 7 customers at times. --Bob From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 5 20:11:47 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dirac's poetry Message-ID: <8CB560F048BB50F-1148-1312@WEBMAIL-DY35.sysops.aol.com> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/4316309/The-Strangest-Man-the-Hidden-Life-of-Paul-Dirac-by-Graham-Farmelo---review.html ?To draw its picture is like a blind man touching a snowflake,? he said. ?One touch and it?s gone.? The man behind the maths was something of a snowflake himself. Outwardly cold and untouchable. Nearly silent. Certainly unique. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090205/ff230763/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 6 09:11:09 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in Message-ID: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> http://media.www.gonzagabulletin.com/media/storage/paper375/news/2009/02/06/Entertainment/LiYoung.Lee.Exterminator.Restaurateur.And.Poet-3616895.shtml Li-young Lee: exterminator, restaurateur and poet Courtney Gullette I am a fan of "The Daily Show," but I was surprised when John Stewart joked that Obama used poetry after the inauguration as a way of clearing the crowd off the Washington Mall. There seems to be the notion today that poetry is somehow an elitist art form, existing only for academics and those who wish to join them. The more than 400 students, professors and members of the Spokane community who attended Li-Young Lee's reading seem to undermine the idea that poetry has little place in our society. As an English major I thought I was the target audience for Gonzaga's Writers Series. I was half expecting to find a sparsely seated auditorium on Tuesday night. However I was astonished as the 400 chairs in Cataldo filled and Dr. Tod Marshall recruited students to set up even more for the horde standing in the back. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/b0ab19c8/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 6 09:14:08 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Tufts winners Message-ID: <8CB567C4F2F85ED-500-27AE@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-etw-kingsleytufts-6,0,7553120.story Poets named as winners of Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards By Lee Margulies, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer February 5, 2009 Matthea Harvey, a Brooklyn, N.Y., resident who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. The prize, established in 1992 to honor work by a mid-career poet, was given for her book "Modern Life." Matthew Dickman, a Portland, Ore., writer, was selected by the Claremont judges to receive the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for his book "All-American Poem." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/ca5f83c8/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 6 09:18:50 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Man in the Newspaper Hat Message-ID: <8CB567CF7A02EEF-500-280F@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> http://broadwayworld.com/article/THE_MAN_IN_THE_NEWSPAPER_HAT_Begins_35_Runs_Thru_41_20090205 MANYTRACKS is pleased to announce the world premiere of THE MAN IN THE NEWSPAPER HAT by Hayley Heaton, directed by Katrin Hilbe. THE MAN IN THE NEWSPAPER HAT plays a three-week limited engagement at the 45th Street Theatre (345 W 45th St). Performances begin Thursday, March 5th and continue through Wednesday, April 1st. The Man in the Newspaper Hat is a fictionalized portrayal of what went into the creation of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "Visits to St. Elizabeths." Bishop wrote this poem during her visits with the controversial poet, Ezra Pound who was remanded to St. Elizabeths in 1946 after having stood trial for treason where a special jury found him incompetent. Each scene is built upon aspects of Bishop's poem and follows both characters as they come together, "poet to poet?. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/76f90436/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 6 11:43:10 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] si(gh)ting: VisPo.com Message-ID: <8CB5691211F6348-1F4-40A@WEBMAIL-DC08.sysops.aol.com> http://vispo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/0ab243c7/attachment.html From r_loden at sbcglobal.net Fri Feb 6 12:27:28 2009 From: r_loden at sbcglobal.net (Rachel Loden) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] ubi sunt - blogs that shuffled off this virtual coil (at least for now) In-Reply-To: <8CB560271A2357A-115C-1883@Webmail-mg16.sim.aol.com> Message-ID: <006801c98880$2fe29660$220110ac@GLASSCASTLE> Hey Jim, As Dr. Henry Frankenstein observed back in 1931, "It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!" Wordstrumpet will shudder to life again later this year -- as Dr. F. said, "the brain of a dead man waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands!" Happy to be on your radar, in any case, even after my temporary demise All best wishes, Rachel P.S. Now to read YOUR blog.... ________________________________ From: new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto:new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of jforjames@aol.com Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 3:42 PM To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Subject: [New-Poetry] ubi sunt - blogs that shuffled off this virtual coil(at least for now) Having hit three years of blogging, I got thinking about blogging and wondering whether or how long I'd keep it up, and that got me thinking about some of the blogs on my blogroll that seem to be defunct: Reginald Shepherd really did die. A stalwart blogger who will be missed...and yet his mate does continue to post now & again in his memory... http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/ Rachel Loden, who has popped up on NewPoetry from time to time, was an occasional blogger but she seemed to stop for good after posting an obit to another poet... http://wordstrumpet.blogspot.com/ And Chris Lott, also of this list, says he's done...Maybe he'll say more about why he no longer feels the cyber magic? http://www.cosmopoetica.com/blog/ Simon DeDeo, a frequent commentator on poetry/poetics, a poetry and science guy, fell into a black hole back in March... http://rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com/ Then there is Alfred Corn who announced he was finished with blogging, but retracted of late, saying he'd blog, but less... http://alfredcornsweblog.blogspot.com/ Well, I guess new blogs will pop up to fill the virtual voids left by the late and dearly departed. Finnegan ________________________________ Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? Find out now! From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 6 13:11:12 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] ubi sunt - blogs that shuffled off this virtual coil (at least for now) In-Reply-To: <006801c98880$2fe29660$220110ac@GLASSCASTLE> Message-ID: <8CB569D6D82178B-11AC-3CC@WEBMAIL-DY33.sysops.aol.com> Rachel, Glad to hear you alive and thriving. It's impossible to do everything. And you have young son, right? Jim Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Rachel Loden Sent: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 12:27 pm Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] ubi sunt - blogs that shuffled off this virtual coil (at least for now) Hey Jim, As Dr. Henry Frankenstein observed back in 1931, "It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!" Wordstrumpet will shudder to life again later this year -- as Dr. F. said, "the brain of a dead man waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands!" Happy to be on your radar, in any case, even after my temporary demise All best wishes, Rachel P.S. Now to read YOUR blog.... ________________________________ From: new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto:new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of jforjames@aol.com Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 3:42 PM To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Subject: [New-Poetry] ubi sunt - blogs that shuffled off this virtual coil(at least for now) Having hit three years of blogging, I got thinking about blogging and wondering whether or how long I'd keep it up, and that got me thinking about some of the blogs on my blogroll that seem to be defunct: Reginald Shepherd really did die. A stalwart blogger who will be missed...and yet his mate does continue to post now & again in his memory... http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/ Rachel Loden, who has popped up on NewPoetry from time to time, was an occasional blogger but she seemed to stop for good after posting an obit to another poet... http://wordstrumpet.blogspot.com/ And Chris Lott, also of this list, says he's done...Maybe he'll say more about why he no longer feels the cyber magic? http://www.cosmopoetica.com/blog/ Simon DeDeo, a frequent commentator on poetry/poetics, a poetry and science guy, fell into a black hole back in March... http://rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com/ Then there is Alfred Corn who announced he was finished with blogging, but retracted of late, saying he'd blog, but less... http://alfredcornsweblog.blogspot.com/ Well, I guess new blogs will pop up to fill the virtual voids left by the late and dearly departed. Finnegan ________________________________ Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? Find out now! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/e23d8c79/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 6 15:08:27 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> References: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> Message-ID: <498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net> I never heard of this guy, which is nothing new. Can anyone tell me if he packs them in because of his poetry, as opposed to because of his Message? I'm curious. --Bob G. From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Fri Feb 6 15:34:17 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net> References: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> <498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <731bb17a0902061234p4925e59cg1bf9dc6d7754d08a@mail.gmail.com> Bob, http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/291 http://www.blueflowerarts.com/li.html http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Lee.html Why not investigate? Jeff On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > I never heard of this guy, which is nothing new. Can anyone tell me if he > packs them in because of his poetry, as opposed to because of his Message? > I'm curious. > --Bob G. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experience, from which each according to his own immediate and peculiar needs may drawn his own conclusion. --W.H. Auden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/24a679ad/attachment.html From cheekc at muohio.edu Fri Feb 6 16:24:08 2009 From: cheekc at muohio.edu (cris cheek) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting In-Reply-To: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com> References: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5C2888AE-0BC9-47A1-AC43-AC069ABA971D@muohio.edu> Bunting IS in the best available anthology for 20th Century British & Irish Poetry, the Oxford; alongside several other poets that ought to be more widely discussed i the US . . . Brian Coffey, WS Graham, Lyn Robert . . . go Jeff Bunting's ear is a fine one cris On Feb 2, 2009, at 11:11 AM, Jeff Newberry wrote: > I've been reading Keith Tuma's By Obstinate Isles: Modern and > Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers and his Anthology of > Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry for my comprehensive > examinations. > > I wanted to start a conversation about a few poets that I've been > reading, poets who've not been on my radar until I started reading > for my exams. So, forgive me if some of my questions of > observations seem elementary or self-evident. > > By far, one of the most fascinating poets I've come across is Basil > Bunting, a name I'd never heard, despite my undergraduate and > graduate years as an English major. I like Briggflats quite a lot, > though I'm still grappling with the poem. Bunting's lines with > their heavy stresses and Anglo-saxon vocabulary remind me of > Pound's translation of "The Seafarer." The poem itself is a > Modernist epic (I think), so I think of Eliot and Pound immediately. > > But Bunting's concern with a particular place contrasts with > Eliot's more "universal" (not quite the right word, I know--maybe > "far-reaching?") concerns. Bunting seems concerned primarily with > this place (his place?): Northumbria. The poem burrows down into > the landscape, carving itself into the land, not unlike the mason > carving stone in the poem's opening lines. Despite his concern > with landscape, however, Bunting can't help bringing in a dose of > mythology in a later part of the poem. Indeed, the poem moves > through seasons, cyclically, depending primarily on recieved > notions--such as Spring being a time of rebirth and so on. > > So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on Bunting? And why on > earth is he so ignored? He doesn't appear (a colleague tells me-- > I've not checked) in the Norton Anthology of British Literature. > Perhaps he's not ignored; perhaps I've just missed him. > Nonetheless, I thought I'd try to open up a conversation about a > poet who really has my ear right now. > > Best, > Jeff Newberry > > -- > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/b9ee64b3/attachment.html From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Fri Feb 6 16:28:58 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting In-Reply-To: <5C2888AE-0BC9-47A1-AC43-AC069ABA971D@muohio.edu> References: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com> <5C2888AE-0BC9-47A1-AC43-AC069ABA971D@muohio.edu> Message-ID: <731bb17a0902061328j2edc1010o2a7c9c8662873c8@mail.gmail.com> Cris-- I agree. The more I've read his work, the more I like it. A few people posted some psuedo-insults on the list, but I'm not deterred. Did Keith Tuma edit the volume that you mention? Best, Jeff On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 4:24 PM, cris cheek wrote: > Bunting IS in the best available anthology for 20th Century British & Irish > Poetry, the Oxford; alongside several other poets that ought to be more > widely discussed i the US . . . Brian Coffey, WS Graham, Lyn Robert . . . > go Jeff > > Bunting's ear is a fine one > > cris > > > On Feb 2, 2009, at 11:11 AM, Jeff Newberry wrote: > > I've been reading Keith Tuma's *By Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern > British Poetry and American Readers* and his *Anthology of > Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry* for my comprehensive > examinations. > > I wanted to start a conversation about a few poets that I've been reading, > poets who've not been on my radar until I started reading for my exams. So, > forgive me if some of my questions of observations seem elementary or > self-evident. > > By far, one of the most fascinating poets I've come across is Basil > Bunting, a name I'd never heard, despite my undergraduate and graduate years > as an English major. I like *Briggflats* quite a lot, though I'm still > grappling with the poem. Bunting's lines with their heavy stresses and > Anglo-saxon vocabulary remind me of Pound's translation of "The Seafarer." > The poem itself is a Modernist epic (I think), so I think of Eliot and Pound > immediately. > > But Bunting's concern with a particular place contrasts with Eliot's more > "universal" (not quite the right word, I know--maybe "far-reaching?") > concerns. Bunting seems concerned primarily with this place (his place?): > Northumbria. The poem burrows down into the landscape, carving itself into > the land, not unlike the mason carving stone in the poem's opening lines. > Despite his concern with landscape, however, Bunting can't help bringing in > a dose of mythology in a later part of the poem. Indeed, the poem moves > through seasons, cyclically, depending primarily on recieved notions--such > as Spring being a time of rebirth and so on. > > So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on Bunting? And why on earth is > he so ignored? He doesn't appear (a colleague tells me--I've not checked) > in the Norton Anthology of British Literature. Perhaps he's not ignored; > perhaps I've just missed him. Nonetheless, I thought I'd try to open up a > conversation about a poet who really has my ear right now. > > Best, > Jeff Newberry > > -- > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experience, from which each according to his own immediate and peculiar needs may drawn his own conclusion. --W.H. Auden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/e986c8fd/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 6 17:36:00 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <731bb17a0902061234p4925e59cg1bf9dc6d7754d08a@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com><498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net> <731bb17a0902061234p4925e59cg1bf9dc6d7754d08a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <498CBB50.4060309@nut-n-but.net> Jeff Newberry wrote: > Bob, > > http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/291 > http://www.blueflowerarts.com/li.html > http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Lee.html > > Why not investigate? > > Jeff Gee, Jeff, for a minute I was going to thank you. Sometimes I'm curious about something but not curious enough to "investigate." So I use New-Poetry for what I believe one of its principal functions is--to get an answer from someone who might be able easily to provide it--the way I myself do at times. --Bob From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Fri Feb 6 18:00:45 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Tufts winners In-Reply-To: <8CB567C4F2F85ED-500-27AE@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> References: <8CB567C4F2F85ED-500-27AE@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> Message-ID: <498CC11D.5060806@opus40.org> By Matthea Harvey: SETTING THE TABLE To cut through night you'll need your sharpest scissors. Cut around the birch, the bump of the bird nest on its lowest limb. Then with your nail scissors, trim around the baby beaks waiting for worms fall from the sky. Snip around the lip of the mailbox and the pervert's shoe peeking out from behind the Chevy. Before dawn, rip the silhouette from the sky and drag it inside. Frame the long black stripe and hang it in the dining room. Sleep. When you wake, redo the scene as day in doily. Now you have a lacy fence, a huge cherry blossom of a holly bush, a birch sugared with snow. Frame the white version and hang it opposite the black. Get your dinner and eat it between the two scenes. Your food will taste just right. by Matthew Dickman SHOW US THE PLEIADES If the snow does not fall outside the hospital window then cherry blossom If the body does not float above the hospital bed then saline drip Your kingdom drops away from you like your very own face, sloped. A king transformed into a mountain. Show us your brain a blackberry Show us your tumor a lagoon Heaven is a cup of teeth, it shines. What island have we washed upon where a man must live in the pit of his own body sending notes to the rest of us on earth? Christ walks down the hall. If the snow does not fall outside the sanatorium window then rain drop Christ with his fists dragging and your name locked inside His mouth. If the body does not float above the sanatorium bed then electric shock- a body coming down the wild hall forever. And if cotton then gauze- a young surgeon holding your brain in his hands and chanting over it- the cerebral cortex the cerebellum glowing forever and ever amen If not that story then this: Lift the pillars of heaven off our tired shoulders. If death then skyscraper. Show us the Pleiades Show us the Pleiades burning outside the hospice window. jforjames@aol.com wrote: > http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-etw-kingsleytufts-6,0,7553120.story > Poets named as winners of Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards > By Lee Margulies, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer > February 5, 2009 > > Matthea Harvey, a Brooklyn, N.Y., resident who teaches at Sarah > Lawrence College, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award > from Claremont Graduate University. > > The prize, established in 1992 to honor work by a mid-career poet, was > given for her book "Modern Life." > > Matthew Dickman, a Portland, Ore., writer, was selected by the > Claremont judges to receive the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for > his book "All-American Poem." > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Carnations mean admiration, Tulips mean love - what do Roses mean? > *Find out now! > * > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Fri Feb 6 18:38:09 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:03 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] My Examiner Valentine's Day Column: How to Write a Love Poem to Your Sweetie if You're Not a Poet Message-ID: <498CC9E1.9060102@opus40.org> Valentine's Day Examiner column: How to write a love poem for your sweetie if you're not a poet. http://www.examiner.com/x-2862-NY-Writing-Careers-Examiner -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 6 19:47:01 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] On the Excellence of Housman's Poem In-Reply-To: <8CB560F048BB50F-1148-1312@WEBMAIL-DY35.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB560F048BB50F-1148-1312@WEBMAIL-DY35.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <498CDA05.3020206@nut-n-but.net> A Rough Attempt At Rating Housman's Cherry Blossom Poem II Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. A. E. Housman My paraphrase (with some metaparaphrasing in italics): Loveliest of trees, the cherry now The boughs of the cherry trees, which are the most beautiful trees Is hung with bloom along the bough, are laden with blossoms at this time And stands about the woodland ride and line the trail through the woods Wearing white for Eastertide. decked out in a white hue appropriate for Easter (/which is the happiest time of the year/) Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, At this time, twenty of the seventy years (/the Bible suggests I'll have/) are gone permanently. And take from seventy springs a score, If you subtract twenty springtimes from seventy It only leaves me fifty more. it will leave me just fifty more years of life And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, Because fifty years of springtimes don't give one much time to enjoying looking at Nature's blossomings About the woodlands I will go I'll proceed through the woods (right away) To see the cherry hung with snow. To take in (as much as I can of) the beauty of the snow-like blossoms of the cherry tree. The snow is metaphorical because: (1) the speaker is going to "look at things in bloom." (2) the speaker has be celebrating spring entirely to this point; nothing he's said indicates that he's going to wait until winter comes, then go out and look at the snow on the cherry trees (which, in any case, would be little different from the snow on other deciduous trees); among other problems with the emotional logic of this, it suggests that he is capable, after all his praise of them, of forgetting about the cherry blossoms out there for him to enjoy right now. (3) I simply can't read the poem as not being about someone fully engaged in the moment- -the speaker spends four lines speaking in the highest terms of the beauty of cherry blossoms, then six indicating how little time he has to enjoy them (the blossoms) despite his having fifty more years to live; this sets up his last two lines as close to the synthesis of a standard syllogism: cherry blossoms are worth seeing; I haven't much time to see them; therefore, I will--what? put on my snowshoes are go look at them when they have snow on their branches? Not for me. (4) the argument has been made that "snow" as a metaphor comes out of nowhere--but earlier in the poem, the trees are personified; that they are "hung" with blooms is somewhat figurative, too, suggesting, as it does, not the sprouting of blooms, but someone's going about decorating them. In any case, the metaphor in line four is an involved, important one--the trees aren't just wearing human apparel, they are celebrating the season. (5) if the poet wanted us to believe the speaker was going to look at the cherry trees in winter, he could easily have changed the poem to tell us that explicitly: for instance, by saying, "About the woods, I'll also go/ When blooms have been replaced by snow." Or the like. Why would the poet not have made sure we saw the point if it was that? Was he some kind of devious Empsonian? He doesn't seem so to me. (6) I would add that "snow" as a metaphor gives the poem a nice climax that echoes what I consider the main virtue of the poem, its contrasting light and dark, and the transient and enduring. (7) Even with its rhetoric, the poem seems to be speaking of blossoms as it ends, not of literal snow, because it ends with a near repeat of its second line. This could be taken as a clever twist--first spring, then winter; but it seems too abrupt for me, and my other arguments are against it. The final lines work far better for me as a satisfying complete return to its initial subject. By my revised check-list, this poem qualifies as excellent because: (1) it both expresses things importantly true and represents things centrally beautiful. a. it expresses the joy of an individual thinking about and anticipating seeing the beauty of cherry trees in bloom (an implied synecdoche for spring); it thus represents something centrally beautiful: a human being's love for Nature and beauty b. it expresses the belief that cherry trees in bloom and, implicitly, Nature (and existence) is not only beautiful but, in human terms, inexhaustible because a full lifetime will barely, or not, give us time fully to enjoy it; it thus expresses something that will seem to many people imprtantly true--that existence's beauty makes life worthwhile; at the same time, the poem accentuates the beauty of spring by contrasting it with winter at the end, and with arithmetic in the middle. c. blending in with a. and b. is what it suggests about the brevity of human life: we have little time to enjoy its beauty, so we should make the most of what time we have--which is so clearly importantly true that, stated in prose, it is a banality. Note, however, that Housman gives this carpe diem them an amusing twist (in keeping with the high spirits of the piece: the poem is not about making the most of the day but of one's lifetime. d. in the meantime, in stating that--for its speaker, at any rate--looking at cherry trees hung with blossoms is of first importance, it expresses something else that is importantly true to non-utilitarians: that beauty is second to nothing else in value to a human life Indeed, for the speaker, it is something to devote fifty springs to, not just a day--he isn't thinking of a fling with Persephone but marriage to her. e. at the same time, it suggests with a reference to easter, and references to spring, not to mention its focus on cherry blossoms, the cyclic ongoingness of existence: however fragile and transient Nature's cherry blossoms are, and--implicitly--human life, rebirth will occur; it thus expresses a third thing importantly true for the religious, and even for those who are not religious but believe in the kind of reincarnation Shelley and Nietzsche did (and I do); for those who don't believe in reincarnation, it still expresses the important truth that Nature itself will endure. f. finally, the poem is itself an object of beauty due to its sounds, images and diction, sufficiently so in my view for me to be able confidently to claim it represents something which is centrally beautiful--itself, in particular, and poetry, in general. (2) it is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or something that makes its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but eventually achieves Clarity; Few, I think, would argue that Housman's poem is unclear. But its full meaning takes time to get to, it seems to me. It also has a personification not brilliant but perfect for the poem that complicates the poem just enough to provide what seems to me sufficient Thematic Misdirection. I say that because I believe all figures of speech do this--they are errors generating confusion it takes a mind a few seconds to overcome. Metrical poetry also is different enough from prose to slow a reader's journey toward understanding the poem in whole. This poem is far from having the thematic misdirection many poems have, but it has enough, so gets a check here. (3) it has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which pulls its elements reasonably close together; I presented my interpretation of the poem as a unified set of four consequential truths and a closely inter-related representation of beauty. Its packaging as a lyric poem of beauty further unifies it. So the poem scores well here. (4) it contains few or no superfluous words; All the poem's words seem necessary either to its meaning or its acoustics, and only rarely not to both. All metrical poems have occasional words that are there for the metrics or rhyme almost entirely, or fall out of one or the other of those things to maintain meaning. So the poem gets a check here, too. (5) it boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have such as uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual art), and imagery; To me the main special constituent this poem has that few of no other poems have is the wry interruption from pure, almost too sweet lyric, into grade school arithmetic it takes-- with a Biblical allusion giving it ponderousness completely opposed to the lightness of cherry blossoms, and delight in cherry blossoms. This strikes me as a wonderful change of tone: cerebral analysis versus emotional spontaneity, heaviness versus gaiety, play, implicitly, versus duty. I suspect but would not swear that the poem also has a melodiousness rare in poetry, a melodiousness kept from excess by the speaker's drawn-out calculations. One other triumph it achieves, although I would not call it uncommonly effective, is its personification of the cherry trees as wearing white garments to celebrate Easter. We're in the archetypal here: Spring! Rebirth! Celebration! Joy! Universal Love of Existence! (6) it avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or thought; too overt Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; I give it a check here, too. It uses a standard form, but it's one appropriate to a fairly serious albeit happy work: pentameter and tetrameter (as opposed to Dickinson's more jingly tetrameter and trimeter), with missing weak stresses at the beginning of several lines, which enlivens the poem, to my ear. Nothing brilliant about the rhymes, but they work as well as the rhymes or just about any poem. "Along the bough," for instance, is pretty clearly in the poem for meter and rhyme since it's unneeded for the meaning--where else would blooms be hung? But it works so well melodationally, one can't reasonably criticize it. "Is hung with bloom along the bough" not only closes an end-rhyme, but carries out a b- and an l-alliteration, and a g-consonance, and four open vowels combine with the two l's and the w to liquify the line, the l's in particular carrying on the l- alliteration that begins the poem, and continues into the third line. And the w's go on in the rest of this stanza to form a 4-member alliteration. The sound effects in the rest of the poem are similarly effective. And, as I mentioned in my brief against taking "snow" as literal snow, the poem is a near-perfectly crafted little mechanism, with a theme stated at its beginning, veered rather distantly from, then returned triumphantly to. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/86b43f08/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 6 20:33:00 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <498CBB50.4060309@nut-n-but.net> References: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com><498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net><731bb17a0902061234p4925e59cg1bf9dc6d7754d08a@mail.gmail.com> <498CBB50.4060309@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <8CB56DB255D7960-14C8-14B9@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> Bob, I think this is a gotcha moment. You oft complain about our lack of attention to VisPoers & those whose poetic practice is 'otherstream', and often you are right, but now, by acknowledging?? you don't?know nothin' about Li-Young Lee...that's like being under a VizPo rock for a decade or more. Li-Young Lee has been a fixture of the contemporary scene for at least 10 years. His book Rose is an all time best seller among contemporary poetry. It's probably not too much a stretch to say that sales of Rose have kept Boa Editions in business. http://www.boaeditions.org/bookstore/details.php?prodId=129 Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Bob Grumman Sent: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 5:36 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in Jeff Newberry wrote:? > Bob,? >? > http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/291? > http://www.blueflowerarts.com/li.html? > http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Lee.html? >? > Why not investigate?? >? > Jeff? Gee, Jeff, for a minute I was going to thank you. Sometimes I'm curious about something but not curious enough to "investigate." So I use New-Poetry for what I believe one of its principal functions is--to get an answer from someone who might be able easily to provide it--the way I myself do at times.? ? --Bob? ? _______________________________________________? New-Poetry mailing list? New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu? http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/83b78f9f/attachment.html From gejs1 at rochester.rr.com Fri Feb 6 21:13:35 2009 From: gejs1 at rochester.rr.com (Gerald Schwartz) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in References: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com><498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net><731bb17a0902061234p4925e59cg1bf9dc6d7754d08a@mail.gmail.com><498CBB50.4060309@nut-n-but.net> <8CB56DB255D7960-14C8-14B9@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <5B4002C887344B9CA91AF4AF7C086772@yourae066c3a9b> Li-Young Lee and Kim Addonizio seem to be a matched set... both at Boa... ... neither, however, ever did to a crowd what Lux Interior did... and then some-- Gerald S. Bob, I think this is a gotcha moment. You oft complain about our lack of attention to VisPoers & those whose poetic practice is 'otherstream', and often you are right, but now, by acknowledging you don't know nothin' about Li-Young Lee...that's like being under a VizPo rock for a decade or more. Li-Young Lee has been a fixture of the contemporary scene for at least 10 years. His book Rose is an all time best seller among contemporary poetry. It's probably not too much a stretch to say that sales of Rose have kept Boa Editions in business. http://www.boaeditions.org/bookstore/details.php?prodId=129 Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Bob Grumman Sent: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 5:36 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in Jeff Newberry wrote: > Bob, > > http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/291 > http://www.blueflowerarts.com/li.html > http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Lee.html > > Why not investigate? > > Jeff Gee, Jeff, for a minute I was going to thank you. Sometimes I'm curious about something but not curious enough to "investigate." So I use New-Poetry for what I believe one of its principal functions is--to get an answer from someone who might be able easily to provide it--the way I myself do at times. --Bob _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Great Deals on Dell Laptops. Starting at $499. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/b3f8b62f/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 6 21:21:10 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <5B4002C887344B9CA91AF4AF7C086772@yourae066c3a9b> References: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com><498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net><731bb17a0902061234p4925e59cg1bf9dc6d7754d08a@mail.gmail.com><498CBB50.4060309@nut-n-but.net><8CB56DB255D7960-14C8-14B9@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> <5B4002C887344B9CA91AF4AF7C086772@yourae066c3a9b> Message-ID: <8CB56E1E069A1F4-14C8-169D@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> You're Crampin' my style, man. Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Gerald Schwartz Sent: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 9:13 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in Li-Young Lee and Kim Addonizio seem to be a matched set... both at Boa... ? .... neither, however, ever did to a crowd what Lux Interior did... and then some-- ? Gerald S. Bob, I think this is a gotcha moment. You oft complain about our lack of attention to VisPoers & those whose poetic practice is 'otherstream', and often you are right, but now, by acknowledging?? you don't?know nothin' about Li-Young Lee...that's like being under a VizPo rock for a decade or more. Li-Young Lee has been a fixture of the contemporary scene for at least 10 years. His book Rose is an all time best seller among contemporary poetry. It's probably not too much a stretch to say that sales of Rose have kept Boa Editions in business. http://www.boaeditions.org/bookstore/details.php?prodId=129 Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Bob Grumman Sent: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 5:36 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in Jeff Newberry wrote:? > Bob,? >? > http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/291? > http://www.blueflowerarts.com/li.html? > http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Lee.html? >? > Why not investigate?? >? > Jeff? Gee, Jeff, for a minute I was going to thank you. Sometimes I'm curious about something but not curious enough to "investigate." So I use New-Poetry for what I believe one of its principal functions is--to get an answer from someone who might be able easily to provide it--the way I myself do at times.? ? --Bob? ? _______________________________________________? New-Poetry mailing list? New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu? http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry? Great Deals on Dell Laptops. Starting at $499. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090206/94956838/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 6 21:30:41 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (bobgrumman@nut-n-but.net) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in Message-ID: <1fe5540520cb4ad2a12a9bccb3470523.bobgrumman@nut-n-but.net> ------- Original Message ------- >From : Gerald Schwartz[mailto:gejs1@rochester.rr.com] Sent : 2/6/2009 9:13:35 PM To : new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Cc : Subject : RE: Re: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in Li-Young Lee and Kim Addonizio seem to be a matched set... both at Boa... ... neither, however, ever did to a crowd what Lux Interior did... and then some-- Gerald S. Bob, I think this is a gotcha moment. You oft complain about our lack of attention to VisPoers & those whose poetic practice is 'otherstream', and often you are right, but now, by acknowledging you don't know nothin' about Li-Young Lee...that's like being under a VizPo rock for a decade or more. Li-Young Lee has been a fixture of the contemporary scene for at least 10 years. His book Rose is an all time best seller among contemporary poetry. It's probably not too much a stretch to say that sales of Rose have kept Boa Editions in business. http://www.boaeditions.org/bookstore/details.php?prodId=129 Finnegan And I should have heard of one knownstreamer? Why? That's not ignoring a whole field of poetry. There are good visual poets I've never heard of. Now, is he popular because of his poetry or because of his message? --Bob From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 07:44:17 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] My Examiner Valentine's Day Column: How to Write a Love Poem to Your Sweetie if You're Not a Poet In-Reply-To: <498CC9E1.9060102@opus40.org> References: <498CC9E1.9060102@opus40.org> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902070444sf30fbc6qfbb8620aa76f3004@mail.gmail.com> Interesting, will do ... On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 12:38 AM, TheOldMole wrote: > Valentine's Day Examiner column: How to write a love poem for your sweetie > if you're not a poet. > > http://www.examiner.com/x-2862-NY-Writing-Careers-Examiner > > -- > Tad Richards > http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ > http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ > > Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! > http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/b0d8c63d/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sat Feb 7 07:58:34 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Marilyn Chin Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902070458y9c8d2d2me8ccf09ff9384c1b@mail.gmail.com> A dear friend just sent me this excellent [Excellent] poem, Turtle Soup, by Marilyn Chin. Best, Judy who enjoys Chin's humour as well as her other Excellent poetic bits ------------------------------ *Turtle Soup* You go home one evening tired from work, and your mother boils you turtle soup. Twelve hours hunched over the hearth (who knows what else is in that cauldron). You say, "Ma, you've poached the symbol of long life; that turtle lived four thousand years, swam the Wet, up the Yellow, over the Yangtze. Witnessed the Bronze Age, the High Tang, grazed on splendid sericulture." (So, she boils the life out of him.) "All our ancestors have been fools. Remember Uncle Wu who rode ten thousand miles to kill a famous Manchu and ended up with his head on a pole? Eat, child, its liver will make you strong." "Sometimes you're the life, sometimes the sacrifice." Her sobbing is inconsolable. So, you spread that gentle napkin over your lap in decorous Pasadena. Baby, some high priestess has got it wrong. The golden decal on the green underbelly says "Made in Hong Kong." Is there nothing left but the shell and humanity's strange inscriptions, the songs, the rites, the oracles? FOR BEN HUANG Copyright (c) 1993 by Marilyn Chin, from *The Pheonix Gone, The Terrace Empty *Online Source: http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/users/m/mdherrin/turtle.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/bae87ea9/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 08:30:29 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Marilyn Chin In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902070458y9c8d2d2me8ccf09ff9384c1b@mail.gmail.com> References: <7db1d01b0902070458y9c8d2d2me8ccf09ff9384c1b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902070530u7df360c2t42f0dd0234a6c47e@mail.gmail.com> I know this poem. On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Judy Prince wrote: > A dear friend just sent me this excellent [Excellent] poem, Turtle Soup, by > Marilyn Chin. > Best, > > Judy who enjoys Chin's humour as well as her other Excellent poetic bits > > ------------------------------ > > *Turtle Soup* > > You go home one evening tired from work, > and your mother boils you turtle soup. > Twelve hours hunched over the hearth > (who knows what else is in that cauldron). > > You say, "Ma, you've poached the symbol of long life; > that turtle lived four thousand years, swam > the Wet, up the Yellow, over the Yangtze. > Witnessed the Bronze Age, the High Tang, > grazed on splendid sericulture." > (So, she boils the life out of him.) > > "All our ancestors have been fools. > Remember Uncle Wu who rode ten thousand miles > to kill a famous Manchu and ended up > with his head on a pole? Eat, child, > its liver will make you strong." > > "Sometimes you're the life, sometimes the sacrifice." > Her sobbing is inconsolable. > So, you spread that gentle napkin > over your lap in decorous Pasadena. > > Baby, some high priestess has got it wrong. > The golden decal on the green underbelly > says "Made in Hong Kong." > > Is there nothing left but the shell > and humanity's strange inscriptions, > the songs, the rites, the oracles? > > FOR BEN HUANG > > Copyright (c) 1993 by Marilyn Chin, from *The Pheonix Gone, The Terrace > Empty > *Online Source: http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/users/m/mdherrin/turtle.html > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/bb6894c5/attachment.html From cheekc at muohio.edu Sat Feb 7 08:38:27 2009 From: cheekc at muohio.edu (cris cheek) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting In-Reply-To: <731bb17a0902061328j2edc1010o2a7c9c8662873c8@mail.gmail.com> References: <731bb17a0902020811q40a021bcr4e817ff0664107ae@mail.gmail.com> <5C2888AE-0BC9-47A1-AC43-AC069ABA971D@muohio.edu> <731bb17a0902061328j2edc1010o2a7c9c8662873c8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <176A5F44-7006-4EC2-9E4A-EF04A45A92ED@muohio.edu> Yes, the Oxford is Keith's work. It's going to stand in the way of contenders for some time yet. Not because it is perfect. No anthology could claim to be. Because it makes a great attempt to represent the full range of what's been going on on in British and Irish poetries throughout the 20th Century. And because the annotations, compiled by Nate Dorward are extremely fine. Bunting's presence played an important role. Almost a reluctant one in that he did not seem to seek the limelight. The tale of Tom Pickard's encouragement is salutary. Briggflatt's is simply "one" of the really great long poems written in England in the 20th Century. cris On Feb 6, 2009, at 4:28 PM, Jeff Newberry wrote: > Cris-- > > I agree. The more I've read his work, the more I like it. A few > people posted some psuedo-insults on the list, but I'm not deterred. > > Did Keith Tuma edit the volume that you mention? > > Best, > Jeff > > On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 4:24 PM, cris cheek wrote: > Bunting IS in the best available anthology for 20th Century British > & Irish Poetry, the Oxford; alongside several other poets that > ought to be more widely discussed i the US . . . Brian Coffey, WS > Graham, Lyn Robert . . . > > go Jeff > > Bunting's ear is a fine one > > cris > > > On Feb 2, 2009, at 11:11 AM, Jeff Newberry wrote: > >> I've been reading Keith Tuma's By Obstinate Isles: Modern and >> Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers and his Anthology >> of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry for my comprehensive >> examinations. >> >> I wanted to start a conversation about a few poets that I've been >> reading, poets who've not been on my radar until I started reading >> for my exams. So, forgive me if some of my questions of >> observations seem elementary or self-evident. >> >> By far, one of the most fascinating poets I've come across is >> Basil Bunting, a name I'd never heard, despite my undergraduate >> and graduate years as an English major. I like Briggflats quite a >> lot, though I'm still grappling with the poem. Bunting's lines >> with their heavy stresses and Anglo-saxon vocabulary remind me of >> Pound's translation of "The Seafarer." The poem itself is a >> Modernist epic (I think), so I think of Eliot and Pound immediately. >> >> But Bunting's concern with a particular place contrasts with >> Eliot's more "universal" (not quite the right word, I know--maybe >> "far-reaching?") concerns. Bunting seems concerned primarily with >> this place (his place?): Northumbria. The poem burrows down into >> the landscape, carving itself into the land, not unlike the mason >> carving stone in the poem's opening lines. Despite his concern >> with landscape, however, Bunting can't help bringing in a dose of >> mythology in a later part of the poem. Indeed, the poem moves >> through seasons, cyclically, depending primarily on recieved >> notions--such as Spring being a time of rebirth and so on. >> >> So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on Bunting? And why on >> earth is he so ignored? He doesn't appear (a colleague tells me-- >> I've not checked) in the Norton Anthology of British Literature. >> Perhaps he's not ignored; perhaps I've just missed him. >> Nonetheless, I thought I'd try to open up a conversation about a >> poet who really has my ear right now. >> >> Best, >> Jeff Newberry >> >> -- >> >> > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > -- > You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; > and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular > people and experience, from which each according to his own > immediate and peculiar needs may drawn his own conclusion. --W.H. > Auden > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/d8b32318/attachment.html From editor at pavementsaw.org Sat Feb 7 11:20:25 2009 From: editor at pavementsaw.org (David Baratier) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in Message-ID: <13548.38381.qm@web45601.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Gerry-- What is a Lux interior? Also there is a logic problem with using this Li Young Lee reading as proof of the importance of poetry. If one of the best known US poets can only muster an audience on his own of 400, it proves the opposite. Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press 321 Empire Street Montpelier OH 43543 http://pavementsaw.org Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Feb 7 11:24:30 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] On the Excellence of Housman's Poem In-Reply-To: <498CDA05.3020206@nut-n-but.net> References: <8CB560F048BB50F-1148-1312@WEBMAIL-DY35.sysops.aol.com> <498CDA05.3020206@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <498DB5BE.9010406@nut-n-but.net> I forgot something when I posted my little essay: a thank you to New-Poetry for being here for me to post it to, and to all whose comments and ideas on excellence in poetry and on this poem in particular, including many opposed to mine, that I stole or bounced off of into enlargements or improvements of ones I already had. I know I sound now like someone who just won a Tuft's Prize or something, but I consider my essay, still in progress though I'm sure it is, an important minor achievement for me, however others may view it. --Bob From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sat Feb 7 11:29:02 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:04 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <13548.38381.qm@web45601.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <13548.38381.qm@web45601.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498DB6CE.9080603@opus40.org> The writer, a college student, is saying that an audience of 400 indicates that poetry is much more important on her campus than she might have supposed. If a popular lecture -- on the Darwin anniversary, let's say -- draws 15,000 on the same campus, then she's wrong. If it draws, say, 600, then she's still right. David Baratier wrote: > Gerry-- > > What is a Lux interior? > > Also there is a logic problem with using this Li Young Lee reading as proof of the importance of poetry. If one of the best known US poets can only muster an audience on his own of 400, it proves the opposite. > > Be well > > David Baratier, Editor > > Pavement Saw Press > 321 Empire Street > Montpelier OH 43543 > http://pavementsaw.org > > Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at > http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Feb 7 11:41:20 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <8CB56E1E069A1F4-14C8-169D@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com><498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net><731bb17a0902061234p4925e59cg1bf9d c6d7754d08a@mail.gmail.com><498CBB50.4060309@nut-n-but.net><8CB56DB255D7960-14C8-14B9@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com><5B4002C88734 4B9CA91AF4AF7C086772@yourae066c3a9b> <8CB56E1E069A1F4-14C8-169D@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <498DB9B0.3020309@nut-n-but.net> Follow-up note. My complaint is not with people who privately bother only with one kind of poetry, but with those who publish books of "the best" poem (of all kinds) of a year, or give out money or paid vacations to poets, or teach classes in contemporary poetry not devoted specifically to one poet or kind of poetry, or write criticism supposedly of poetry in general, and ignore important entire schools of it like visual poetry. If if were chosen to do any of those things, I would make sure I got as good an idea as possible of what poetry was out there, including Lee's, including commercially-successful poetry (which I admit to knowing close to zero about since Bukowski kicked off and McKuen slipped out of fame)--because I would research it and ask for help. My press has published poetry ranging from, yes, Iowa Plaintext Lyrics, to "asemic" poetry (which I refuse to accept as poetry but am willing to publish, anyway). I've reviewed poetry of various contemporary schools for /American Book Review/--though its editors only let me review an otherstream poet once. I will admit that I no longer keep up with poetry, and never did to a tenth of the extent people like David do. But if any of the many reporters who constantly interview me ever asks me to describe the State Of Contemporary American Poetry, I will forthrightly say that I lack the data to do an accurate job of that, but that THE &$##%!!@#ESTABLISHME NTHATESVISUALPOETRYBECA US EOFHOWMUCHB ETTERTHAN--. I mean, I will say that the only good poets current are those posting to New-Poetry . . . except for that Anny woman. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/411888af/attachment.html From halvard at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 11:42:00 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <498DB9B0.3020309@nut-n-but.net> References: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> <498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net> <498CBB50.4060309@nut-n-but.net> <8CB56DB255D7960-14C8-14B9@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> <8CB56E1E069A1F4-14C8-169D@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> <498DB9B0.3020309@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: Keeping up with poetry! Now there's a concept. Hal On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Follow-up note. My complaint is not with people who privately bother only > with one kind of poetry, but with those who publish books of "the best" poem > (of all kinds) of a year, or give out money or paid vacations to poets, or > teach classes in contemporary poetry not devoted specifically to one poet or > kind of poetry, or write criticism supposedly of poetry in general, and > ignore important entire schools of it like visual poetry. If if were chosen > to do any of those things, I would make sure I got as good an idea as > possible of what poetry was out there, including Lee's, including > commercially-successful poetry (which I admit to knowing close to zero about > since Bukowski kicked off and McKuen slipped out of fame)--because I would > research it and ask for help. > > My press has published poetry ranging from, yes, Iowa Plaintext Lyrics, to > "asemic" poetry (which I refuse to accept as poetry but am willing to > publish, anyway). I've reviewed poetry of various contemporary schools for > *American Book Review*--though its editors only let me review an > otherstream poet once. I will admit that I no longer keep up with poetry, > and never did to a tenth of the extent people like David do. But if any of > the many reporters who constantly interview me ever asks me to describe the > State Of Contemporary American Poetry, I will forthrightly say that I lack > the data to do an accurate job of that, but that THE &$##%!!@#ESTABLISHME > NTHATESVISUALPOETRYBECA > US EOFHOWMUCHB ETTERTHAN--. I mean, I will say that the only good poets > current are those posting to New-Poetry . . . except for that Anny woman. > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/dcb329ef/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sat Feb 7 11:46:24 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: References: <8CB567BE49AB9F1-500-2773@Webmail-mg05.sim.aol.com> <498C98BB.8010401@nut-n-but.net> <498CBB50.4060309@nut-n-but.net> <8CB56DB255D7960-14C8-14B9@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> <8CB56E1E069A1F4-14C8-169D@webmail-da07.sysops.aol.com> <498DB9B0.3020309@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <498DBAE0.4030709@opus40.org> I have enough trouble keeping up with the Johnsons. Halvard Johnson wrote: > Keeping up with poetry! Now there's a concept. > > Hal > > On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Bob Grumman > wrote: > > Follow-up note. My complaint is not with people who privately > bother only with one kind of poetry, but with those who publish > books of "the best" poem (of all kinds) of a year, or give out > money or paid vacations to poets, or teach classes in contemporary > poetry not devoted specifically to one poet or kind of poetry, or > write criticism supposedly of poetry in general, and ignore > important entire schools of it like visual poetry. If if were > chosen to do any of those things, I would make sure I got as good > an idea as possible of what poetry was out there, including Lee's, > including commercially-successful poetry (which I admit to knowing > close to zero about since Bukowski kicked off and McKuen slipped > out of fame)--because I would research it and ask for help. > > My press has published poetry ranging from, yes, Iowa Plaintext > Lyrics, to "asemic" poetry (which I refuse to accept as poetry but > am willing to publish, anyway). I've reviewed poetry of various > contemporary schools for /American Book Review/--though its > editors only let me review an otherstream poet once. I will admit > that I no longer keep up with poetry, and never did to a tenth of > the extent people like David do. But if any of the many reporters > who constantly interview me ever asks me to describe the State Of > Contemporary American Poetry, I will forthrightly say that I lack > the data to do an accurate job of that, but that THE > &$##%!!@#ESTABLISHME NTHATESVISUALPOETRYBECA > US EOFHOWMUCHB ETTERTHAN--. I mean, I will say that the only good > poets current are those posting to New-Poetry . . . except for > that Anny woman. > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > -- > > Halvard Johnson > ================ > halvard@gmail.com > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html > > http://entropyandme.blogspot.com > http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com > http://www.hamiltonstone.org > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Feb 7 11:50:28 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <498DB6CE.9080603@opus40.org> References: <13548.38381.qm@web45601.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <498DB6CE.9080603@opus40.org> Message-ID: <498DBBD4.2090302@nut-n-but.net> TheOldMole wrote: > The writer, a college student, is saying that an audience of 400 > indicates that poetry is much more important on her campus than she > might have supposed. If a popular lecture -- on the Darwin > anniversary, let's say -- draws 15,000 on the same campus, then she's > wrong. If it draws, say, 600, then she's still right. > There is also the problem of why the poet is popular. Is it due, I still want to know, to his poetry or his message? If the Pope had a book of poems published and drew a crowd of 400 or 4000 to a reading, would it indicate poetry is popular? --Bob G. > David Baratier wrote: >> Gerry-- >> >> What is a Lux interior? >> >> Also there is a logic problem with using this Li Young Lee reading as >> proof of the importance of poetry. If one of the best known US poets >> can only muster an audience on his own of 400, it proves the opposite. >> Be well >> >> David Baratier, Editor >> >> Pavement Saw Press >> 321 Empire Street >> Montpelier OH 43543 >> http://pavementsaw.org >> >> Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at >> http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > From grahamd at ripon.edu Sat Feb 7 12:05:17 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <498DB6CE.9080603@opus40.org> References: <13548.38381.qm@web45601.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <498DB6CE.9080603@opus40.org> Message-ID: <40037250-979E-454F-BFB7-B5F13DA0EA4F@ripon.edu> This argument really refuses to die a decent death, rising every so often from the ashes to totter around and scare poets anew and give highbrow journalists an easy topic to tut-tut about. Usually in the absence of any facts beyond a couple flashy anecdotes. Poetry's not as popular as bread & circuses, and never has been. My guess is that at least as many Americans read a bit of poetry now and then as attend modern dance performances, but I can't prove that, and you probably can't disprove it, either. It's apples-and-oranges and a distraction from all things important and holy anyway. A given: more people watch pro wrestling than read Li-Young Lee. But is that really the most interesting comparison to keep making, whether you're Edmund Wilson or Dana Gioia? The curious matter is that poetry's death is such an old story. Why, as Donald Hall asked in an essay many years back, do so many poets and others yearn to declare poetry dead? Especially when there is rather a lot of evidence to the contrary. Now *that's* a fascinating question. See Hall's essays for what is still, to my knowledge, the best treatment of this issue. "Death to the Death of Poetry" would be a decent place to start. For my part, I've been attending poetry readings for more than 30 years which were lively and packed with listeners, in many states across the land, on and off campus. For decades now I've seen poets like Gwendolyn Brooks or Robert Bly routinely draw much bigger audiences than lectures on anthropology or the films of Ingmar Bergman, for instance. A couple weeks ago on my college campus a poet even I've never heard of drew an audience of about 30 or 40 to a reading that no one was required to attend. That's simply not unusual, in my experience. Should I moan because, across town, Beyonce is filling a stadium? In a world where even a poet as obscure as myself has read to audiences in the triple digits more than once, I believe that the notion of poetry's "popularity" is, at least, complicated. Bob G is still fussing, I see, because no one will rise to his bait & declare that Li-Young Lee is or is not "popular" due to his "message." That's probably because it *is* so obviously bait, and not indicative of a desire to know more about Li-Young Lee. Jeff Newberry and Jim Finnegan already nailed him on that. Bob's question is also, just incidentally, a nice example of the fallacy of bifurcation. I mean, was Shakespeare popular "because" of his skill as a playwright, or because there are murders and lots of sex jokes in his plays? For extra credit: what *was* the message in *Othello*, anyway? ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/0a0ab7cd/attachment.html From halvard at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 12:10:04 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <40037250-979E-454F-BFB7-B5F13DA0EA4F@ripon.edu> References: <13548.38381.qm@web45601.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <498DB6CE.9080603@opus40.org> <40037250-979E-454F-BFB7-B5F13DA0EA4F@ripon.edu> Message-ID: Hey, even when that Yevtushenko guy used to fill soccer stadiums in the USSR backin the good, old Cold War days, that was almost entirely because there wasn't anything good on TV. Hal On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 11:05 AM, David Graham wrote: > This argument really refuses to die a decent death, rising every so often > from the ashes to totter around and scare poets anew and give highbrow > journalists an easy topic to tut-tut about. Usually in the absence of any > facts beyond a couple flashy anecdotes. > Poetry's not as popular as bread & circuses, and never has been. > > My guess is that at least as many Americans read a bit of poetry now and > then as attend modern dance performances, but I can't prove that, and you > probably can't disprove it, either. It's apples-and-oranges and a > distraction from all things important and holy anyway. > > A given: more people watch pro wrestling than read Li-Young Lee. But is > that really the most interesting comparison to keep making, whether you're > Edmund Wilson or Dana Gioia? > > The curious matter is that poetry's death is such an old story. Why, as > Donald Hall asked in an essay many years back, do so many poets and others > yearn to declare poetry dead? Especially when there is rather a lot of > evidence to the contrary. Now *that's* a fascinating question. See Hall's > essays for what is still, to my knowledge, the best treatment of this issue. > "Death to the Death of Poetry" would be a decent place to start. > > For my part, I've been attending poetry readings for more than 30 years > which were lively and packed with listeners, in many states across the land, > on and off campus. For decades now I've seen poets like Gwendolyn Brooks or > Robert Bly routinely draw much bigger audiences than lectures on > anthropology or the films of Ingmar Bergman, for instance. A couple weeks > ago on my college campus a poet even I've never heard of drew an audience of > about 30 or 40 to a reading that no one was required to attend. That's > simply not unusual, in my experience. > > Should I moan because, across town, Beyonce is filling a stadium? > > In a world where even a poet as obscure as myself has read to audiences in > the triple digits more than once, I believe that the notion of poetry's > "popularity" is, at least, complicated. > > Bob G is still fussing, I see, because no one will rise to his bait & > declare that Li-Young Lee is or is not "popular" due to his "message." > That's probably because it *is* so obviously bait, and not indicative of a > desire to know more about Li-Young Lee. Jeff Newberry and Jim Finnegan > already nailed him on that. Bob's question is also, just incidentally, a > nice example of the fallacy of bifurcation. I mean, was Shakespeare popular > "because" of his skill as a playwright, or because there are murders and > lots of sex jokes in his plays? > > For extra credit: what *was* the message in *Othello*, anyway? > > ======================================== > David Graham > grahamd@ripon.edu > > Home Page: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz > > Poetry Library: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html > ========================================== > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/15e646f9/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Feb 7 12:52:57 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <40037250-979E-454F-BFB7-B5F13DA0EA4F@ripon.edu> References: <13548.38381.qm@web45601.mail.sp1.yahoo.com><498DB6CE.9080603@opus40.org> <40037250-979E-454F-BFB7-B5F13DA0EA4F@ripon.edu> Message-ID: <498DCA79.6050409@nut-n-but.net> Bob G is still fussing, I see, because no one will rise to his bait & declare that Li-Young Lee is or is not "popular" due to his "message." That's probably because it *is* so obviously bait, and not indicative of a desire to know more about Li-Young Lee. Right, David. But I always answer your baited questions, and you--oddly--never respond to my answers. > Jeff Newberry and Jim Finnegan already nailed him on that. And I revealed the weakness of their case--without rebuttal so far. > Bob's question is also, just incidentally, a nice example of the > fallacy of bifurcation. I mean, was Shakespeare popular "because" of > his skill as a playwright, or because there are murders and lots of > sex jokes in his plays? Both, David. My question was a casual one that I thought anyone reading it would take to be "is Lee's popularity based on his being some kind of new-age prophet, as the text on him suggested to me he is, as well as a poet or is it based purely on what he does as a poet? This is central to whether his popularity indicates that poetry as poetry is popular or not. I truly don't know but I truly am not interested enough in popular poetry to find out on my own. > > > For extra credit: what *was* the message in *Othello*, anyway? That jealousy is a bad thing. --Bob G. From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 13:37:31 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Segantini and the bad mothers Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902071037y2636f01aiea84d1be24afa4a9@mail.gmail.com> I am wondering, am I the only one who thinks that The Bad Mothers are simply "bad mothers"? http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.asp?venue=2&id=30 My assumption starts from a very simple linguistic statement, that a mother is a woman who has a child. A female human being who does not have a child is defined a woman, a girl, a lady, ... but not a "mother". I am specifically denying the following: The Punishment of Lust belongs to a series of paintings produced between 1891-96 on the theme of bad mothers (cattive madri). Segantini was inspired by Nirvana, a poem written by the 12th century monk Luigi Illica in imitation of the Indian text Panghiavahli. Illica's poem contained the phrase 'la Mala Madre' (the bad or wicked mother with an echo similar to 'la mala femmina' or prostitute) to describe those women who refused the responsibilities of motherhood. -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/9b5c8f39/attachment.html From gejs1 at rochester.rr.com Sat Feb 7 14:48:35 2009 From: gejs1 at rochester.rr.com (Gerald Schwartz) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in References: <13548.38381.qm@web45601.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <466B731155A74091AC4915CCB1EE197A@yourae066c3a9b> Lux Interior, along with partner Poison Ivy, fronted The Cramps... He passed from this to a hotter coil the other day. '86 or '87 saw them @ the Q. Same year as the Chilli Peppers... and Living Colour, 247 Spyz... Wasn't I using a Lee draw as proof, didn't mean to at least. (Was being haughty/ sarcastic... thinking someone like Lux had so much more to put in front of an audience than a Lee, etc.) But, since Interior's death and Lee's "draw" entered into my consciousness at the same time, decided something need be (in a twisted-lime kinda way)said. On a same note, I did see Sala in the late seventies, opening for the Stooges, holding the stage with the best of them. g. > Gerry-- > > What is a Lux interior? > > Also there is a logic problem with using this Li Young Lee reading as > proof of the importance of poetry. If one of the best known US poets can > only muster an audience on his own of 400, it proves the opposite. > > Be well > > David Baratier, Editor > > Pavement Saw Press > 321 Empire Street > Montpelier OH 43543 > http://pavementsaw.org > > Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at > http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > From cervantes.james at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 17:42:47 2009 From: cervantes.james at gmail.com (James Cervantes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <466B731155A74091AC4915CCB1EE197A@yourae066c3a9b> References: <13548.38381.qm@web45601.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <466B731155A74091AC4915CCB1EE197A@yourae066c3a9b> Message-ID: <648208b60902071442y46d9405ek2b0d08e752f89f68@mail.gmail.com> Just reading the name/term "Lux Interior" was like lighting a sparkler and I should have ridden one of the little comets and written a poem. None of the little lights had anything to do with a punk group or particular persona. Now "Lux Interior" is tainted, so to speak. Can it be cleansed? - Jim On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Gerald Schwartz wrote: > > Lux Interior, along with partner Poison Ivy, > fronted The Cramps... > He passed from this to a hotter coil the other > day. > > '86 or '87 saw them @ the Q. > > Same year as the Chilli Peppers... and Living > Colour, 247 Spyz... > > Wasn't I using a Lee draw as proof, didn't mean > to at least. (Was being haughty/ sarcastic... thinking > someone like Lux had so much more to put in front of > > an audience than a Lee, etc.) > But, since Interior's death and Lee's "draw" entered into my > consciousness at the same time, decided something need be > (in a twisted-lime kinda way)said. > > On a same note, I did see Sala in the late seventies, opening for > the Stooges, holding the stage with the best of them. > > g. > >> Gerry-- >> >> What is a Lux interior? >> >> Also there is a logic problem with using this Li Young Lee reading as >> proof of the importance of poetry. If one of the best known US poets can >> only muster an audience on his own of 400, it proves the opposite. >> >> Be well >> >> David Baratier, Editor >> >> Pavement Saw Press >> 321 Empire Street >> Montpelier OH 43543 >> http://pavementsaw.org >> >> Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at >> http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From amanda at surkont.com Sat Feb 7 17:48:34 2009 From: amanda at surkont.com (Amanda Surkont) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:05 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <40037250-979E-454F-BFB7-B5F13DA0EA4F@ripon.edu> Message-ID: <917296.5697.qm@web1108.biz.mail.sk1.yahoo.com> Because it makes them feel better about not getting paid for it... .best, manda --- On Sat, 2/7/09, David Graham wrote: References: <8CB560F048BB50F-1148-1312@WEBMAIL-DY35.sysops.aol.com> <498CDA05.3020206@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902071520u6004ab4bieddd8531d9ed41fb@mail.gmail.com> What exercise for an exercise, Bob! Good thing you only have to paraphrase and evaluate next the 'Banana' poem. Since what you're mainly doing is trying to refute Linda Sue Grimes, John Jeffrey, and my interp that 'snow' means 'snow' in the last line, I'll go ahead and carve a coupla hours out of my Saturday evening to refute your attempt, interleaving below with ALL CAPS because we can't do colours. Here goes: 2009/2/6 Bob Grumman > A Rough Attempt At Rating Housman's Cherry Blossom Poem > > II > > > Loveliest of trees, the cherry now > Is hung with bloom along the bough, > And stands about the woodland ride > Wearing white for Eastertide. > > Now, of my threescore years and ten, > Twenty will not come again, > And take from seventy springs a score, > It only leaves me fifty more. > > And since to look at things in bloom > Fifty springs are little room, > About the woodlands I will go > To see the cherry hung with snow. > > A. E. Housman > > > My paraphrase (with some metaparaphrasing in italics): > > Loveliest of trees, the cherry now > > The boughs of the cherry trees, which are the most beautiful trees > > Is hung with bloom along the bough, > > are laden with blossoms at this time > > And stands about the woodland ride > > and line the trail through the woods > > Wearing white for Eastertide. > > decked out in a white hue appropriate for Easter > (*which is the happiest time of the year*) > > Now, of my threescore years and ten, > Twenty will not come again, > > At this time, twenty of the seventy years (*the Bible suggests I'll have*) > > are gone permanently. > > And take from seventy springs a score, > > If you subtract twenty springtimes from seventy > > It only leaves me fifty more. > > it will leave me just fifty more years of life > > And since to look at things in bloom > Fifty springs are little room, > > Because fifty years of springtimes don't give one much time > to enjoying looking at Nature's blossomings > > About the woodlands I will go > > I'll proceed through the woods (right away) > > To see the cherry hung with snow. > > To take in (as much as I can of) the beauty of the snow-like blossoms of > the cherry tree. > The snow is metaphorical because: > > (1) the speaker is going to "look at things in bloom." REASONABLE POINT IF > YOU WANT TO STAY SUPER-LITERAL THROUGHOUT THE POEM, WHICH YOU DON'T. > > (2) the speaker has be celebrating spring entirely to this point; nothing > he's said indicates > that he's going to wait until winter comes, then go out and look at the > snow on the cherry > trees (which, in any case, would be little different from the snow on other > deciduous > trees); among other problems with the emotional logic of this, it suggests > that he is > capable, after all his praise of them, of forgetting about the cherry > blossoms out there for > him to enjoy right now. YOU AND I AGREE THAT HE SAVES 'THE BEST', 'THE > ZINGER', 'THE DECISIVE POINT' 'TIL HIS LAST LINE; WE DISAGREE ON WHETHER > SNOW IS SNOW OR SNOW IS BLOSSOMS. RE YOUR PARENTHETICAL POINT, HE WISHES TO > FOCUS ON HIS FAVE TREE, THE CHERRY, SO IS WISE TO CONTINUE WITH IT. > FINALLY, BECAUSE HE LOVES MOST OF ALL THE CHERRY BLOSSOMS AND FIGURES HE > HASN'T ENUFF SPRINGTIMES TO SEE THEM, HE WILL SEE ITS BOUGHS LADEN WITH > WHITE IN THE 50 WINTERS HE THINKS HE HAS LEFT. > > (3) I simply can't read the poem as not being about someone fully engaged > in the moment- > -the speaker spends four lines speaking in the highest terms of the beauty > of cherry > blossoms, then six indicating how little time he has to enjoy them (the > blossoms) despite > his having fifty more years to live; this sets up his last two lines as > close to the synthesis > of a standard syllogism: cherry blossoms are worth seeing; I haven't much > time to see > them; therefore, I will--what? put on my snowshoes are go look at them when > they have > snow on their branches? Not for me. AGAIN, WE DIFFER ONLY ON HIS > DECISION, HOW HE DECIDES TO SEE BEAUTY AS OFTEN AS HE CAN. YOU ASSUME THAT > IF HE TRAMPS AROUND THE WOODS MORE [EACH SPRING] THAN HE HAS DONE, OR MORE > THAN HE HAS JUST 'THIS' SPRING FINISHED DOING, HE WILL BE SATISFIED. YOU > MAY BE RIGHT; I THINK YOU'RE NOT. > > (4) the argument has been made that "snow" as a metaphor comes out of > nowhere--but > earlier in the poem, the trees are personified; that they are "hung" with > blooms is > somewhat figurative, too, suggesting, as it does, not the sprouting of > blooms, but > someone's going about decorating them. In any case, the metaphor in line > four is an > involved, important one--the trees aren't just wearing human apparel, they > are celebrating > the season. HOUSMAN'S LOW-LEVEL PERSONIFICATIONS IN THE FIRST STANZA > PRETTY MUCH EXHAUST HIS FIGURATIVES FOR THE POEM. 'HUNG', 'STANDS', AND > 'WEARING' TRY CLICHEDLY TO DESCRIBE WHAT HE LOVES, ARE LIMITED TO THE FIRST > STANZA, AND APPEAR AFTER HE HAS ASSERTED WHAT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, TO HIM, > THE BLOOMING CHERRY TREE. THEREAFTER, HE LOGICS AND CONCLUDES WITHOUT > FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE. > > > > (5) if the poet wanted us to believe the speaker was going to look at the > cherry trees in > winter, he could easily have changed the poem to tell us that explicitly: > for instance, by > saying, "About the woods, I'll also go/ When blooms have been replaced by > snow." Or the > like. Why would the poet not have made sure we saw the point if it was > that? Was he > some kind of devious Empsonian? He doesn't seem so to me. THE BOTTOM HALF > OF HIS LAST STANZA'S EXPLICIT TO ME AND OTHERS, AND MORE POETIC THAN YOUR > REPLACEMENT, WHICH SEEMS TO ME UNNECESSARY. > > (6) I would add that "snow" as a metaphor gives the poem a nice climax that > echoes what > I consider the main virtue of the poem, its contrasting light and dark, and > the transient and > enduring. A PROFOUND CONCLUSION LIVES IN HIS LITERAL LAST LINE. IT IMPELS > US TO LOOK FOR BEAUTY IN THE THINGS AND TIMES THAT WE TEND NOT TO EXPECT > THEM. FOR EXAMPLE, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, SO LET ME LOOK AT YOU MORE.....IS NOT > PROFOUND. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AT THIS MOMENT, AND I WILL SEE YOUR BEAUTY IN > OTHER WAYS, AT THE STARKEST TIMES, EVEN WHEN ALL OTHERS WOULD SEE UGLINESS > AND WANT. THAT'S WISE, THOUGHT-PROVOKING, AND URGES SEEING THE SPIRITUAL IN > THE TEMPORAL, THE SENSUAL. THAT INTERPRETATION-EXPLANATION COVERS YOUR NEXT > SEVERAL POINTS. > > BEST TO YOU, BEAUTIFUL BOB, FOR YOUR EFFORTS. WE AWAIT YOUR 'BANANA' > EVALUATION. > JUDY > > (7) Even with its rhetoric, the poem seems to be speaking of blossoms as it > ends, not of literal snow, because it ends with a near repeat of its second > line. This could be taken as a clever twist--first spring, then winter; but > it seems too abrupt for me, and my other arguments are against it. The > final lines work far better for me as a satisfying complete return to its > initial subject. > > By my revised check-list, this poem qualifies as excellent because: > > (1) it both expresses things importantly true and represents things > centrally beautiful. > > a. it expresses the joy of an individual thinking about and anticipating > seeing the beauty of > cherry trees in bloom (an implied synecdoche for spring); it thus > represents something > centrally beautiful: a human being's love for Nature and beauty > > b. it expresses the belief that cherry trees in bloom and, implicitly, > Nature (and existence) is > not only beautiful but, in human terms, inexhaustible because a full > lifetime will barely, or > not, give us time fully to enjoy it; it thus expresses something that will > seem to many > people imprtantly true--that existence's beauty makes life worthwhile; at > the same time, the > poem accentuates the beauty of spring by contrasting it with winter at the > end, and with > arithmetic in the middle. > > c. blending in with a. and b. is what it suggests about the brevity of > human life: we have > little time to enjoy its beauty, so we should make the most of what time we > have--which is > so clearly importantly true that, stated in prose, it is a banality. Note, > however, that > Housman gives this carpe diem them an amusing twist (in keeping with the > high spirits of > the piece: the poem is not about making the most of the day but of one's > lifetime. > > d. in the meantime, in stating that--for its speaker, at any rate--looking > at cherry trees > hung with blossoms is of first importance, it expresses something else that > is importantly > true to non-utilitarians: that beauty is second to nothing else in value to > a human life > Indeed, for the speaker, it is something to devote fifty springs to, not > just a day--he isn't > thinking of a fling with Persephone but marriage to her. > > e. at the same time, it suggests with a reference to easter, and references > to spring, not to > mention its focus on cherry blossoms, the cyclic ongoingness of existence: > however fragile > and transient Nature's cherry blossoms are, and--implicitly--human life, > rebirth will occur; > it thus expresses a third thing importantly true for the religious, and > even for those who > are not religious but believe in the kind of reincarnation Shelley and > Nietzsche did (and I > do); for those who don't believe in reincarnation, it still expresses the > important truth that > Nature itself will endure. > > f. finally, the poem is itself an object of beauty due to its sounds, > images and diction, > sufficiently so in my view for me to be able confidently to claim it > represents something > which is centrally beautiful--itself, in particular, and poetry, in > general. > > (2) it is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or > something that makes > its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but > eventually achieves Clarity; > > Few, I think, would argue that Housman's poem is unclear. But its full > meaning takes time > to get to, it seems to me. It also has a personification not brilliant but > perfect for the poem > that complicates the poem just enough to provide what seems to me > sufficient Thematic > Misdirection. I say that because I believe all figures of speech do > this--they are errors > generating confusion it takes a mind a few seconds to overcome. Metrical > poetry also is > different enough from prose to slow a reader's journey toward understanding > the poem in > whole. This poem is far from having the thematic misdirection many poems > have, but it > has enough, so gets a check here. > > (3) it has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which > pulls its > elements reasonably close together; > > I presented my interpretation of the poem as a unified set of four > consequential truths and a > closely inter-related representation of beauty. Its packaging as a lyric > poem of beauty > further unifies it. So the poem scores well here. > > (4) it contains few or no superfluous words; > > All the poem's words seem necessary either to its meaning or its acoustics, > and only rarely > not to both. All metrical poems have occasional words that are there for > the metrics or > rhyme almost entirely, or fall out of one or the other of those things to > maintain meaning. > So the poem gets a check here, too. > > (5) it boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have > such as > uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual > art), and imagery; > > To me the main special constituent this poem has that few of no other poems > have is the > wry interruption from pure, almost too sweet lyric, into grade school > arithmetic it takes-- > with a Biblical allusion giving it ponderousness completely opposed to the > lightness of > cherry blossoms, and delight in cherry blossoms. This strikes me as a > wonderful change of > tone: cerebral analysis versus emotional spontaneity, heaviness versus > gaiety, play, > implicitly, versus duty. > > I suspect but would not swear that the poem also has a melodiousness rare > in poetry, a > melodiousness kept from excess by the speaker's drawn-out calculations. > One other > triumph it achieves, although I would not call it uncommonly effective, is > its > personification of the cherry trees as wearing white garments to celebrate > Easter. We're in > the archetypal here: Spring! Rebirth! Celebration! Joy! Universal Love > of Existence! > > (6) it avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or > thought; too > overt Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; > > I give it a check here, too. It uses a standard form, but it's one > appropriate to a fairly > serious albeit happy work: pentameter and tetrameter (as opposed to > Dickinson's more > jingly tetrameter and trimeter), with missing weak stresses at the > beginning of several > lines, which enlivens the poem, to my ear. Nothing brilliant about the > rhymes, but they > work as well as the rhymes or just about any poem. "Along the bough," for > instance, is > pretty clearly in the poem for meter and rhyme since it's unneeded for the > meaning--where > else would blooms be hung? But it works so well melodationally, one can't > reasonably > criticize it. "Is hung with bloom along the bough" not only closes an > end-rhyme, but > carries out a b- and an l-alliteration, and a g-consonance, and four open > vowels combine > with the two l's and the w to liquify the line, the l's in particular > carrying on the l- > alliteration that begins the poem, and continues into the third line. And > the w's go on in > the rest of this stanza to form a 4-member alliteration. The sound effects > in the rest of the > poem are similarly effective. And, as I mentioned in my brief against > taking "snow" as > literal snow, the poem is a near-perfectly crafted little mechanism, with a > theme stated at > its beginning, veered rather distantly from, then returned triumphantly to. > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090207/edb0f020/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sat Feb 7 19:44:29 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:06 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] On the Excellence of Housman's Poem In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902071520u6004ab4bieddd8531d9ed41fb@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB560F048BB50F-1148-1312@WEBMAIL-DY35.sysops.aol.com> <498CDA05.3020206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902071520u6004ab4bieddd8531d9ed41fb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <498E2AED.9060309@opus40.org> Re: AGAIN, WE DIFFER ONLY ON HIS DECISION, HOW HE DECIDES TO SEE BEAUTY AS OFTEN AS HE CAN. YOU ASSUME THAT IF HE TRAMPS AROUND THE WOODS MORE [EACH SPRING] THAN HE HAS DONE, OR MORE THAN HE HAS JUST 'THIS' SPRING FINISHED DOING, HE WILL BE SATISFIED. YOU MAY BE RIGHT; I THINK YOU'RE NOT. He doesn't do either. The poem is not written by a 70-year-old man reflecting on all the cherry blossoms he's seen, and/or all the snowy trees he's seen. This is an ecstatic burst by a 20-year-old. We have know way of knowing whether he'll follow through on it beyond that morning. Judy Prince wrote: > What exercise for an exercise, Bob! Good thing you only have to > paraphrase and evaluate next the 'Banana' poem. > > Since what you're mainly doing is trying to refute Linda Sue Grimes, > John Jeffrey, and my interp that 'snow' means 'snow' in the last line, > I'll go ahead and carve a coupla hours out of my Saturday evening to > refute your attempt, interleaving below with ALL CAPS because we can't > do colours. > > Here goes: > > 2009/2/6 Bob Grumman > > > A Rough Attempt At Rating Housman's Cherry Blossom Poem > > II > > > Loveliest of trees, the cherry now > Is hung with bloom along the bough, > And stands about the woodland ride > Wearing white for Eastertide. > > Now, of my threescore years and ten, > Twenty will not come again, > And take from seventy springs a score, > It only leaves me fifty more. > > And since to look at things in bloom > Fifty springs are little room, > About the woodlands I will go > To see the cherry hung with snow. > > A. E. Housman > > > My paraphrase (with some metaparaphrasing in italics): > > Loveliest of trees, the cherry now > > The boughs of the cherry trees, which are the most beautiful trees > > Is hung with bloom along the bough, > > are laden with blossoms at this time > > And stands about the woodland ride > > and line the trail through the woods > > Wearing white for Eastertide. > > decked out in a white hue appropriate for Easter > (/which is the happiest time of the year/) > > Now, of my threescore years and ten, > Twenty will not come again, > > At this time, twenty of the seventy years (/the Bible suggests > I'll have/) > are gone permanently. > > And take from seventy springs a score, > > If you subtract twenty springtimes from seventy > > It only leaves me fifty more. > > it will leave me just fifty more years of life > > And since to look at things in bloom > Fifty springs are little room, > > Because fifty years of springtimes don't give one much time > to enjoying looking at Nature's blossomings > > About the woodlands I will go > > I'll proceed through the woods (right away) > > To see the cherry hung with snow. > > To take in (as much as I can of) the beauty of the snow-like > blossoms of the cherry tree. > The snow is metaphorical because: > > (1) the speaker is going to "look at things in bloom." REASONABLE > POINT IF YOU WANT TO STAY SUPER-LITERAL THROUGHOUT THE POEM, WHICH > YOU DON'T. > > (2) the speaker has be celebrating spring entirely to this point; > nothing he's said indicates > that he's going to wait until winter comes, then go out and look > at the snow on the cherry > trees (which, in any case, would be little different from the snow > on other deciduous > trees); among other problems with the emotional logic of this, it > suggests that he is > capable, after all his praise of them, of forgetting about the > cherry blossoms out there for > him to enjoy right now. YOU AND I AGREE THAT HE SAVES 'THE BEST', > 'THE ZINGER', 'THE DECISIVE POINT' 'TIL HIS LAST LINE; WE DISAGREE > ON WHETHER SNOW IS SNOW OR SNOW IS BLOSSOMS. RE YOUR > PARENTHETICAL POINT, HE WISHES TO FOCUS ON HIS FAVE TREE, THE > CHERRY, SO IS WISE TO CONTINUE WITH IT. FINALLY, BECAUSE HE LOVES > MOST OF ALL THE CHERRY BLOSSOMS AND FIGURES HE HASN'T ENUFF > SPRINGTIMES TO SEE THEM, HE WILL SEE ITS BOUGHS LADEN WITH WHITE > IN THE 50 WINTERS HE THINKS HE HAS LEFT. > > (3) I simply can't read the poem as not being about someone fully > engaged in the moment- > -the speaker spends four lines speaking in the highest terms of > the beauty of cherry > blossoms, then six indicating how little time he has to enjoy them > (the blossoms) despite > his having fifty more years to live; this sets up his last two > lines as close to the synthesis > of a standard syllogism: cherry blossoms are worth seeing; I > haven't much time to see > them; therefore, I will--what? put on my snowshoes are go look at > them when they have > snow on their branches? Not for me. AGAIN, WE DIFFER ONLY ON HIS > DECISION, HOW HE DECIDES TO SEE BEAUTY AS OFTEN AS HE CAN. YOU > ASSUME THAT IF HE TRAMPS AROUND THE WOODS MORE [EACH SPRING] THAN > HE HAS DONE, OR MORE THAN HE HAS JUST 'THIS' SPRING FINISHED > DOING, HE WILL BE SATISFIED. YOU MAY BE RIGHT; I THINK YOU'RE NOT. > > (4) the argument has been made that "snow" as a metaphor comes out > of nowhere--but > earlier in the poem, the trees are personified; that they are > "hung" with blooms is > somewhat figurative, too, suggesting, as it does, not the > sprouting of blooms, but > someone's going about decorating them. In any case, the metaphor > in line four is an > involved, important one--the trees aren't just wearing human > apparel, they are celebrating > the season. HOUSMAN'S LOW-LEVEL PERSONIFICATIONS IN THE FIRST > STANZA PRETTY MUCH EXHAUST HIS FIGURATIVES FOR THE POEM. 'HUNG', > 'STANDS', AND 'WEARING' TRY CLICHEDLY TO DESCRIBE WHAT HE LOVES, > ARE LIMITED TO THE FIRST STANZA, AND APPEAR AFTER HE HAS ASSERTED > WHAT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, TO HIM, THE BLOOMING CHERRY TREE. > THEREAFTER, HE LOGICS AND CONCLUDES WITHOUT FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE. > > > > > > (5) if the poet wanted us to believe the speaker was going to look > at the cherry trees in > winter, he could easily have changed the poem to tell us that > explicitly: for instance, by > saying, "About the woods, I'll also go/ When blooms have been > replaced by snow." Or the > like. Why would the poet not have made sure we saw the point if > it was that? Was he > some kind of devious Empsonian? He doesn't seem so to me. THE > BOTTOM HALF OF HIS LAST STANZA'S EXPLICIT TO ME AND OTHERS, AND > MORE POETIC THAN YOUR REPLACEMENT, WHICH SEEMS TO ME UNNECESSARY. > > (6) I would add that "snow" as a metaphor gives the poem a nice > climax that echoes what > I consider the main virtue of the poem, its contrasting light and > dark, and the transient and > enduring. A PROFOUND CONCLUSION LIVES IN HIS LITERAL LAST LINE. > IT IMPELS US TO LOOK FOR BEAUTY IN THE THINGS AND TIMES THAT WE > TEND NOT TO EXPECT THEM. FOR EXAMPLE, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, SO LET > ME LOOK AT YOU MORE.....IS NOT PROFOUND. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AT > THIS MOMENT, AND I WILL SEE YOUR BEAUTY IN OTHER WAYS, AT THE > STARKEST TIMES, EVEN WHEN ALL OTHERS WOULD SEE UGLINESS AND WANT. > THAT'S WISE, THOUGHT-PROVOKING, AND URGES SEEING THE SPIRITUAL IN > THE TEMPORAL, THE SENSUAL. THAT INTERPRETATION-EXPLANATION COVERS > YOUR NEXT SEVERAL POINTS. > > > > BEST TO YOU, BEAUTIFUL BOB, FOR YOUR EFFORTS. WE AWAIT YOUR > 'BANANA' EVALUATION. > > > JUDY > > > > (7) Even with its rhetoric, the poem seems to be speaking of > blossoms as it ends, not of literal snow, because it ends with a > near repeat of its second line. This could be taken as a clever > twist--first spring, then winter; but it seems too abrupt for me, > and my other arguments are against it. The final lines work far > better for me as a satisfying complete return to its initial subject. > > By my revised check-list, this poem qualifies as excellent because: > > (1) it both expresses things importantly true and represents > things centrally beautiful. > > a. it expresses the joy of an individual thinking about and > anticipating seeing the beauty of > cherry trees in bloom (an implied synecdoche for spring); it thus > represents something > centrally beautiful: a human being's love for Nature and beauty > > b. it expresses the belief that cherry trees in bloom and, > implicitly, Nature (and existence) is > not only beautiful but, in human terms, inexhaustible because a > full lifetime will barely, or > not, give us time fully to enjoy it; it thus expresses something > that will seem to many > people imprtantly true--that existence's beauty makes life > worthwhile; at the same time, the > poem accentuates the beauty of spring by contrasting it with > winter at the end, and with > arithmetic in the middle. > > c. blending in with a. and b. is what it suggests about the > brevity of human life: we have > little time to enjoy its beauty, so we should make the most of > what time we have--which is > so clearly importantly true that, stated in prose, it is a > banality. Note, however, that > Housman gives this carpe diem them an amusing twist (in keeping > with the high spirits of > the piece: the poem is not about making the most of the day but of > one's lifetime. > > d. in the meantime, in stating that--for its speaker, at any > rate--looking at cherry trees > hung with blossoms is of first importance, it expresses something > else that is importantly > true to non-utilitarians: that beauty is second to nothing else in > value to a human life > Indeed, for the speaker, it is something to devote fifty springs > to, not just a day--he isn't > thinking of a fling with Persephone but marriage to her. > > e. at the same time, it suggests with a reference to easter, and > references to spring, not to > mention its focus on cherry blossoms, the cyclic ongoingness of > existence: however fragile > and transient Nature's cherry blossoms are, and--implicitly--human > life, rebirth will occur; > it thus expresses a third thing importantly true for the > religious, and even for those who > are not religious but believe in the kind of reincarnation Shelley > and Nietzsche did (and I > do); for those who don't believe in reincarnation, it still > expresses the important truth that > Nature itself will endure. > > f. finally, the poem is itself an object of beauty due to its > sounds, images and diction, > sufficiently so in my view for me to be able confidently to claim > it represents something > which is centrally beautiful--itself, in particular, and poetry, > in general. > > (2) it is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, > or something that makes > its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but > eventually achieves Clarity; > > Few, I think, would argue that Housman's poem is unclear. But its > full meaning takes time > to get to, it seems to me. It also has a personification not > brilliant but perfect for the poem > that complicates the poem just enough to provide what seems to me > sufficient Thematic > Misdirection. I say that because I believe all figures of speech > do this--they are errors > generating confusion it takes a mind a few seconds to overcome. > Metrical poetry also is > different enough from prose to slow a reader's journey toward > understanding the poem in > whole. This poem is far from having the thematic misdirection > many poems have, but it > has enough, so gets a check here. > > (3) it has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the > like which pulls its > elements reasonably close together; > > I presented my interpretation of the poem as a unified set of four > consequential truths and a > closely inter-related representation of beauty. Its packaging as > a lyric poem of beauty > further unifies it. So the poem scores well here. > > (4) it contains few or no superfluous words; > > All the poem's words seem necessary either to its meaning or its > acoustics, and only rarely > not to both. All metrical poems have occasional words that are > there for the metrics or > rhyme almost entirely, or fall out of one or the other of those > things to maintain meaning. > So the poem gets a check here, too. > > (5) it boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other > poems have such as > uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, > visual > art), and imagery; > > To me the main special constituent this poem has that few of no > other poems have is the > wry interruption from pure, almost too sweet lyric, into grade > school arithmetic it takes-- > with a Biblical allusion giving it ponderousness completely > opposed to the lightness of > cherry blossoms, and delight in cherry blossoms. This strikes me > as a wonderful change of > tone: cerebral analysis versus emotional spontaneity, heaviness > versus gaiety, play, > implicitly, versus duty. > > I suspect but would not swear that the poem also has a > melodiousness rare in poetry, a > melodiousness kept from excess by the speaker's drawn-out > calculations. One other > triumph it achieves, although I would not call it uncommonly > effective, is its > personification of the cherry trees as wearing white garments to > celebrate Easter. We're in > the archetypal here: Spring! Rebirth! Celebration! Joy! > Universal Love of Existence! > > (6) it avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, > imagery or thought; too > overt Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; > > I give it a check here, too. It uses a standard form, but it's > one appropriate to a fairly > serious albeit happy work: pentameter and tetrameter (as opposed > to Dickinson's more > jingly tetrameter and trimeter), with missing weak stresses at the > beginning of several > lines, which enlivens the poem, to my ear. Nothing brilliant > about the rhymes, but they > work as well as the rhymes or just about any poem. "Along the > bough," for instance, is > pretty clearly in the poem for meter and rhyme since it's unneeded > for the meaning--where > else would blooms be hung? But it works so well melodationally, > one can't reasonably > criticize it. "Is hung with bloom along the bough" not only > closes an end-rhyme, but > carries out a b- and an l-alliteration, and a g-consonance, and > four open vowels combine > with the two l's and the w to liquify the line, the l's in > particular carrying on the l- > alliteration that begins the poem, and continues into the third > line. And the w's go on in > the rest of this stanza to form a 4-member alliteration. The > sound effects in the rest of the > poem are similarly effective. And, as I mentioned in my brief > against taking "snow" as > literal snow, the poem is a near-perfectly crafted little > mechanism, with a theme stated at > its beginning, veered rather distantly from, then returned > triumphantly to. > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Feb 7 21:57:59 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:06 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] On the Excellence of Housman's Poem In-Reply-To: <498E2AED.9060309@opus40.org> References: <8CB560F048BB50F-1148-1312@WEBMAIL-DY35.sysops.aol.com> <498CDA05.3020206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902071520u6004ab4bieddd8531d9ed41fb@mail.gmail.com> <498E2AED.9060309@opus40.org> Message-ID: <498E4A37.4080801@nut-n-but.net> For some reason, Judy's post never reached my computer. TheOldMole wrote: > Re: AGAIN, WE DIFFER ONLY ON HIS DECISION, HOW HE DECIDES TO SEE > BEAUTY AS OFTEN AS HE CAN. YOU ASSUME THAT IF HE TRAMPS AROUND THE > WOODS MORE [EACH SPRING] THAN HE HAS DONE, OR MORE THAN HE HAS JUST > 'THIS' SPRING FINISHED DOING, HE WILL BE SATISFIED. YOU MAY BE RIGHT; > I THINK YOU'RE NOT. > He doesn't do either. The poem is not written by a 70-year-old man > reflecting on all the cherry blossoms he's seen, and/or all the snowy > trees he's seen. This is an ecstatic burst by a 20-year-old. We have > know way of knowing whether he'll follow through on it beyond that > morning. The Mole has it. > > > Judy Prince wrote: >> What exercise for an exercise, Bob! Good thing you only have to >> paraphrase and evaluate next the 'Banana' poem. That will be harder. >> Since what you're mainly doing is trying to refute Linda Sue Grimes, >> John Jeffrey, and my interp that 'snow' means 'snow' in the last >> line, I'll go ahead and carve a coupla hours out of my Saturday >> evening to refute your attempt, interleaving below with ALL CAPS >> because we can't do colours. I was mainly trying to say why the poem seemed excellent to me, Judy, but felt I had to consider your reading. >> >> >> Here goes: >> >> 2009/2/6 Bob Grumman > > >> >> A Rough Attempt At Rating Housman's Cherry Blossom Poem >> >> II >> >> >> Loveliest of trees, the cherry now >> Is hung with bloom along the bough, >> And stands about the woodland ride >> Wearing white for Eastertide. >> >> Now, of my threescore years and ten, >> Twenty will not come again, >> And take from seventy springs a score, >> It only leaves me fifty more. >> >> And since to look at things in bloom >> Fifty springs are little room, >> About the woodlands I will go >> To see the cherry hung with snow. >> >> A. E. Housman >> >> >> My paraphrase (with some metaparaphrasing in italics): >> >> Loveliest of trees, the cherry now >> The boughs of the cherry trees, which are the most >> beautiful trees >> >> Is hung with bloom along the bough, >> >> are laden with blossoms at this time >> >> And stands about the woodland ride >> >> and line the trail through the woods >> >> Wearing white for Eastertide. >> >> decked out in a white hue appropriate for Easter >> (/which is the happiest time of the year/) >> >> Now, of my threescore years and ten, >> Twenty will not come again, >> >> At this time, twenty of the seventy years (/the Bible suggests >> I'll have/) >> are gone permanently. >> >> And take from seventy springs a score, >> >> If you subtract twenty springtimes from seventy >> >> It only leaves me fifty more. >> >> it will leave me just fifty more years of life >> >> And since to look at things in bloom >> Fifty springs are little room, >> >> Because fifty years of springtimes don't give one much time >> to enjoy looking at Nature's blossomings >> >> About the woodlands I will go >> >> I'll proceed through the woods (right away) >> >> To see the cherry hung with snow. >> >> To take in (as much as I can of) the beauty of the snow-like >> blossoms of the cherry tree. >> The snow is metaphorical because: >> >> (1) the speaker is going to "look at things in bloom." REASONABLE >> POINT IF YOU WANT TO STAY SUPER-LITERAL THROUGHOUT THE POEM, WHICH >> YOU DON'T. I don't really follow you here, Judy. All poems are sometimes literal, sometimes not. Anyway, if the speaker says he wants to look at things in bloom, and has already spoken emphatically about how cherry trees are literally in bloom, then it makes sense to think the speaker means things in bloom. Moreover, this is just one argument for my case. >> >> >> (2) the speaker has be celebrating spring entirely to this point; >> nothing he's said indicates >> that he's going to wait until winter comes, then go out and look >> at the snow on the cherry >> trees (which, in any case, would be little different from the snow >> on other deciduous >> trees); among other problems with the emotional logic of this, it >> suggests that he is >> capable, after all his praise of them, of forgetting about the >> cherry blossoms out there for >> him to enjoy right now. YOU AND I AGREE THAT HE SAVES 'THE BEST', >> 'THE ZINGER', 'THE DECISIVE POINT' 'TIL HIS LAST LINE; Not quite. I think the poem reaches a nice climax, but I'm not sure it's stronger than the first stanza. And my climax happens in the last two lines--he's going to go about the woodlands to enjoy the cherry trees. >> WE DISAGREE >> ON WHETHER SNOW IS SNOW OR SNOW IS BLOSSOMS. RE YOUR >> PARENTHETICAL POINT, HE WISHES TO FOCUS ON HIS FAVE TREE, THE >> CHERRY, SO IS WISE TO CONTINUE WITH IT. FINALLY, BECAUSE HE LOVES >> MOST OF ALL THE CHERRY BLOSSOMS AND FIGURES HE HASN'T ENUFF >> SPRINGTIMES TO SEE THEM, HE WILL SEE ITS BOUGHS LADEN WITH WHITE >> IN THE 50 WINTERS HE THINKS HE HAS LEFT. What about my point that he's eager to view the cherry trees? Why would he tell us that he wants to view them, so will go view them six months from now? >> (3) I simply can't read the poem as not being about someone fully >> engaged in the moment- >> -the speaker spends four lines speaking in the highest terms of >> the beauty of cherry >> blossoms, then six indicating how little time he has to enjoy them >> (the blossoms) despite >> his having fifty more years to live; this sets up his last two >> lines as close to the synthesis >> of a standard syllogism: cherry blossoms are worth seeing; I >> haven't much time to see >> them; therefore, I will--what? put on my snowshoes are go look at >> them when they have >> snow on their branches? Not for me. Also, as I and Sam have asked, what's so great about cherry trees with snow on them? How are they significantly different from any other deciduous trees with snow on them? >> AGAIN, WE DIFFER ONLY ON HIS >> DECISION, HOW HE DECIDES TO SEE BEAUTY AS OFTEN AS HE CAN. Yes, but the poem, as I keep on saying, implies that he wants to enjoy that beauty NOW. >> YOU >> ASSUME THAT IF HE TRAMPS AROUND THE WOODS MORE [EACH SPRING] THAN >> HE HAS DONE, OR MORE THAN HE HAS JUST 'THIS' SPRING FINISHED >> DOING, HE WILL BE SATISFIED. Nothing in the poem says he's been looking at the trees. And I don't find him just intending to increase his viewing time. I read him as Mole does, thinking he'd better get out to the woodlands to enjoy THIS spring's cherry blossoms. It's implied that he will feel the same way every spring. But there's no search for a way of seeing more of the cherries, and the focus is on the blossoms, nothing else. >> YOU MAY BE RIGHT; I THINK YOU'RE NOT. >> (4) the argument has been made that "snow" as a metaphor comes out >> of nowhere--but >> earlier in the poem, the trees are personified; that they are >> "hung" with blooms is >> somewhat figurative, too, suggesting, as it does, not the >> sprouting of blooms, but >> someone's going about decorating them. In any case, the metaphor >> in line four is an >> involved, important one--the trees aren't just wearing human >> apparel, they are celebrating >> the season. >> HOUSMAN'S LOW-LEVEL PERSONIFICATIONS IN THE FIRST >> STANZA PRETTY MUCH EXHAUST HIS FIGURATIVES FOR THE POEM. I consider wearing white for Eastertide as high-level as personifications go, myself. And it dominates the fist stanza of a three-stanza poem. The second stanza is by obvious contrast non-metaphorical, anti-poetic, even. And the third stanza, in my reading, ends like the first, with a figure of speech, a fairly good one. >> 'HUNG', >> 'STANDS', AND 'WEARING' TRY CLICHEDLY TO DESCRIBE WHAT HE LOVES, >> ARE LIMITED TO THE FIRST STANZA, AND APPEAR AFTER HE HAS ASSERTED >> WHAT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, TO HIM, THE BLOOMING CHERRY TREE. >> THEREAFTER, HE LOGICS AND CONCLUDES WITHOUT FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE. in your opinion. >> >> >> >> >> (5) if the poet wanted us to believe the speaker was going >> to look >> at the cherry trees in >> winter, he could easily have changed the poem to tell us that >> explicitly: for instance, by >> saying, "About the woods, I'll also go/ When blooms have been >> replaced by snow." Or the >> like. Why would the poet not have made sure we saw the point if >> it was that? Was he >> some kind of devious Empsonian? He doesn't seem so to me. >> THE BOTTOM HALF OF HIS LAST STANZA'S EXPLICIT TO ME AND OTHERS, AND >> MORE POETIC THAN YOUR REPLACEMENT, WHICH SEEMS TO ME UNNECESSARY. The overwhelming majority of readers of the poem saw it as I do. My point is that if he meant "snow" literally, he was not clear about it, and could have been--unless he wanted contradictory meanings, and he wasn't that sort of poet, I don't think. >> >> (6) I would add that "snow" as a metaphor gives the poem a nice >> climax that echoes what >> I consider the main virtue of the poem, its contrasting light and >> dark, and the transient and >> enduring. >> A PROFOUND CONCLUSION LIVES IN HIS LITERAL LAST LINE. >> IT IMPELS US TO LOOK FOR BEAUTY IN THE THINGS AND TIMES THAT WE >> TEND NOT TO EXPECT THEM. FOR EXAMPLE, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, SO LET >> ME LOOK AT YOU MORE.....IS NOT PROFOUND. to you. But that's not what I said the poem is saying. It's saying you are beautiful so I'd better make sure I get as much of you as I can. Not profound, but poems aren't meant to say profound things, they are meant to be profoundly beautiful about unprofound things. >> YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AT >> THIS MOMENT, AND I WILL SEE YOUR BEAUTY IN OTHER WAYS, AT THE >> STARKEST TIMES, EVEN WHEN ALL OTHERS WOULD SEE UGLINESS AND WANT. >> THAT'S WISE, THOUGHT-PROVOKING, AND URGES SEEING THE SPIRITUAL IN >> THE TEMPORAL, THE SENSUAL. THAT INTERPRETATION-EXPLANATION COVERS >> YOUR NEXT SEVERAL POINTS. To me it seems you like this sentiment so are imposing it on an expression of delighted hedonism. >> >> >> >> BEST TO YOU, BEAUTIFUL BOB, FOR YOUR EFFORTS. WE AWAIT YOUR >> 'BANANA' EVALUATION. >> >> JUDY Thanks for popping back at me, Judy. I hope I can do justice to the banana poem. It will be interesting. Not sure I'll recover from my bout with AE, though. And I never really did the Emily, in my opinion. --Bob From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 22:11:06 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:06 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] On the Excellence of Housman's Poem In-Reply-To: <498CDA05.3020206@nut-n-but.net> References: <8CB560F048BB50F-1148-1312@WEBMAIL-DY35.sysops.aol.com> <498CDA05.3020206@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902071911h3e4dff7ft7ccb7a3217e7e525@mail.gmail.com> You did your homework. On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 1:47 AM, Bob Grumman wrote: > A Rough Attempt At Rating Housman's Cherry Blossom Poem > > II > > > Loveliest of trees, the cherry now > Is hung with bloom along the bough, > And stands about the woodland ride > Wearing white for Eastertide. > > Now, of my threescore years and ten, > Twenty will not come again, > And take from seventy springs a score, > It only leaves me fifty more. > > And since to look at things in bloom > Fifty springs are little room, > About the woodlands I will go > To see the cherry hung with snow. > > A. E. Housman > > > My paraphrase (with some metaparaphrasing in italics): > > Loveliest of trees, the cherry now > > The boughs of the cherry trees, which are the most beautiful trees > > Is hung with bloom along the bough, > > are laden with blossoms at this time > > And stands about the woodland ride > > and line the trail through the woods > > Wearing white for Eastertide. > > decked out in a white hue appropriate for Easter > (*which is the happiest time of the year*) > > Now, of my threescore years and ten, > Twenty will not come again, > > At this time, twenty of the seventy years (*the Bible suggests I'll have*) > > are gone permanently. > > And take from seventy springs a score, > > If you subtract twenty springtimes from seventy > > It only leaves me fifty more. > > it will leave me just fifty more years of life > > And since to look at things in bloom > Fifty springs are little room, > > Because fifty years of springtimes don't give one much time > to enjoying looking at Nature's blossomings > > About the woodlands I will go > > I'll proceed through the woods (right away) > > To see the cherry hung with snow. > > To take in (as much as I can of) the beauty of the snow-like blossoms of > the cherry tree. > The snow is metaphorical because: > > (1) the speaker is going to "look at things in bloom." > > (2) the speaker has be celebrating spring entirely to this point; nothing > he's said indicates > that he's going to wait until winter comes, then go out and look at the > snow on the cherry > trees (which, in any case, would be little different from the snow on other > deciduous > trees); among other problems with the emotional logic of this, it suggests > that he is > capable, after all his praise of them, of forgetting about the cherry > blossoms out there for > him to enjoy right now. > > (3) I simply can't read the poem as not being about someone fully engaged > in the moment- > -the speaker spends four lines speaking in the highest terms of the beauty > of cherry > blossoms, then six indicating how little time he has to enjoy them (the > blossoms) despite > his having fifty more years to live; this sets up his last two lines as > close to the synthesis > of a standard syllogism: cherry blossoms are worth seeing; I haven't much > time to see > them; therefore, I will--what? put on my snowshoes are go look at them when > they have > snow on their branches? Not for me. > > (4) the argument has been made that "snow" as a metaphor comes out of > nowhere--but > earlier in the poem, the trees are personified; that they are "hung" with > blooms is > somewhat figurative, too, suggesting, as it does, not the sprouting of > blooms, but > someone's going about decorating them. In any case, the metaphor in line > four is an > involved, important one--the trees aren't just wearing human apparel, they > are celebrating > the season. > > (5) if the poet wanted us to believe the speaker was going to look at the > cherry trees in > winter, he could easily have changed the poem to tell us that explicitly: > for instance, by > saying, "About the woods, I'll also go/ When blooms have been replaced by > snow." Or the > like. Why would the poet not have made sure we saw the point if it was > that? Was he > some kind of devious Empsonian? He doesn't seem so to me. > > (6) I would add that "snow" as a metaphor gives the poem a nice climax that > echoes what > I consider the main virtue of the poem, its contrasting light and dark, and > the transient and > enduring. > > (7) Even with its rhetoric, the poem seems to be speaking of blossoms as it > ends, not of literal snow, because it ends with a near repeat of its second > line. This could be taken as a clever twist--first spring, then winter; but > it seems too abrupt for me, and my other arguments are against it. The > final lines work far better for me as a satisfying complete return to its > initial subject. > > By my revised check-list, this poem qualifies as excellent because: > > (1) it both expresses things importantly true and represents things > centrally beautiful. > > a. it expresses the joy of an individual thinking about and anticipating > seeing the beauty of > cherry trees in bloom (an implied synecdoche for spring); it thus > represents something > centrally beautiful: a human being's love for Nature and beauty > > b. it expresses the belief that cherry trees in bloom and, implicitly, > Nature (and existence) is > not only beautiful but, in human terms, inexhaustible because a full > lifetime will barely, or > not, give us time fully to enjoy it; it thus expresses something that will > seem to many > people imprtantly true--that existence's beauty makes life worthwhile; at > the same time, the > poem accentuates the beauty of spring by contrasting it with winter at the > end, and with > arithmetic in the middle. > > c. blending in with a. and b. is what it suggests about the brevity of > human life: we have > little time to enjoy its beauty, so we should make the most of what time we > have--which is > so clearly importantly true that, stated in prose, it is a banality. Note, > however, that > Housman gives this carpe diem them an amusing twist (in keeping with the > high spirits of > the piece: the poem is not about making the most of the day but of one's > lifetime. > > d. in the meantime, in stating that--for its speaker, at any rate--looking > at cherry trees > hung with blossoms is of first importance, it expresses something else that > is importantly > true to non-utilitarians: that beauty is second to nothing else in value to > a human life > Indeed, for the speaker, it is something to devote fifty springs to, not > just a day--he isn't > thinking of a fling with Persephone but marriage to her. > > e. at the same time, it suggests with a reference to easter, and references > to spring, not to > mention its focus on cherry blossoms, the cyclic ongoingness of existence: > however fragile > and transient Nature's cherry blossoms are, and--implicitly--human life, > rebirth will occur; > it thus expresses a third thing importantly true for the religious, and > even for those who > are not religious but believe in the kind of reincarnation Shelley and > Nietzsche did (and I > do); for those who don't believe in reincarnation, it still expresses the > important truth that > Nature itself will endure. > > f. finally, the poem is itself an object of beauty due to its sounds, > images and diction, > sufficiently so in my view for me to be able confidently to claim it > represents something > which is centrally beautiful--itself, in particular, and poetry, in > general. > > (2) it is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or > something that makes > its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but > eventually achieves Clarity; > > Few, I think, would argue that Housman's poem is unclear. But its full > meaning takes time > to get to, it seems to me. It also has a personification not brilliant but > perfect for the poem > that complicates the poem just enough to provide what seems to me > sufficient Thematic > Misdirection. I say that because I believe all figures of speech do > this--they are errors > generating confusion it takes a mind a few seconds to overcome. Metrical > poetry also is > different enough from prose to slow a reader's journey toward understanding > the poem in > whole. This poem is far from having the thematic misdirection many poems > have, but it > has enough, so gets a check here. > > (3) it has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which > pulls its > elements reasonably close together; > > I presented my interpretation of the poem as a unified set of four > consequential truths and a > closely inter-related representation of beauty. Its packaging as a lyric > poem of beauty > further unifies it. So the poem scores well here. > > (4) it contains few or no superfluous words; > > All the poem's words seem necessary either to its meaning or its acoustics, > and only rarely > not to both. All metrical poems have occasional words that are there for > the metrics or > rhyme almost entirely, or fall out of one or the other of those things to > maintain meaning. > So the poem gets a check here, too. > > (5) it boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have > such as > uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual > art), and imagery; > > To me the main special constituent this poem has that few of no other poems > have is the > wry interruption from pure, almost too sweet lyric, into grade school > arithmetic it takes-- > with a Biblical allusion giving it ponderousness completely opposed to the > lightness of > cherry blossoms, and delight in cherry blossoms. This strikes me as a > wonderful change of > tone: cerebral analysis versus emotional spontaneity, heaviness versus > gaiety, play, > implicitly, versus duty. > > I suspect but would not swear that the poem also has a melodiousness rare > in poetry, a > melodiousness kept from excess by the speaker's drawn-out calculations. > One other > triumph it achieves, although I would not call it uncommonly effective, is > its > personification of the cherry trees as wearing white garments to celebrate > Easter. We're in > the archetypal here: Spring! Rebirth! Celebration! Joy! Universal Love > of Existence! > > (6) it avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or > thought; too > overt Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; > > I give it a check here, too. It uses a standard form, but it's one > appropriate to a fairly > serious albeit happy work: pentameter and tetrameter (as opposed to > Dickinson's more > jingly tetrameter and trimeter), with missing weak stresses at the > beginning of several > lines, which enlivens the poem, to my ear. Nothing brilliant about the > rhymes, but they > work as well as the rhymes or just about any poem. "Along the bough," for > instance, is > pretty clearly in the poem for meter and rhyme since it's unneeded for the > meaning--where > else would blooms be hung? But it works so well melodationally, one can't > reasonably > criticize it. "Is hung with bloom along the bough" not only closes an > end-rhyme, but > carries out a b- and an l-alliteration, and a g-consonance, and four open > vowels combine > with the two l's and the w to liquify the line, the l's in particular > carrying on the l- > alliteration that begins the poem, and continues into the third line. And > the w's go on in > the rest of this stanza to form a 4-member alliteration. The sound effects > in the rest of the > poem are similarly effective. And, as I mentioned in my brief against > taking "snow" as > literal snow, the poem is a near-perfectly crafted little mechanism, with a > theme stated at > its beginning, veered rather distantly from, then returned triumphantly to. > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/a14d8dd8/attachment.html From editor at pavementsaw.org Sat Feb 7 23:02:34 2009 From: editor at pavementsaw.org (David Baratier) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:06 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <466B731155A74091AC4915CCB1EE197A@yourae066c3a9b> Message-ID: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Didn't know, out in nowhere I hope that microphone eating perv stays sick on the other side and haunts those retards from the Voice. Is the other Jerome Sala? Never was about the cramps, always held the Gories above them, just wasn't into the glitz more about the rockabily. Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press 321 Empire Street Montpelier OH 43543 http://pavementsaw.org Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 --- On Sat, 2/7/09, Gerald Schwartz wrote: > From: Gerald Schwartz > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in > To: editor@pavementsaw.org, "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views" > Date: Saturday, February 7, 2009, 7:48 PM > Lux Interior, along with partner Poison Ivy, > fronted The Cramps... > He passed from this to a hotter coil the other > day. > > '86 or '87 saw them @ the Q. > > Same year as the Chilli Peppers... and Living > Colour, 247 Spyz... > > Wasn't I using a Lee draw as proof, didn't mean > to at least. (Was being haughty/ sarcastic... thinking > someone like Lux had so much more to put in front of > > an audience than a Lee, etc.) > But, since Interior's death and Lee's > "draw" entered into my > consciousness at the same time, decided something need be > (in a twisted-lime kinda way)said. > > On a same note, I did see Sala in the late seventies, > opening for > the Stooges, holding the stage with the best of them. > > g. > > > Gerry-- > > > > What is a Lux interior? > > > > Also there is a logic problem with using this Li Young > Lee reading as > > proof of the importance of poetry. If one of the best > known US poets can > > only muster an audience on his own of 400, it proves > the opposite. > > > > Be well > > > > David Baratier, Editor > > > > Pavement Saw Press > > 321 Empire Street > > Montpelier OH 43543 > > http://pavementsaw.org > > > > Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at > > http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 03:21:58 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:06 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] university of baltimore Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902080021v2fd1c57boba4aa7c0b0e2fb25@mail.gmail.com> is looking for submissions: http://welter.ubalt.edu/welter/submissions.html -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/2d182038/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 04:28:50 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:06 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] roanoke marginal arts festival Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902080128n6aea1eb3q1d6e9946837aebb3@mail.gmail.com> 2009 roanoke marginal arts festival mail art, sound poetry, visual poetry, ubu enchained, silent films scored by live bands, power tool drag racing, collab fests, a conceptual art auction, a parade, readings, workshops, power point presentations, boxing, bicycling, exhibits, performances, lectures. dance improv, an absurdist church service... -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/08157e9b/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 07:35:39 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:06 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Umbrella Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902080435m75f9e926p68ab2e4eae841268@mail.gmail.com> is accepting submission: http://www.umbrellajournal.com/winter2008/editorial.html C.E.Chaffin, member of the present list, is a contributing editor. http://www.umbrellajournal.com/winter2008/editorial.html -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/8a297eb1/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 8 07:46:15 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:06 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Baiting In-Reply-To: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498ED417.6060009@nut-n-but.net> Sorry to keep a rather dumb and trivial tangent going, but on reflection I've decided that the first time I asked whether Lee was packing them in because of his message (/primarily/, as I guess I have to point out for the literalists) rather than his poetry, I was simply curious, as I said. I was not trying to get into an argument about the otherstream versus the knownstream. I won't deny that I /was/ also implicitly sniping yet again at bigtimers--but I was ready to be pleased with and for Lee if someone whose opinion I esteemed said his poetry was what what drawing crowds, or even that he message was drawing crowds but he was a good poet aside from that. Evidence supporting my defense: I was going to post a rude reaction to the Tufts prize-winners but didn't--because I decided after a non-skim of the second poem that it was quite good (although flawed--I think the word "hospice" was too pathos-laden). The non-poem that got the professor a hundred grand, though, was standard for that kind of stale-by-now thing. Unless it's completely unrepresentative of the professor's work, I think her getting the loot a blow against poetry. --Bob G. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/55dfdcbf/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 8 07:52:44 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry--Andrews In-Reply-To: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498ED59C.9090209@nut-n-but.net> I need a true copy of this poem--sorry to be nit-picking, but its words are not all it is--the page it's on is part of it (as it isn't in conventional poems). Its context is important, too: we know it was in a magazine. If anyone has it, I'd like to know what is said about the piece in the table of contents. All this because the piece won't work without its being clearly recognized as a poem (or as at least a would-be poem). --Bob From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 8 08:31:23 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Housman--I'm Still At It In-Reply-To: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498EDEAB.7000206@nut-n-but.net> This argument of mine with Judy made me suddenly see something about the Housman poem I hadn't seen before. It explains a reason I've always automatically liked the poem. What I now see is that the poem is a subtle chant: line 2: "(the cherry) is hung with bloom" rah rah line 4: "(the cherry) is wearing white (blooms)" rah rah line 9: "look at things in bloom" rah rah line 12: "see the cherry hung with (bloom the color as delicacy of) snow" rah rah Okay, call it just a sort of refrain. The point is, the poem's speaker tells us about blooms much more than he has to. Once he's told us that the cherry trees are blossoming in line 2, for instance, he needn't tell us they're wearing white--if conveying information was all the poem was intending to do. It seems to me unarguable that the poet is driving the cherry blossom image into us--in a way almost like Stein's "rose is a rose is a rose." His poetry keeps the repetitionfrom being boring (for most of his readers). If I'm right about this, then the snow image at the end has to be a metaphor. If I'm wrong, the poet has spent all of an eleven-line poem except its last word celebrating cherry blossoms. Would anyone reading the poem expect him to switch to winter anywhere before the final word? Is there any other successful poem that carries out such an abrupt switch? Here's a better, though still not Housmanian, rendering of the poem's third stanza as I think it would have had to have been if the snow-as-snow reading were valid: And since to look at lovely things Requires more time than fifty springs About the winter woods I'll go To see the cherry hung with snow. No good poet, in my opinion, sneaks a greatly altered meaning, however profound some take it to be, into a poem at the very end. The one suggested here, I would add, goes against a main virtue of the poem: its expression of a buoyant love of cherry blossoms, a love turned to a chant, and one demanding, it seems to me, immediate involvement with the love-objects. --Bob From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 8 08:54:42 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Segantini and the bad mothers In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902071037y2636f01aiea84d1be24afa4a9@mail.gmail.com> References: <4b65c2d70902071037y2636f01aiea84d1be24afa4a9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <498EE422.3080307@nut-n-but.net> Anny Ballardini wrote: > I am wondering, am I the only one who thinks that The Bad Mothers are > simply "bad mothers"? > http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.asp?venue=2&id=30 > > > My assumption starts from a very simple linguistic statement, that a > mother is a woman who has a child. A female human being who does not > have a child is defined a woman, a girl, a lady, ... but not a "mother". > > I am specifically denying the following: > > The Punishment of Lust belongs to a series of paintings produced > between 1891-96 on the theme of bad mothers (cattive madri). Segantini > was inspired by Nirvana, a poem written by the 12th century monk Luigi > Illica in imitation of the Indian text Panghiavahli. Illica's poem > contained the phrase 'la Mala Madre' (the bad or wicked mother with an > echo similar to 'la mala femmina' or prostitute) to describe those > women who refused the responsibilities of motherhood. I'm coming into this with no background, Anny, but the paragraph above makes sense to me: a bad mother is a woman who has a child but neglects it--in this way refusing the responsibilities of motherhood. She isn't refusing motherhood, as you seem to be thinking but the responsibilities that go with it.. Hey, I may not know what I'm talking about, but I'm not baiting you, honest! --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/a71d9a26/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 09:20:07 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Segantini and the bad mothers In-Reply-To: <498EE422.3080307@nut-n-but.net> References: <4b65c2d70902071037y2636f01aiea84d1be24afa4a9@mail.gmail.com> <498EE422.3080307@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902080620u2fe2a8u667d8e107677a92b@mail.gmail.com> Thank you very much Bob. I can feel the tone in your mail. I also need to say that mine was a rhetorical statement. I have already made up my mind and I'm just openly criticizing what many people in this field give for granted. Have a nice Sunday. Already afternoon here, days off just disappear! Anny On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Anny Ballardini wrote: > > I am wondering, am I the only one who thinks that The Bad Mothers are > simply "bad mothers"? > > http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.asp?venue=2&id=30 > > My assumption starts from a very simple linguistic statement, that a mother > is a woman who has a child. A female human being who does not have a child > is defined a woman, a girl, a lady, ... but not a "mother". > > I am specifically denying the following: > > The Punishment of Lust belongs to a series of paintings produced between > 1891-96 on the theme of bad mothers (cattive madri). Segantini was inspired > by Nirvana, a poem written by the 12th century monk Luigi Illica in > imitation of the Indian text Panghiavahli. Illica's poem contained the > phrase 'la Mala Madre' (the bad or wicked mother with an echo similar to 'la > mala femmina' or prostitute) to describe those women who refused the > responsibilities of motherhood. > > I'm coming into this with no background, Anny, but the paragraph above > makes sense to me: a bad mother is a woman who has a child but neglects > it--in this way refusing the responsibilities of motherhood. She isn't > refusing motherhood, as you seem to be thinking but the responsibilities > that go with it.. > > Hey, I may not know what I'm talking about, but I'm not baiting you, > honest! > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/906bd065/attachment.html From gejs1 at rochester.rr.com Sun Feb 8 09:58:52 2009 From: gejs1 at rochester.rr.com (Gerald Schwartz) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in References: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6324304097654F85A6DFFA28D2AD77EC@yourae066c3a9b> > Didn't know, out in nowhere > I hope that microphone eating perv stays sick on the other side > and haunts those retards from the Voice. > > Is the other Jerome Sala? Yep, That's him. > Never was about the cramps, always held the Gories above them, just wasn't > into the glitz more about the rockabily. I took it all in, especially spectacle, of which music was one of the components of the mighty. > > Be well > > David Baratier, Editor > > Pavement Saw Press > 321 Empire Street > Montpelier OH 43543 > http://pavementsaw.org > > Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at > http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 > > > --- On Sat, 2/7/09, Gerald Schwartz wrote: > >> From: Gerald Schwartz >> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in >> To: editor@pavementsaw.org, "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views" >> >> Date: Saturday, February 7, 2009, 7:48 PM >> Lux Interior, along with partner Poison Ivy, >> fronted The Cramps... >> He passed from this to a hotter coil the other >> day. >> >> '86 or '87 saw them @ the Q. >> >> Same year as the Chilli Peppers... and Living >> Colour, 247 Spyz... >> >> Wasn't I using a Lee draw as proof, didn't mean >> to at least. (Was being haughty/ sarcastic... thinking >> someone like Lux had so much more to put in front of >> >> an audience than a Lee, etc.) >> But, since Interior's death and Lee's >> "draw" entered into my >> consciousness at the same time, decided something need be >> (in a twisted-lime kinda way)said. >> >> On a same note, I did see Sala in the late seventies, >> opening for >> the Stooges, holding the stage with the best of them. >> >> g. >> >> > Gerry-- >> > >> > What is a Lux interior? >> > >> > Also there is a logic problem with using this Li Young >> Lee reading as >> > proof of the importance of poetry. If one of the best >> known US poets can >> > only muster an audience on his own of 400, it proves >> the opposite. >> > >> > Be well >> > >> > David Baratier, Editor >> > >> > Pavement Saw Press >> > 321 Empire Street >> > Montpelier OH 43543 >> > http://pavementsaw.org >> > >> > Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at >> > http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > _______________________________________________ >> > New-Poetry mailing list >> > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sun Feb 8 09:53:54 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Baiting In-Reply-To: <498ED417.6060009@nut-n-but.net> References: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <498ED417.6060009@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <498EF202.4060700@opus40.org> Well, you know me, Bob -- I'll always rise to a challenge. But in this case I had nothing to say. I don't think message and technique exist locked away in separate rooms. In general, people are going to be more interested in reading stuff they're interested reading, and they're going to be interested in reading that stuff delivered by the best writers. This is true in every field, It's why horror fans read Stephen King more than they read some shlub, and romance readers are going to spring for Nora Roberts more often than Roberts-plagiarizer Cassie Edwards. Bob Grumman wrote: > Sorry to keep a rather dumb and trivial tangent going, but on > reflection I've decided that the first time I asked whether Lee was > packing them in because of his message (/primarily/, as I guess I have > to point out for the literalists) rather than his poetry, I was simply > curious, as I said. I was not trying to get into an argument about > the otherstream versus the knownstream. I won't deny that I /was/ > also implicitly sniping yet again at bigtimers--but I was ready to be > pleased with and for Lee if someone whose opinion I esteemed said his > poetry was what what drawing crowds, or even that he message was > drawing crowds but he was a good poet aside from that. > > Evidence supporting my defense: I was going to post a rude reaction to > the Tufts prize-winners but didn't--because I decided after a non-skim > of the second poem that it was quite good (although flawed--I think > the word "hospice" was too pathos-laden). The non-poem that got the > professor a hundred grand, though, was standard for that kind of > stale-by-now thing. Unless it's completely unrepresentative of the > professor's work, I think her getting the loot a blow against poetry. > > --Bob G. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sun Feb 8 10:04:53 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Housman--I'm Still At It In-Reply-To: <498EDEAB.7000206@nut-n-but.net> References: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <498EDEAB.7000206@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <498EF495.4030906@opus40.org> He also tells more about the mathematics of life expectancy than he has to. This is all stuff that shouldn't work -- that we tell our freshman comp students not to do. Hey, I forgot to tell you this! And then he tells you the same thing over again. But here it works sublimely. It's not dissimilar to what I tell my beginning screenwriting students, after I show them The Bicycle Thief. Any of you could make this movie. You could get amateur actors, like DeSica did. You could take a hand-held camera and go out and shoot it in the streets of Poughkeepsie. You could even raise the money for it, since it's a shoestring budget. The only thing you'd need would be genius. Bob Grumman wrote: > This argument of mine with Judy made me suddenly see something about > the Housman > poem I hadn't seen before. It explains a reason I've always > automatically liked the poem. > What I now see is that the poem is a subtle chant: > > line 2: "(the cherry) is hung with bloom" rah rah > > line 4: "(the cherry) is wearing white (blooms)" rah rah > > line 9: "look at things in bloom" rah rah > > line 12: "see the cherry hung with (bloom the color as delicacy of) > snow" rah rah > > Okay, call it just a sort of refrain. The point is, the poem's > speaker tells us about blooms > much more than he has to. Once he's told us that the cherry trees are > blossoming in line 2, > for instance, he needn't tell us they're wearing white--if conveying > information was all the > poem was intending to do. It seems to me unarguable that the poet is > driving the cherry > blossom image into us--in a way almost like Stein's "rose is a rose is > a rose." His poetry > keeps the repetitionfrom being boring (for most of his readers). If > I'm right about this, > then the snow image at the end has to be a metaphor. > > If I'm wrong, the poet has spent all of an eleven-line poem except its > last word celebrating > cherry blossoms. Would anyone reading the poem expect him to switch > to winter > anywhere before the final word? Is there any other successful poem > that carries out such > an abrupt switch? > > Here's a better, though still not Housmanian, rendering of the poem's > third stanza as I > think it would have had to have been if the snow-as-snow reading were > valid: > > And since to look at lovely things > Requires more time than fifty springs > About the winter woods I'll go > To see the cherry hung with snow. > > No good poet, in my opinion, sneaks a greatly altered meaning, however > profound some > take it to be, into a poem at the very end. The one suggested here, I > would add, goes > against a main virtue of the poem: its expression of a buoyant love of > cherry blossoms, a > love turned to a chant, and one demanding, it seems to me, immediate > involvement with > the love-objects. > > --Bob > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 8 10:25:51 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Baiting In-Reply-To: <498EF202.4060700@opus40.org> References: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com><498ED417.6060009@nut-n-but.net> <498EF202.4060700@opus40.org> Message-ID: <498EF97F.6030203@nut-n-but.net> TheOldMole wrote: > Well, you know me, Bob -- I'll always rise to a challenge. But in this > case I had nothing to say. I don't think message and technique exist > locked away in separate rooms. Nor do I, but they both have an effect. Take Obama's speeches: are they praised because they say what many people want to hear or are they praised because they are genuinely eloquent? No baiting here: I haven't listened to any of them, so have no opinion, and don't care. Just an example. I can't think of any poets or other writers as good examples, but am sure there are many who said what people of their time liked but didn't last because they didn't say it lastingly. > In general, people are going to be more interested in reading stuff > they're interested reading, and they're going to be interested in > reading that stuff delivered by the best writers. This is true in > every field, It's why horror fans read Stephen King more than they > read some shlub, and romance readers are going to spring for Nora > Roberts more often than Roberts-plagiarizer Cassie Edwards. I half-agree. One problem is that when a really good writer writes a genre novel, it will be called a Serious Novel--and won't capture the audience a Stephen King novel will. I'm not sure the truly best genre novels are the most popular. But maybe. I think Rex Stout was terrific, for example, and his stuff was very popular. --Bob From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 8 10:42:29 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Housman--I'm Still At It In-Reply-To: <498EF495.4030906@opus40.org> References: <6877.65692.qm@web45615.mail.sp1.yahoo.com><498EDEAB.7000206@nut-n-but.net> <498EF495.4030906@opus40.org> Message-ID: <498EFD65.1080403@nut-n-but.net> TheOldMole wrote: > He also tells more about the mathematics of life expectancy than he > has to. Yes! > This is all stuff that shouldn't work -- that we tell our freshman > comp students not to do. Exactly what I was thinking as I read it critically. > Hey, I forgot to tell you this! And then he tells you the same thing > over again. But here it works sublimely. It's not dissimilar to what I > tell my beginning screenwriting students, after I show them The > Bicycle Thief. Any of you could make this movie. You could get amateur > actors, like DeSica did. You could take a hand-held camera and go out > and shoot it in the streets of Poughkeepsie. You could even raise the > money for it, since it's a shoestring budget. The only thing you'd > need would be genius. What kind of baiting is this, Mole. I agree with all of it. Ah, but the fish you're after is that Judy person! --Bob From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 15:15:41 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: university of baltimore In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902080021v2fd1c57boba4aa7c0b0e2fb25@mail.gmail.com> References: <4b65c2d70902080021v2fd1c57boba4aa7c0b0e2fb25@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902081215k291bb048i6f79854f80e77ca2@mail.gmail.com> Margarete Peterson adds: If anyone from your list does end up getting printed in Welter, we have a reading for all the contributors in April at the university. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Anny Ballardini Date: Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 9:21 AM Subject: university of baltimore To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &, Views" < new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu> is looking for submissions: http://welter.ubalt.edu/welter/submissions.html -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/acf7c375/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 15:31:16 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] SPRING Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902081231x14d64d63x54feb4b2feb010f3@mail.gmail.com> By honoring Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge who were instrumental in Vivaldi's revival, I am forwarding the present call for poems for the Spring collection. You can find Autumn: http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=318 and Winter: http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=329 already on the Poets' Corner. *La Primavera* *Spring* *Allegro* Giunt' ? la Primavera e festosetti La Salutan gl' Augei con lieto canto, E i fonti allo Spirar de' Zeffiretti Con dolce mormorio Scorrono intanto: Vengon' coprendo l' aer di nero amanto E Lampi, e tuoni ad annuntiarla eletti Indi tacendo questi, gl' Augelletti; Tornan' di nuovo al lor canoro incanto: *Largo* E quindi sul fiorito ameno prato Al caro mormorio di fronde e piante Dorme 'l Caprar col fido can' ? lato. *Allegro* Di pastoral Zampogna al suon festante Danzan Ninfe e Pastor nel tetto amato Di primavera all' apparir brillante. *Spring* *Allegro* Springtime is upon us. The birds celebrate her return with festive song, and murmuring streams are softly caressed by the breezes. Thunderstorms, those heralds of Spring, roar, casting their dark mantle over heaven, Then they die away to silence, and the birds take up their charming songs once more. *Largo* On the flower-strewn meadow, with leafy branches rustling overhead, the goat-herd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him. *Allegro* Led by the festive sound of rustic bagpipes, nymphs and shepherds lightly dance beneath the brilliant canopy of spring. * * * * >From Wikipedia under the Four Seasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Seasons_(Vivaldi) you can also listen to John Harrison's wonderful violin, you should so wish! My best wishes, Anny -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/80a5e55f/attachment.html From editor at pavementsaw.org Sun Feb 8 18:16:46 2009 From: editor at pavementsaw.org (David Baratier) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in Message-ID: <59363.47734.qm@web45614.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Bob-- ? I understood your point ages ago. ? In the late eighties, I read for?the AIDS quilt which was brought to the New York State Museum in Albany. Many "poets," including one very famous one, read poems that were against AIDS. "AIDS is bad," "friends died," "boo for AIDS," "where is money for testing," I got to wear this rubber thing," etcetera. And people cheered. But the?superior writers (ie poets) used some other metaphor with no stated connection, one was about a medicine ball. ? Why does someone have to prove to you that Li is a good poet, and not due to content? In fact, his subject matter is the opposite of what you want to hear, it gets tedious, the first two?collections and part of the third are "Dead Dad" books.?But he is the best known and living narrative "Dead Dad" writer there is.? ? Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press 321 Empire Street Montpelier OH 43543 http://pavementsaw.org Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/bb4731bb/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 8 19:39:12 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:07 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <59363.47734.qm@web45614.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <59363.47734.qm@web45614.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498F7B30.6060601@nut-n-but.net> David Baratier wrote: > Bob-- > > I understood your point ages ago. > > In the late eighties, I read for the AIDS quilt which was brought to > the New York State Museum in Albany. Many "poets," including one very > famous one, read poems that were against AIDS. "AIDS is bad," "friends > died," "boo for AIDS," "where is money for testing," I got to wear > this rubber thing," etcetera. And people cheered. But the superior > writers (ie poets) used some other metaphor with no stated connection, > one was about a medicine ball. > > Why does someone have to prove to you that Li is a good poet, and not > due to content? In fact, his subject matter is the opposite of what > you want to hear, it gets tedious, the first two collections and part > of the third are "Dead Dad" books. But he is the best known and living > narrative "Dead Dad" writer there is. > > I was asking for proof, David--I just wanted to know, basically, what kind of poetry he was writing that was drawing crowds--without reading it myself, which I don't have time to do. And now, you've pretty much told me. thanks, Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/f8d8ee43/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sun Feb 8 19:44:24 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:08 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <498F7B30.6060601@nut-n-but.net> References: <59363.47734.qm@web45614.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <498F7B30.6060601@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <498F7C68.6080206@opus40.org> This took more time than reading it yourself would have. Bob Grumman wrote: > David Baratier wrote: >> Bob-- >> >> I understood your point ages ago. >> >> In the late eighties, I read for the AIDS quilt which was brought to >> the New York State Museum in Albany. Many "poets," including one very >> famous one, read poems that were against AIDS. "AIDS is bad," >> "friends died," "boo for AIDS," "where is money for testing," I got >> to wear this rubber thing," etcetera. And people cheered. But >> the superior writers (ie poets) used some other metaphor with no >> stated connection, one was about a medicine ball. >> >> Why does someone have to prove to you that Li is a good poet, and not >> due to content? In fact, his subject matter is the opposite of what >> you want to hear, it gets tedious, the first two collections and part >> of the third are "Dead Dad" books. But he is the best known and >> living narrative "Dead Dad" writer there is. >> >> > I was asking for proof, David--I just wanted to know, basically, what > kind of poetry he was writing that was drawing crowds--without reading > it myself, which I don't have time to do. And now, you've pretty much > told me. > > thanks, Bob > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 8 20:03:54 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:08 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Li-Young Lee packs 'em in In-Reply-To: <498F7C68.6080206@opus40.org> References: <59363.47734.qm@web45614.mail.sp1.yahoo.com><498F7B30.6060601@nut-n-but.net> <498F7C68.6080206@opus40.org> Message-ID: <498F80FA.5030609@nut-n-but.net> TheOldMole wrote: > This took more time than reading it yourself would have. Haw, you're right, Mole--but I didn't think when I made my first post on the subject. --Bob G. From jforjames at aol.com Sun Feb 8 20:37:36 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:08 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild In-Reply-To: <8FC4B31000A74E5F8003361482A479DE@Schlueter> References: <8FC4B31000A74E5F8003361482A479DE@Schlueter> Message-ID: <8CB586E1C809071-1730-4@WEBMAIL-DZ28.sysops.aol.com> -----Original Message----- From: PoemoftheWeek.org To: Poem of theWeek Sent: Sun, 8 Feb 2009 3:43 pm Subject: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild Poem Of The Week?? 02-08-09? ? ???????????????????? B. H. Fairchild ? ? ? Beauty Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful. . . -James Wright, "Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry, Ohio" I. We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she says, what are you thinking? and I say, beauty, thinking of how very far we are now from the machine shop and the dry fields of Kansas, the treeless horizons of slate skies and the muted passions of roughnecks and scrabble farmers drunk and romantic enough to weep more or less silently at the darkened end of the bar out of, what else, loneliness, meaning the ache of thwarted desire, of, in a word, beauty, or rather its absence, and it occurs to me again that no male member of my family has ever used this word in my hearing or anyone else's except in reference, perhaps, to a new pickup or dead deer. This insight, this backward vision, first came to me as a young man as some weirdness of the air waves slipped through the static of our new Motorola with a discussion of beauty between Robert Penn Warren and Paul Weiss at Yale College. We were in Kansas eating barbecue-flavored20potato chips and waiting for Father Knows Best to float up through the snow of rural TV in 1963. I felt transported, stunned. Here are two grown men discussing "beauty" seriously and with dignity as if they and the topic were as normal as normal topics of discussion between men such as soybean prices or why the commodities market was a sucker's game or Oklahoma football or Gimpy Neiderland almost dying from his hemorrhoid operation. They were discussing beauty and tossing around allusions to Plato and Aristotle and someone named Pater, and they might be homosexuals. That would be a natural conclusion, of course, since here were two grown men talking about "beauty" instead of scratching their crotches and cursing the goddamned government trying to run everybody's business. Not a beautiful thing, that. The government. Not beautiful, though a man would not use that word. One time my Uncle Ross from California called my mom's Sunday dinner centerpiece "lovely" and my father left the room, clearly troubled by the word "lovely" coupled probably with the very idea of California and the fact that my Uncle Ross liked to tap-dance. The light from the venetian blinds, the autumn, silver Kansas light laving the table that Sunday, is what I recall now because it was beautiful, though I of course would not have said so then, beautiful, as so many moments forgotten but later remembered come back to us in slants and pools and uprisings of light, beautiful in itself, but more beautiful mingled with memory, the light leaning across my mother's carefully set table, across the empty chair beside my Uncle Ross, the light filtering down from the green plastic slats in the roof of the machine shop where I worked with my father so many afternoons, standing or crouched in pools of light and sweat with men who knew the true meaning of labor and money and other hard, true things and did not, did not ever, use the word, beauty. II. Late November, shadows gather in the shop's north end, and I'm watching Bobby Sudduth do piece work on the Hobbs. He fouls another cut, motherfucker, fucking bitch machine, and starts over, sloppy, slow, about two joints away from being fired, but he just doesn't give a shit. He sets the bit again, white wrists flashing in the lamplight and showing botched, blurred tattoos, both from a night in Tijuana, and continues his sexual autobiography, that's right, fucked my own sister, and I'll tell you, bud, it wasn't bad. Later, in the Phillipines, the clap: as far as I'm concerned, any man who hasn't had V.D. just isn't a man. I walk away, knowing I have just heard the dumbest remark ever uttered by man or animal. The air around me hums in a dark metallic bass, light spilling like grails of milk as someone opens the mammoth shop door. A shrill, sullen truculence blows in like dust devils, the hot wind nagging my blousy overalls, and in the sideyard the winch truck b ackfires and stalls. The sky yellows. Barn sparrows cry in the rafters. That afternoon in Dallas Kennedy is shot. Two weeks later sitting around on rotary tables and traveling blocks whose bearings litter the shop floor like huge eggs, we close our lunch boxes and lean back with cigarettes and watch smoke and dust motes rise and drift into sunlight. All of us have seen the newscasts, photographs from Life, have sat there in our cavernous rooms, assassinations and crowds flickering over our faces, some of us have even dreamed it, sleeping through the TV's drone and flutter, seen her arm reaching across the lank body, black suits rushing in like moths, and the long snake of the motorcade come to rest, then the announcer's voice as we wake astonished in the dark. We think of it now, staring at the tin ceiling like a giant screen, what a strange goddamned country, as Bobby Sudduth arches a wadded Fritos bag at the time clock and says, Oswald, from that far, you got to admit, that shot was a beauty. III. The following summer. A black Corvette gleams like a slice of onyx in the sideyard, driven there by two young men who look like Marlon Brando and mention Hollywood when Bobby asks where they're from. The foreman, my father, has hired them because we're backed up with work, both shop and yard strewn with rig parts, flat-bed haulers rumbling in each day lugging damaged drawworks, and we are desperate. The noise is awful, a gang of rou ghnecks from a rig on down-time shouting orders, our floor hands knee-deep in the drawwork's gears heating the frozen sleeves and bushings with cutting torches until they can be hammered loose. The iron shell bangs back like a drum-head. Looking for some peace, I walk onto the pipe rack for a quick smoke, and this is the way it begins for me, this memory, this strangest of all memories of the shop and the men who worked there, because the silence has come upon me like the shadow of cranes flying overhead as they would each autumn, like the quiet and imperceptible turning of a season, the shop has grown suddenly still here in the middle of the workday, and I turn to look through the tall doors where the machinist stand now with their backs to me, the lathes whining down together, and in the shop's center I see them standing in a square of light, the two men from California, as the welders lift their black masks, looking up, and I see their faces first, the expressions of children at a zoo, perhaps, or after a first snow, as the two men stand naked, their clothes in little piles on the floor as if they are about to go swimming, and I recall how fragile and pale their bodies seemed against the iron and steel of the drill presses and milling machines and lathes. I did not know the word, exhibitionist, then, and so for a moment it seemed only a problem of memory, that they had forgotten somehow where they were, that this was not the locker room after the game, that they were not taking a shower, that this was not the appropriate place, and they would then remember, and suddenly embarrassed, begin shyly to dress again. But they did not, and in memory they stand frozen and poised as two models in a drawing class, of whom the finished sketch might be said, though not by me nor any man I knew, to be beautiful, they stand there forever, with the time clock ticking behind them, time running on but not moving, like the white tunnel of silence between the snap of the ball and the thunderclap of shoulder pads that never seems to come and then there it is, and I hear a quick intake of breath on my right behind the Hobbs and it is Bobby Sudduth with what I think now was not just anger but a kind of terror on his face, an animal wildness in the eyes and the jaw tight, making ropes in his neck while in a long blur with his left hand raised and gripping an iron file he is moving toward the men who wait attentive and motionless as deer trembling in a clearing, and instantly there is my father between Bobby and the men as if he were waking them after a long sleep, reaching out to touch the shoulder of the blonde one as he says in a voice almost terrible in its gentleness, its discretion, you boys will have to leave now. He takes one look at Bobby who is shrinking back into the shadows of the Hobbs, then walks quickly back to=2 0his office at the front of the shop, and soon the black Corvette with the orange California plates is squealing onto Highway 54 heading west into the sun. IV. So there they are, as I will always remember them, the men who were once fullbacks or tackles or guards in their three-point stances knuckling into the mud, hungry for highschool glory and the pride of their fathers, eager to gallop terribly against each other's bodies, each man in his body looking out now at the nakedness of a body like his, men who each autumn had followed their fathers into the pheasant-rich fields of Kansas and as boys had climbed down from the Allis-Chalmers after plowing their first straight furrow, licking the dirt from their lips, the hand of the father resting lightly upon their shoulder, men who in the oven-warm winter kitchens of Baptist households saw after a bath the body of the father and felt diminished by it, who that same winter in the abandoned schoolyard felt the odd intimacy of their fist against the larger boy's cheekbone but kept hitting, ferociously, and walked away feeling for the first time the strength, the abundance, of their own bodies. And I imagine the men that evening after the strangest day of their lives, after they have left the shop without speaking and made the long drive home alone in their pickups, I see them in their little white frame houses on the edge of town adrift in the long silence of the evening turning finall y to their wives, touching without speaking the hair which she has learned to let fall about her shoulders at this hour of the night, lifting the white nightgown from her body as she in turn unbuttons his work shirt heavy with the sweat and grease of the day's labor until they stand naked before each other and begin to touch in a slow choreography of familiar gestures their bodies, she touching his chest, his hand brushing her breasts, and he does not say the word "beautiful" because he cannot and never has, and she does not say it because it would embarrass him or any other man she has ever known, though it is precisely the word I am thinking now as I stand before Donatello's David with my wife touching my sleeve, what are you thinking? and I think of the letter from my father years ago describing the death of Bobby Sudduth, a single shot from a twelve-gauge which he held against his chest, the death of the heart, I suppose, a kind of terrible beauty, as someone said of the death of Hart Crane, though that is surely a perverse use of the word, and I was stunned then, thinking of the damage men will visit upon their bodies, what are you thinking? she asks again, and so I begin to tell her about a strange afternoon in Kansas, about something I have never spoken of, and we walk to a window where the shifting light spreads a sheen along the casement, and looking out, we see the city blazing like miles of uncut wh eat, the farthest buildings taken in their turn, and the great dome, the way the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her, would break into flame late on an autumn day, with such beauty. ??????????????????????? -from The Art of the Lathe ? ? ? ? Author and poet B.H. Fairchild's first published book was a critical study of another poet. Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake, which saw print in 1980, looked at the influence of music on the work of the famed late eighteenth-century poet who pioneered Romanticism and created such masterpieces as Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Four Zoas. In fact, it is primarily these two sets of poems by Blake that Fairchild uses to assert his premise that music is supremely important to Blake's poetic creations. As Brian Wilke pointed out in the Rocky Mountain Review, Such Holy Song itself "has a kind of simple ABA sonata form." The critic explained that chapter one provides a framework for the rest of the book. The next three chapters explore "the theoretical and mythic meaning of music for Blake," "melos" in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the "sound effects, ... musico-dramatic form, and ... musical imagery" in The Four Zoas. The last chapter sums up the book. Fairchild also asserts that melody, in Blake's creative realm, is likened "to the visual ... and the poetic line, ... representing the right, healthy form of imagination. ..." In addition, the author includes information about Blake's living conditions, which included a home near "pleasure gardens" where music was frequently performed. Critical response to Such Holy Song was generally positive. Wilke noted that the chapter dealing with The Four Zoas is "the best part of the book." Wilke particularly appreciated the explanation "of the poem's sound effects, which Fairchild brings excitingly alive." A Choice contributor noted that Fairchild explores his subject matter and proves his points "clearly and effectively," and declared the volume to be "the first direct attempt to render as accurately as possible the musicality" of Blake's poetry. Fairchild has also published volumes of his own poetry, including 1985's The Arrival of the Future, with illustrations by Ross Zirkle, and a volume titled Local Knowledge, which a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted for its "obvious strength." His collection of poems titled The Art of the Lathe: Poems was called "thoughtful and delicately crafted" by Poetry contributor John Taylor. The reviewer went on to note: "His images haunt with a sort of silent metaphysical immobility." Vince Gotera, writing in the North American Review, commented that the author provides "impeccably precise and fresh insight." Fairchild received wide recognition and critical praise for his volume of poetry titled Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. Writing in Poetry, Bill Christophersen noted that the author "continues to mine the experience of growing up in various hardscrabble towns of Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas during the Fifties and Sixties." Christophersen went on to write: "Many of these poems, like their predecessors ... are free verse narratives distinguished by their blue-collar settings and crisp detail." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that "fans of Fairchild's comforting excursions to the familiar isolated territory of machinists won't be disappointed." In a review in the New York Times, Michael Hainey wrote: "This is the American voice at its best." ? B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas and University of Tulsa and now lives with his wife and daughter in Claremont, California. His awards include the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize, a NEA Fellowship in Poetry, a California Arts Grant, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers Conference, a National Writers? Union First Prize, and an AWP Anniversary Award. His poetry collections include Local Knowledge, The System of Which the Body Is One Part, and Flight. He is also the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake. His poems have appeared in Southern Review, Poetry, Triquarterly, Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Sewanee Review and other journals. ? ? ? A Conversation with B. H. Fairchild, by Paul Mariani ?. . . even then, before the dust would thin from Kansas skies and we would take the rags from the windows and20breathe again, even then, I could turn with Seton's bear at the gateway to the last canyon as the Angel of the Wild Things waited, as the fumes rose like night's warm quilt, as the hunters crept closer slowly, slowly. ?????? from "Ernest Thompson Seton's Biography of a Grizzly" ? Image: Much of your work is firmly planted in your Texas and Kansas years, the years you spent in your father's machine shop, working a lathe, living in a world very much like that portrayed in Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 film, The Last Picture Show. Often this Midwestern experience is refracted through the lens of what we used to call high art ? Texas and Kansas refracted through the lenses of Cicero, Augustine, Rilke, and Ren? Char. Your long poem "Beauty," for example, takes place in the Bargello in Florence, where you are looking at the paintings on the Renaissance palace walls in company with your wife, before you circle back to your youth in Kansas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, remembering what the word beauty meant in a context of violence, boredom, and fear. Like William Carlos Williams, James Wright, and James Dickey, all writing in the American grain, you insist on the beauty to be found in what seems to be a desolate landscape. Would you comment? B.H. Fairchild: Thank you for mentioning The Last Picture Show, which is probably the best visual and dramatic representation ever of the kind of small towns in which I grew up. I saw, or tried to see, that movi e when it was first released, and after the first two minutes I had to get up and leave. I later saw the whole film, but that first look ? tumbleweeds blowing across the main street, dirt in the air, the absence of trees ? was hard to take. "Refracted through... the lens of high art" is an interesting and useful phrase, though I'm not sure it quite describes what is happening in my poems when high art appears shoulder to shoulder with physical labor or popular culture ? in the title poem of The Art of the Lathe, for instance, when Mozart and Patsy Cline are mentioned together, or the machine shop is compared with the drawing of the blacksmith's shop in Diderot's encyclopedia or with a cathedral such as Suger's Saint-Denis. I resent the way blue-collar labor is often stereotyped as being utterly divorced from high culture, as if it were performed only by men and women whose lives are a cycle of beer drinking, Monday night football, and NASCAR, and who have never read or wanted to read The Brothers Karamazov or Anna Karenina. I have a cousin, for instance, who is a machinist and comes in and sets the parameters on the lathe (they're computerized now), then leans back and reads Heidegger. Maybe that's exceptional, but I also have a poem, "Toban's Precision Machine Shop," that resulted from walking into a very old shop in San Bernardino (so old the lathes were driven by belts connected to an overhead shaft) where a Mahler symphony was flooding the air. A large part o f my intent in The Art of the Lathe was to blur the line between craft and art. The men in those shops, including my father, were highly skilled laborers who performed tasks whose intellectual complexity was at least equal to if not more demanding than those performed by academic intellectuals. Take a good look at Machinery's Handbook if you don't believe me. Maybe lathe work is not an art, though it is certainly a craft, but as a child my first sense of beauty may have been lamplight reflecting from the blue spiral of iron as it peeled off of a threaded end of drill pipe. One of the most important transitions for me, psychological or otherwise, was the gradual, halting movement out of the physical world of work into the world of art and literature and ideas. Very often, especially in my later teens and early twenties, I was existing in both worlds at the same time, watching a welder lay down a perfect seam while Madame Bovary was walking around in my head, or observing the gleam of a freshly shaped and honed piece of stock while remembering the arc of a Brancusi sculpture. I don't "insist" upon beauty being found in strange, overlooked places; that's just the way it seems to emerge in many of my poems. Nobody could be more surprised at this than I am. I did not have a talent for machine work and could not wait to escape that little town, at least for nine months, to the world of the university. But that town is where my mind seems to locate the startling fact of beaut y. And the stranger the circumstances or source of beauty, the more authentic it seems to me. Image: I wonder if you might talk a bit about your own long, solitary apprenticeship to poetry. Let's start with how you came to compose your first book, The Arrival of the Future, which originally appeared in 1985, when you were forty-three. BHF: The Arrival of the Future is simply a selection from everything I had written since the early seventies. The delay in the book's appearance had less to do with my development as a poet than it did with the poetry situation then and now. These days, if you have a manuscript of merit, are outside the MFA bureaucracy, and have no one of influence to recommend you, you are limited to entering competitions in order to have a book published. If the manuscript has real value, it will likely be a runner-up or finalist many times before it is actually selected. If it takes you five years to write the book, it may well take five more years before it wins publication. This makes it so important that the competitions are run fairly. A couple of years ago, I read at a university with a prestigious poetry book series, and two of the professors there ? very nice folks and fine poets ? asked me whether I remembered submitting a manuscript to them some fifteen years before. I didn't, because I had been submitting to so many contests then. They confessed that they had chosen my manuscript as the winner, but the final judge insisted on giving the20prize to his student. I'm glad that they didn't tell me at the time, because I may well have thrown in the towel. Image: How have you been able to write while teaching all those literature and composition classes, year after year, without any real time off? This had to take away from your ability to sit down and write with the leisure one needs to produce good work. BHF: Everyone struggles with this. Everything ultimately seems to circle around economics, and someone somewhere is surely writing a book on poetry and money, or they should be. I might still be working on Early Occult Memory Systems if it weren't for the awards given to The Art of the Lathe. With the money from those awards and some generosity from my school, I was able to buy myself a year off from teaching. I had never in my life had a year off to write, and it's amazing how much you can produce when you have the time. I could never seem to land the good job, though God knows I'm lucky to have any job at all. I've taught eight to ten classes a year at state universities my whole career and had to wedge the writing in whenever I could. The worst part is not the constant awareness of what you're not writing but rather the guilt you feel for the time you're taking away from your family. But other writers who, like me, teach in the Cal State system have been impressively productive: my colleague the novelist James Brown, Tim Steele, Ron Koertge, Charles Harper Webb. The work gets done, somehow. Image : How long did it take to, as they say, find your voice? BHF: I was never very concerned with this when I was trying to teach myself the art of poetry. I was working in almost complete isolation, had never taken a poetry writing class or workshop, and therefore did not hear the phrase used much. Furthermore, I don't think I quite believed in it. I was trying to find my mind more than my voice. Also, because I had once been an aspiring jazz musician, I was trying to teach myself the way such a musician does: reading the best poets, trying to analyze what they did, then trying to do it myself, the way in those days a kid would listen to Charlie Parker or Sonny Stitt or Art Pepper to pick up their technique and ideas. I would also practice each day, giving myself little exercises in image, metaphor, syntax, or form, the way a pianist does five-finger exercises. Instead of trying to find my voice, I thought about precision of technique. Something of a breakthrough came for me sitting in on a class in prosody taught by the poet Don Welch at Kearney State College, where I taught briefly. It opened up the interior life of the poem for me. Another lucky event was taking a class from Winston Weathers at the University of Tulsa, where he taught a sort of modernized version of classical rhetoric, mostly tropes and schemes. Image: Who were some of your models? James Agee in prose? James Wright and William Stafford in poetry? Who else? What about European influences? BHF: Some of=2 0the early influences included prose writers who were doing interesting things with syntax: Hemingway, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and yes, James Agee, mostly the prose-poem preface to A Death in the Family, a small portion of which I used as the epigraph for my fourth book. I later read his poems, reviews, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Remember, I did not come from a literary background. Some Frost and Whitman excited me in high school, but college was a huge intellectual adventure, and each writer ? Keats, Shakespeare, all the big ones ? was a great discovery. Poetry itself, truly understood as an art form, was a great discovery. As I began to write poems myself, Bill Stafford, James Wright, and Richard Hugo became very important to me because they validated my subject matter. I had grown up in small towns in the oil fields, and I had thought that poems needed to be about Grecian urns and unrequited love and nightingales. Those three poets made it immediately clear that I could write about my own experiences. Later, in graduate school, I read Anthony Hecht's The Hard Hours, and it impressed me in every possible way. I was as attracted to his sound ? I mean his complex phonemic textures ? as I was to those in Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle and in Sylvia Plath. I'm not sure how all of this plays out in terms of actual influence. As for European or other influences: as you can see from the epigraphs in The Arrival of the Future, I was readi ng W. S. Merwin's translation of Osip Mandelstam and Cesare Pavese's Hard Labor in the later stages of my manuscript, and they made a deep impression on me. Image: Can you talk a bit about the shape of this first book, and why you chose the cover you did, your friend Don Van Radke's The Wasp Killers (1977)? BHF: It's difficult for me to remember now how I constructed the book out of the poems I had then. The title poem, with its epigraph from the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, I knew I wanted as the closing poem, and the book is roughly divided into three parts, but it is not a tightly, intricately structured book such as I would later try to do. The cover I can be more specific about. I made the acquaintance of the painter Don Van Radke when I was putting together Arrival of the Future, saw The Wasp Killers on the wall of his house, and recognized it immediately as a visual translation of the phrase "the arrival of the future." I knew I wanted it on the cover, and when the book finally won a competition, I arranged it with the publisher. But the publisher (a brave, noble, small poetry publisher, like so many) was going out of business even as the book was being produced, so a less expensive cover was substituted, and I was very disappointed. Later, after The Art of the Lathe, Alice James agreed to republish the book the way I originally wanted it, and I thank them for that. Image: Can you talk about the cross-fertilization process between narrative and lyrical stru ctures ? the vertical heightening of the lyric, as well as the insistence, if you will, on the more horizontal fidelity to the quotidian? BHF: It seems obvious that most poems these days are lyric/narrative hybrids. I think of pure lyric as being a vertical movement within a moment of time ? sometimes an infinitely small moment ? and pure narrative as being a horizontal movement in time. I think you can have pure lyric, such as Rilke's "Rose, oh pure contradiction," but that it's almost impossible to have pure narrative, at least in poetry. In fact, I think a narrative poem always has to be a hybrid, even though it's closer to the horizontal axis, because a poem must have at least some lyric depth. Beginning as far back as "In Czechoslovakia" in my second book, Local Knowledge, I became interested in this problem of writing a narrative that sustains momentum without sacrificing lyric depth. Image: You speak of your first book as a miscellany, but certainly your last two books are finely honed and highly structured. Would you comment on this development? By extension, where do you see your new work going? BHF: Thank you for the compliment and observation. Yes, it was certainly my intent to make The Art of the Lathe and Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest more than just collections, especially the latter, though it is probably immodest to say so, there being such a gulf between intent and execution. But I at least wanted more of a thematic consistency in The Art of the Lathe; I hoped that there would be a development between the strangeness, even forbiddenness, of the idea of beauty in the first poem and the location and celebration of it in the work itself (that is, the machine work) in the title poem which closes the book. Early Occult Memory Systems has two memory systems and two centers. One, the subject of the first poem, the title poem, I invented for myself as a child. It is about not only memory but memory's desire: to forget nothing, to hold on to everything as if one were going to live forever. The other memory system is the one that was so important to Renaissance intellectuals such as Giordano Bruno, whose wonderful memory theater really derived from classical rhetoricians (thus the Renaissance habit of referring to such systems as "occult," meaning simply pre-Christian or pagan). One center of the book occurs in the middle of the long poem, "The Blue Buick," when Roy Garcia, having taught the boy-narrator Bruno's system, says that the boy would then forget nothing and "everything would be imprinted on his soul." The other center is "The Deposition," in which the eyes of the dead Christ twice say to the persona, "I know who you are." Here is the idea that one can never know oneself truly, that a finite mind can only be fully comprehended by an infinite one. This poem lies between the epigraph from James Agee that ends in the child's voice, "these [the adults] receive me... but will not ever tell me who I am," and the very la st sentence of the final poem of the book, "The Memory Palace": "and still you do not know who you are." In that final poem, the two centers merge: the boy from "The Blue Buick," now an old man in the final moments of dying, uses Bruno's memory system to remember everything that he loved. He wants to achieve memory's desire, the same desire he had as a child, to forget nothing, to hold on to everything forever. Image: There's not a great deal in your poems about your wife and children; that is, there's no self-portrait of yourself as husband and father. Instead, the focus is on you as a young man in the working world of Kansas. Would you care to say something about your parents as shapers? Your father is everywhere, your mother less so, except perhaps in The Memory Palace. Why is this? BHF: There are perfectly natural reasons, including the usual psychological ones, for family, especially parents, to appear in one's poems. However, in my case they were also playing out a quintessentially American story, though I became conscious of that only in retrospect. Like so many of their generation, they grew up on small, homestead farms, and ? subsistence farming being an extremely hard life ? migrated to towns and cities, learned a trade, struggled through the depression of the thirties, then World War II, and finally came upon that slim opportunity, like the light seeping through a crack in the door, to pull themselves up into the middle class through unrelenting work and sacrifice and a little luck. My father had to quit high school in the tenth grade to help support his family ? a fairly common story in those days ? but he was smart, strong, and, like my mom, could work harder than any human being I had ever seen. I much preferred the years when he was a wage-earning lathe machinist in Texas to later, when he risked everything they had saved to own a small piece of a machine shop in Kansas. That shop was built on rumors about the Hugoton gas field that never played out, sank entirely into the red in its first few years, looked every day like it was going under, and exacted a huge toll on the emotional life of our family and on my parents' marriage. My father was the most exploited worker in the shop. He frequently worked sixteen-hour days, often worked at night (he once stood over a lathe for forty-eight hours straight), never had weekends, and brought home, it seemed, nothing but worry and despair about losing everything. In the early years in Texas, from a child's point of view, life was wonderful; in fact, you could say I was, in William Matthews's phrase, the victim of a happy childhood. If your father had come home from World War II ? and that's a very big if ? growing up in the late forties in a blue-collar neighborhood could be paradise. There were fathers in undershirts at twilight, home from work, watering their lawns, hose in one hand, beer in the other, mothers talking on front porches, kids screaming and runn ing through the yards, playing stickball in the street, all of this until dark. This was before the great narcotic, television, came along to pull everyone inside and turn neighborhoods into cemeteries. There was the occasional weekend fishing trip to the beach in Galveston. But then came the move to Kansas, exile from paradise, and that constant, unvarying cycle of work/eat/sleep that made less and less sense to me until it made no sense at all. For reasons that are fairly evident if you read the poems, I have written more about my father than my mother. But my mother made me the obsessive reader I became, by putting books in my hands at an early age so that I was reading pretty well by the age of four. I was sick a lot as a kid, and for me being sick was almost pleasurable, because she would always place a stack of new books beside me in bed. She also taught me there was such a thing as unconditional love. On the other hand, among my earliest memories is standing by my father as he operated a lathe. He was a perfectionist and so introduced me to the idea of craft, "a small thing done well." The odd fact that I fell in love with craft itself before I ever came to poetry has had a huge influence on the way I think about poetry. I vividly remember how he would point out something another machinist had done as "good work," clearly the highest kind of praise, and how disdainfully he would refer to other work as "sloppy." It was a moral distinction as much as an ae sthetic one and made a deep impression on me. But then later, in Kansas, came the financial pressures, despair, and anger, and I was increasingly drawn to what was called "the life of the mind." Even later came the political arguments, and the sense of having failed him. It's an old story, isn't it? And a very American one. Image: Could you say something about your interest in those American obsessions that keep cropping up in your poems? I mean cars, baseball, and jazz. BHF: During the bad years, the one thing between my father and me that did not sour was baseball. He and his brothers had been terrific ballplayers, and baseball was the only sport I wasn't terrible at. In fact, one of my earliest aesthetic experiences ? the sense of something that might be called beauty, though I could not have said so at the time ? was playing second base in a double play. It went so smoothly, a perfect line reeled out from the shortstop to me to first base, and I felt my body disappear inside a motion, gave myself to something larger than myself, something that might possibly be called beautiful. So, without planning to do so, I seem to have written several poems about baseball. I don't follow the majors the way I used to, though Boston's victory last year in the series brought tears to my eyes. For just a few moments it felt like Brooklyn in 1955, and all the old feeling came back. Image: What about your connection with jazz? BHF: As the work/eat/sleep cycle began to domi nate everything, to appear inevitable and unending, and as the isolation of the town became claustrophobic (the nearest large town was Amarillo, Texas, 180 miles away, which was also the nearest bookstore), I think I would have died if it hadn't been for the excellent local library and jazz. I was fascinated with bebop, though it was hard to get records (a drive to Amarillo again). I have a poem in Early Occult Memory Systems about hearing Charlie Parker for the first time over WNOE, a station in New Orleans that we could sometimes pick up late at night. I played tenor saxophone pretty well, though I had a completely oversized sense of my own talent. I used to dream about running off to Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, the center of bebop at that time. If I had, I wouldn't have lasted five minutes. I somehow discovered Downbeat magazine and would wait patiently for my subscription to arrive each month. Nat Hentoff, the famous jazz critic and later equally famous civil rights champion, had a regular column with record reviews, and it was another ridiculous fantasy of mine that Hentoff would someday review a record of mine. Some forty years later I walked into my house and turned on my answering machine, and a voice said, "Hi. I'm Nat Hentoff, and I'd like to review your recent book of poems for the Wall Street Journal." Suddenly I was eighteen years old all over again. I couldn't shut up about it, though my wife suggested that might be a good idea. My father hated the poems, but he wou ld have been very proud to see me mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. Image: Does your ongoing interest in jazz figure into the musical phrasing of your own poetry? I'm wondering about what Pound calls melopoeia, the musical sense of the line. BHF: I don't think jazz had any direct influence on syntactical phrasing or improvised meter in my work, meter with variations being, even in Shakespeare, inherently analogous to an improvised melodic line in jazz, regardless of influence. Any kind of musical training gives one an ear for the auditory dimension of poetry, especially sound texture and pulse. I was constantly attracted to someone's sound, whether Lowell, Hecht, Plath, Hugo, whoever. Plath loved internal rhyme and the occasional monosyllabic with strong consonants on each end, while Hugo had that very strong duple meter ? whether iambic or trochaic ? running through his poems. Image: Can you say something about the world of art as it appears in your work? I'm thinking not only of the Bargello, but of the seventeenth-century Dutch realists as complements to your work, and even more of Edward Hopper, that quintessentially American poet of isolation, even to the point of finally emptying his lighted rooms of human presence altogether. You have a poem in The Art of the Lathe called "All the People in Hopper's Paintings." BHF: That poem attempts to put into words the almost ineffable effect his work had on me and so many other American poets. I never entered an art museum until college,20so I had only seen his paintings in books, but even then they stunned me, and I would linger in awe and wonder over them for hours. They explained something in me and in the America I had lived in that I could simply not articulate. Recently I gave a reading at Yale and happened onto their little art museum, which has to be one of the best of any college in this country. I went up to the second floor, walked to the end of the hall, and there were four Hoppers, including three of my favorites, especially Western Motel, which can almost be read as an allegory about southern California. I got paid well for the reading, but seeing those paintings was the real pay-off. Image: You've also been influenced by William Stafford. BHF: It was a wonderful surprise to discover in my mid-thirties that Stafford had graduated from my high school. I heard him read in Texas, and he prefaced a poem by referring to one of his high school teachers, who had also taught my sister and appears as a librarian in one of my poems. We corresponded a bit after that, and I would attend his readings in my area in California whenever I could. I was very proud of my hometown when they recently decided to name the high school library after him. His son, Kim, a prince of a guy who has written an absolutely beautiful memoir of his father, was there for the dedication. But I first met Stafford much earlier, when he visited my fiction class in 1962 at the University of Kansas. He tried to explain th at writing was really easy, and I was offended because I was young and angry and wanted to think that writing was the most difficult task in the world. In my office I have a photo of Stafford and myself next to his poem, "What I Heard Whispered at the Edge of Liberal, Kansas." Image: I want to go back for a moment to Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, whose very title evokes for me the great Jesuit Matteo Ricci teaching the Confucian scholars in Beijing, as well as the figures of Cicero and Bruno. There's something evocative and spiritual ? perhaps religious ? about the poems, which shed a light of something like grace on the lost world of the machine shop and the lathe. It's something you seem to do so quietly and yet insistently. BHF: I think that in that way Early Occult Memory Systems might be called a religious book (I am avoiding the word spiritual, which the New Age people seem to have beaten to death). I was raised a Methodist, then spent twenty years disguised to myself as an agnostic, then became a Lutheran, and finally an Anglican. I know: that would seem to be the slow boat to Rome, but it's a big ocean, after all. The hunger never abates. One reads constantly out of the hunger, sometimes foolishly, I think ? Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Weil, Bonhoeffer, Merton, the whole boatload, and especially now Ren? Girard ? but it's always there. At this point in my life, I don't think it's a problem of belief anymore. It's simply who I am. Image: I'm curious: why Ren? Girard in particular? And what do you mean that at this point in your life this is simply who you are? BHF: Girard is an anthropologist and literary theorist who, in his Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, among other books, offers a non-sacrificial reading of the crucifixion based on the ideas of mimetic rivalries and scapegoat mechanisms. It's an exciting reading, utterly convincing, and nobody has ever seen Christ's sacrifice in this way. As for the second question, I mean that being a Christian no longer seems to present a problem of belief for me, or at least not in the same way it once did (I'm thinking of Paul Tillich's dialectic of belief: doubt and faith as two sides of the same coin). It's simply who I am. That is, it seems to be a fact or condition of my being at an even deeper level than doubt itself. My wife began learning Hebrew in high school and then converted to Judaism. One thing I envy her is that arguing with God is very much a part of her Jewish tradition. I wish that were so, or more so, in the Christian tradition. Image: I find a certain undeniable sacramental quality in many of your poems, as if you were standing outside yourself and looking back at the world of your youth, a world that exists now largely in the golden alembic of your esthetic memory. In particular you point readers to the sacramental nature of work. You show us work's spiritual dimension, the sense in which=2 0it can dignify, valorize, and make holy the individual. BHF: Yes, work can be sacramental, especially work that you do with your hands. I think for my father it was often sacramental, though he would have been embarrassed by that phrase as being too grand. The trouble is that in a capitalist economy, corporate employers constantly take advantage of that, saying, in effect, "If the work is so important to them, so sacred, they won't mind a cut in wages." The work of teaching can certainly be sacramental, and in the same way boards of regents will say, "If they love teaching so much, they won't quit if we double the class size." The working-class ethic is very simple: do the best work you can do, do it on time, and never work for free, because that means you place no value on what you do for a living. If the work is sacred, then by God place a value on it. ? What they're saying?about The Art of the Lathe ?"The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic?a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched?.workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music?" ?Los Angeles Times ? "With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work....Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration." ?from the introduction by Anthony Hecht ? "These remarkably textured, generous, haunting poems articulate the absence and longing that are created by experience and that in turn keep experience alive. Anyone who wishes to understand not only the contemporary American idiom but the reasons for that idiom will have to read B.H. Fairchild?s The Art of the Lathe." ?Wyatt Prunty ? ? ?"The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic?a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched?.workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music?" ?Los Angeles Times ? "With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work....Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration." ?from the introduction by Anthony Hecht ? "These remarkably textured, generous, haunting poems articulate the absence and longing that are created by experience and that in turn keep experience alive. Anyone who wishes to understand not only the contemporary American idiom but the reasons for that idiom will have to read B.H. Fairchild?s The Art of the Lathe." ?Wyatt Prunty ? ? ? ? ???????????????????? B. H. Fairchild ? ? ? Beauty =0 A Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful. . . -James Wright, "Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry, Ohio" I. We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she says, what are you thinking? and I say, beauty, thinking of how very far we are now from the machine shop and the dry fields of Kansas, the treeless horizons of slate skies and the muted passions of roughnecks and scrabble farmers drunk and romantic enough to weep more or less silently at the darkened end of the bar out of, what else, loneliness, meaning the ache of thwarted desire, of, in a word, beauty, or rather its absence, and it occurs to me again that no male member of my family has ever used this word in my hearing or anyone else's except in reference, perhaps, to a new pickup or dead deer. This insight, this backward vision, first came to me as a young man as some weirdness of the air waves slipped through the static of our new Motorola with a discussion of beauty between Robert Penn Warren and Paul Weiss at Yale College. We were in Kansas eating barbecue-flavored potato chips and waiting for Father Knows Best to float up through the snow of rural TV in 1963. I felt transported, stunned. Here are two grown men discussing "beauty" seriously and with dignity as if they and the topic were as normal as normal topics of discussion between men such as soybean prices or why the commodities market was a sucker's game or Oklahoma football or Gimpy Neiderland almost dying from his hemorrhoid operation. They were discussing beauty and tossing around allusions to Plato and Aristotle and someone named Pater, and they might be homosexuals. That would be a natural conclusion, of course, since here were two grown men talking about "beauty" instead of scratching their crotches and cursing the goddamned government trying to run everybody's business. Not a beautiful thing, that. The government. Not beautiful, though a man would not use that word. One time my Uncle Ross from California called my mom's Sunday dinner centerpiece "lovely" and my father left the room, clearly troubled by the word "lovely" coupled probably with the very idea of California and the fact that my Uncle Ross liked to tap-dance. The light from the venetian blinds, the autumn, silver Kansas light laving the table that Sunday, is what I recall now because it was beautiful, though I of course would not have said so then, beautiful, as so many moments forgotten but later remembered come back to us in slants and pools and uprisings of light, beautiful in itself, but more beautiful mingled with memory, the light leaning across my mother's carefully set table, across the empty chair beside my Uncle Ross, the light filtering down from the green plastic slats in the roof of the machine shop where I worked with my father so many afternoons, standing or crouched in pools of light and sweat with men who knew the true meaning of labor and money and other hard, true things and did not, did not ever, use the word, beauty. II. Late November, shadows gather in the shop's north end, and I'm watching Bobby Sudduth do piece work on the Hobbs. He fouls another cut, motherfucker, fucking bitch machine, and starts over, sloppy, slow, about two joints away from being fired, but he just doesn't give a shit. He sets the bit again, white wrists flashing in the lamplight and showing botched, blurred tattoos, both from a night in Tijuana, and continues his sexual autobiography, that's right, fucked my own sister, and I'll tell you, bud, it wasn't bad. Later, in the Phillipines, the clap: as far as I'm concerned, any man who hasn't had V.D. just isn't a man. I walk away, knowing I have just heard the dumbest remark ever uttered by man or animal. The air around me hums in a dark metallic bass, light spilling like grails of milk as someone opens the mammoth shop door. A shrill, sullen truculence blows in like dust devils, the hot wind nagging my blousy overalls, and in the sideyard the winch truck backfires and stalls. The sky yellows. Barn sparrows cry in the rafters. That afternoon in Dallas Kennedy is shot. Two weeks later sitting around on rotary tables and traveling blocks whose bearings litter the shop floor like huge eggs, we close our lunch boxes and lean back with cigarettes and watch smoke and dust motes rise and drift into sunlight. All of us have seen the newscasts, photographs from Life, have sat there in our cavernous rooms, assassinations and crowds flickering over our faces, some of us have even dreamed it, sleeping through the TV's drone and flutter, seen her arm reaching across the lank body, black suits rushing in like moths, and the long snake of the motorcade come to rest, then the announcer's voice as we wake astonished in the dark. We think of it now, staring at the tin ceiling like a giant screen, what a strange goddamned country, as Bobby Sudduth arches a wadded Fritos bag at the time clock and says, Oswald, from that far, you got to admit, that shot was a beauty. III. The following summer. A black Corvette gleams like a slice of onyx in the sideyard, driven there by two young men who look like Marlon Brando and mention Hollywood when Bobby asks where they're from. The foreman, my father, has hired them because we're backed up with work, both shop and yard strewn with rig parts, flat-bed haulers rumbling in each day lugging damaged drawworks, and we are desperate. The noise is awful, a gang of roughnecks from a rig on down-time shouting orders, our floor hands knee-deep in the drawwork's gears heating the frozen sleeves and bushings with cutting torches until they can be hammered loose. The iron shell bangs back like a drum-head. Looking for some peace, I walk onto the pipe rack for a quick smoke, and this is the way it begins for me, this memory, this strangest of all memories of the shop and the men who worked there, because the silence has come upon me like the shadow of cranes flying overhead as they would each autumn, like the quiet and imperceptible turning of a season, the shop has grown suddenly still here in the middle of the workday, and I turn to look through the tall doors where the machinist stand now with their backs to me, the lathes whining down together, and in the shop's center I see them standing in a square of light, the two men from California, as the welders lift their black masks, looking up, and I see their faces first, the expressions of children at a zoo, perhaps, or after a first snow, as the two men stand naked, their clothes in little piles on the floor as if they are about to go swimming, and I recall how fragile and pale their bodies seemed against the iron and steel of the drill presses and milling machines and lathes. I did not know the word, exhibitionist, then, and so for a moment it seemed only a problem of memory, that they had forgotten somehow where they were, that this was not the locker room after the game, that they were not taking a shower, that this was not the appropriate place, and they would then remember, and suddenly embarrassed, begin shyly to dress again. But they did not, and in memory they stand frozen and poised as two models in a drawing class, of whom the finished sketch might be said, though not by me nor any man I knew, to be beautiful,20they stand there forever, with the time clock ticking behind them, time running on but not moving, like the white tunnel of silence between the snap of the ball and the thunderclap of shoulder pads that never seems to come and then there it is, and I hear a quick intake of breath on my right behind the Hobbs and it is Bobby Sudduth with what I think now was not just anger but a kind of terror on his face, an animal wildness in the eyes and the jaw tight, making ropes in his neck while in a long blur with his left hand raised and gripping an iron file he is moving toward the men who wait attentive and motionless as deer trembling in a clearing, and instantly there is my father between Bobby and the men as if he were waking them after a long sleep, reaching out to touch the shoulder of the blonde one as he says in a voice almost terrible in its gentleness, its discretion, you boys will have to leave now. He takes one look at Bobby who is shrinking back into the shadows of the Hobbs, then walks quickly back to his office at the front of the shop, and soon the black Corvette with the orange California plates is squealing onto Highway 54 heading west into the sun. IV. So there they are, as I will always remember them, the men who were once fullbacks or tackles or guards in their three-point stances knuckling into the mud, hungry for highschool glory and the pride of their fathers, eager to gallop ter ribly against each other's bodies, each man in his body looking out now at the nakedness of a body like his, men who each autumn had followed their fathers into the pheasant-rich fields of Kansas and as boys had climbed down from the Allis-Chalmers after plowing their first straight furrow, licking the dirt from their lips, the hand of the father resting lightly upon their shoulder, men who in the oven-warm winter kitchens of Baptist households saw after a bath the body of the father and felt diminished by it, who that same winter in the abandoned schoolyard felt the odd intimacy of their fist against the larger boy's cheekbone but kept hitting, ferociously, and walked away feeling for the first time the strength, the abundance, of their own bodies. And I imagine the men that evening after the strangest day of their lives, after they have left the shop without speaking and made the long drive home alone in their pickups, I see them in their little white frame houses on the edge of town adrift in the long silence of the evening turning finally to their wives, touching without speaking the hair which she has learned to let fall about her shoulders at this hour of the night, lifting the white nightgown from her body as she in turn unbuttons his work shirt heavy with the sweat and grease of the day's labor until they stand naked before each other and begin to touch in a slow choreography of familiar gestures their bodies, she touching his chest, his hand brushing her breasts, and he does not say the word "beautiful" because he cannot and never has, and she does not say it because it would embarrass him or any other man she has ever known, though it is precisely the word I am thinking now as I stand before Donatello's David with my wife touching my sleeve, what are you thinking? and I think of the letter from my father years ago describing the death of Bobby Sudduth, a single shot from a twelve-gauge which he held against his chest, the death of the heart, I suppose, a kind of terrible beauty, as someone said of the death of Hart Crane, though that is surely a perverse use of the word, and I was stunned then, thinking of the damage men will visit upon their bodies, what are you thinking? she asks again, and so I begin to tell her about a strange afternoon in Kansas, about something I have never spoken of, and we walk to a window where the shifting light spreads a sheen along the casement, and looking out, we see the city blazing like miles of uncut wheat, the farthest buildings taken in their turn, and the great dome, the way the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her, would break into flame late on an autumn day, with such beauty. ??????????????????????? -from The Art of the Lathe ? ? ? ? Author and poet B.H. Fairchild's first published=2 0book was a critical study of another poet. Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake, which saw print in 1980, looked at the influence of music on the work of the famed late eighteenth-century poet who pioneered Romanticism and created such masterpieces as Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Four Zoas. In fact, it is primarily these two sets of poems by Blake that Fairchild uses to assert his premise that music is supremely important to Blake's poetic creations. As Brian Wilke pointed out in the Rocky Mountain Review, Such Holy Song itself "has a kind of simple ABA sonata form." The critic explained that chapter one provides a framework for the rest of the book. The next three chapters explore "the theoretical and mythic meaning of music for Blake," "melos" in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the "sound effects, ... musico-dramatic form, and ... musical imagery" in The Four Zoas. The last chapter sums up the book. Fairchild also asserts that melody, in Blake's creative realm, is likened "to the visual ... and the poetic line, ... representing the right, healthy form of imagination. ..." In addition, the author includes information about Blake's living conditions, which included a home near "pleasure gardens" where music was frequently performed. Critical response to Such Holy Song was generally positive. Wilke noted that the chapter dealing with The Four Zoas is "the best part of the book." Wilke particularly appreciated the explanation "of the poem' s sound effects, which Fairchild brings excitingly alive." A Choice contributor noted that Fairchild explores his subject matter and proves his points "clearly and effectively," and declared the volume to be "the first direct attempt to render as accurately as possible the musicality" of Blake's poetry. Fairchild has also published volumes of his own poetry, including 1985's The Arrival of the Future, with illustrations by Ross Zirkle, and a volume titled Local Knowledge, which a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted for its "obvious strength." His collection of poems titled The Art of the Lathe: Poems was called "thoughtful and delicately crafted" by Poetry contributor John Taylor. The reviewer went on to note: "His images haunt with a sort of silent metaphysical immobility." Vince Gotera, writing in the North American Review, commented that the author provides "impeccably precise and fresh insight." Fairchild received wide recognition and critical praise for his volume of poetry titled Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. Writing in Poetry, Bill Christophersen noted that the author "continues to mine the experience of growing up in various hardscrabble towns of Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas during the Fifties and Sixties." Christophersen went on to write: "Many of these poems, like their predecessors ... are free verse narratives distinguished by their blue-collar settings and crisp detail." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that "fans of Fairchild's comforting excursions to the familiar isolated territory of machinists won't b e disappointed." In a review in the New York Times, Michael Hainey wrote: "This is the American voice at its best." ? B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas and University of Tulsa and now lives with his wife and daughter in Claremont, California. His awards include the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize, a NEA Fellowship in Poetry, a California Arts Grant, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers Conference, a National Writers? Union First Prize, and an AWP Anniversary Award. His poetry collections include Local Knowledge, The System of Which the Body Is One Part, and Flight. He is also the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake. His poems have appeared in Southern Review, Poetry, Triquarterly, Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Sewanee Review and other journals. ? ? ? A Conversation with B. H. Fairchild, by Paul Mariani ?. . . even then, before the dust would thin from Kansas skies and we would take the rags from the windows and breathe again, even then, I could turn with Seton's bear at the gateway to the last canyon as the Angel of the Wild Things waited, as the fumes rose like night's warm quilt, as the hunters crept closer slowly, slowly. ?????? from "Ernest Thompson Seton's Biography of a Grizzly" ? Image: Much of your work is firmly planted in your Texas and Kansas years, the years you spent in your father's machine shop, working a lathe, living in a world very much like that portrayed in Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 film, The Last Picture Show. Often this Midwestern experience is refracted through the lens of what we used to call high art ? Texas and Kansas refracted through the lenses of Cicero, Augustine, Rilke, and Ren? Char. Your long poem "Beauty," for example, takes place in the Bargello in Florence, where you are looking at the paintings on the Renaissance palace walls in company with your wife, before you circle back to your youth in Kansas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, remembering what the word beauty meant in a context of violence, boredom, and fear. Like William Carlos Williams, James Wright, and James Dickey, all writing in the American grain, you insist on the beauty to be found in what seems to be a desolate landscape. Would you comment? B.H. Fairchild: Thank you for mentioning The Last Picture Show, which is probably the best visual and dramatic representation ever of the kind of small towns in which I grew up. I saw, or tried to see, that movie when it was first released, and after the first two minutes I had to get up and leave. I later saw the whole film, but that first look ? tumbleweeds blowing across the main street, dirt in the air, the absence of trees ? was hard to take. "Refracted through... the lens of high art" is an interesting and useful phrase, though I'm not sure it quite describes what is happening in my poems when=2 0high art appears shoulder to shoulder with physical labor or popular culture ? in the title poem of The Art of the Lathe, for instance, when Mozart and Patsy Cline are mentioned together, or the machine shop is compared with the drawing of the blacksmith's shop in Diderot's encyclopedia or with a cathedral such as Suger's Saint-Denis. I resent the way blue-collar labor is often stereotyped as being utterly divorced from high culture, as if it were performed only by men and women whose lives are a cycle of beer drinking, Monday night football, and NASCAR, and who have never read or wanted to read The Brothers Karamazov or Anna Karenina. I have a cousin, for instance, who is a machinist and comes in and sets the parameters on the lathe (they're computerized now), then leans back and reads Heidegger. Maybe that's exceptional, but I also have a poem, "Toban's Precision Machine Shop," that resulted from walking into a very old shop in San Bernardino (so old the lathes were driven by belts connected to an overhead shaft) where a Mahler symphony was flooding the air. A large part of my intent in The Art of the Lathe was to blur the line between craft and art. The men in those shops, including my father, were highly skilled laborers who performed tasks whose intellectual complexity was at least equal to if not more demanding than those performed by academic intellectuals. Take a good look at Machinery's Handbook if you don't believe me. Maybe lathe work is not an art, though it is certainly20a craft, but as a child my first sense of beauty may have been lamplight reflecting from the blue spiral of iron as it peeled off of a threaded end of drill pipe. One of the most important transitions for me, psychological or otherwise, was the gradual, halting movement out of the physical world of work into the world of art and literature and ideas. Very often, especially in my later teens and early twenties, I was existing in both worlds at the same time, watching a welder lay down a perfect seam while Madame Bovary was walking around in my head, or observing the gleam of a freshly shaped and honed piece of stock while remembering the arc of a Brancusi sculpture. I don't "insist" upon beauty being found in strange, overlooked places; that's just the way it seems to emerge in many of my poems. Nobody could be more surprised at this than I am. I did not have a talent for machine work and could not wait to escape that little town, at least for nine months, to the world of the university. But that town is where my mind seems to locate the startling fact of beauty. And the stranger the circumstances or source of beauty, the more authentic it seems to me. Image: I wonder if you might talk a bit about your own long, solitary apprenticeship to poetry. Let's start with how you came to compose your first book, The Arrival of the Future, which originally appeared in 1985, when you were forty-three. BHF: The Arrival of the Future is simply a selection from everything I had=2 0written since the early seventies. The delay in the book's appearance had less to do with my development as a poet than it did with the poetry situation then and now. These days, if you have a manuscript of merit, are outside the MFA bureaucracy, and have no one of influence to recommend you, you are limited to entering competitions in order to have a book published. If the manuscript has real value, it will likely be a runner-up or finalist many times before it is actually selected. If it takes you five years to write the book, it may well take five more years before it wins publication. This makes it so important that the competitions are run fairly. A couple of years ago, I read at a university with a prestigious poetry book series, and two of the professors there ? very nice folks and fine poets ? asked me whether I remembered submitting a manuscript to them some fifteen years before. I didn't, because I had been submitting to so many contests then. They confessed that they had chosen my manuscript as the winner, but the final judge insisted on giving the prize to his student. I'm glad that they didn't tell me at the time, because I may well have thrown in the towel. Image: How have you been able to write while teaching all those literature and composition classes, year after year, without any real time off? This had to take away from your ability to sit down and write with the leisure one needs to produce good work. BHF: Everyone struggles with this. Eve rything ultimately seems to circle around economics, and someone somewhere is surely writing a book on poetry and money, or they should be. I might still be working on Early Occult Memory Systems if it weren't for the awards given to The Art of the Lathe. With the money from those awards and some generosity from my school, I was able to buy myself a year off from teaching. I had never in my life had a year off to write, and it's amazing how much you can produce when you have the time. I could never seem to land the good job, though God knows I'm lucky to have any job at all. I've taught eight to ten classes a year at state universities my whole career and had to wedge the writing in whenever I could. The worst part is not the constant awareness of what you're not writing but rather the guilt you feel for the time you're taking away from your family. But other writers who, like me, teach in the Cal State system have been impressively productive: my colleague the novelist James Brown, Tim Steele, Ron Koertge, Charles Harper Webb. The work gets done, somehow. Image: How long did it take to, as they say, find your voice? BHF: I was never very concerned with this when I was trying to teach myself the art of poetry. I was working in almost complete isolation, had never taken a poetry writing class or workshop, and therefore did not hear the phrase used much. Furthermore, I don't think I quite believed in it. I was trying to find my mind more than my voice. Also, b ecause I had once been an aspiring jazz musician, I was trying to teach myself the way such a musician does: reading the best poets, trying to analyze what they did, then trying to do it myself, the way in those days a kid would listen to Charlie Parker or Sonny Stitt or Art Pepper to pick up their technique and ideas. I would also practice each day, giving myself little exercises in image, metaphor, syntax, or form, the way a pianist does five-finger exercises. Instead of trying to find my voice, I thought about precision of technique. Something of a breakthrough came for me sitting in on a class in prosody taught by the poet Don Welch at Kearney State College, where I taught briefly. It opened up the interior life of the poem for me. Another lucky event was taking a class from Winston Weathers at the University of Tulsa, where he taught a sort of modernized version of classical rhetoric, mostly tropes and schemes. Image: Who were some of your models? James Agee in prose? James Wright and William Stafford in poetry? Who else? What about European influences? BHF: Some of the early influences included prose writers who were doing interesting things with syntax: Hemingway, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and yes, James Agee, mostly the prose-poem preface to A Death in the Family, a small portion of which I used as the epigraph for my fourth book. I later read his poems, reviews, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Remember, I did not come from a literary background. Some Frost an d Whitman excited me in high school, but college was a huge intellectual adventure, and each writer ? Keats, Shakespeare, all the big ones ? was a great discovery. Poetry itself, truly understood as an art form, was a great discovery. As I began to write poems myself, Bill Stafford, James Wright, and Richard Hugo became very important to me because they validated my subject matter. I had grown up in small towns in the oil fields, and I had thought that poems needed to be about Grecian urns and unrequited love and nightingales. Those three poets made it immediately clear that I could write about my own experiences. Later, in graduate school, I read Anthony Hecht's The Hard Hours, and it impressed me in every possible way. I was as attracted to his sound ? I mean his complex phonemic textures ? as I was to those in Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle and in Sylvia Plath. I'm not sure how all of this plays out in terms of actual influence. As for European or other influences: as you can see from the epigraphs in The Arrival of the Future, I was reading W. S. Merwin's translation of Osip Mandelstam and Cesare Pavese's Hard Labor in the later stages of my manuscript, and they made a deep impression on me. Image: Can you talk a bit about the shape of this first book, and why you chose the cover you did, your friend Don Van Radke's The Wasp Killers (1977)? BHF: It's difficult for me to remember now how I constructed the book out of the poems I had t hen. The title poem, with its epigraph from the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, I knew I wanted as the closing poem, and the book is roughly divided into three parts, but it is not a tightly, intricately structured book such as I would later try to do. The cover I can be more specific about. I made the acquaintance of the painter Don Van Radke when I was putting together Arrival of the Future, saw The Wasp Killers on the wall of his house, and recognized it immediately as a visual translation of the phrase "the arrival of the future." I knew I wanted it on the cover, and when the book finally won a competition, I arranged it with the publisher. But the publisher (a brave, noble, small poetry publisher, like so many) was going out of business even as the book was being produced, so a less expensive cover was substituted, and I was very disappointed. Later, after The Art of the Lathe, Alice James agreed to republish the book the way I originally wanted it, and I thank them for that. Image: Can you talk about the cross-fertilization process between narrative and lyrical structures ? the vertical heightening of the lyric, as well as the insistence, if you will, on the more horizontal fidelity to the quotidian? BHF: It seems obvious that most poems these days are lyric/narrative hybrids. I think of pure lyric as being a vertical movement within a moment of time ? sometimes an infinitely small moment ? and pure narrative as being a horizontal movement in time. I think you can have pure lyric, such as Rilke's "Rose, oh pure contradiction," but that it's almost impossible to have pure narrative, at least in poetry. In fact, I think a narrative poem always has to be a hybrid, even though it's closer to the horizontal axis, because a poem must have at least some lyric depth. Beginning as far back as "In Czechoslovakia" in my second book, Local Knowledge, I became interested in this problem of writing a narrative that sustains momentum without sacrificing lyric depth. Image: You speak of your first book as a miscellany, but certainly your last two books are finely honed and highly structured. Would you comment on this development? By extension, where do you see your new work going? BHF: Thank you for the compliment and observation. Yes, it was certainly my intent to make The Art of the Lathe and Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest more than just collections, especially the latter, though it is probably immodest to say so, there being such a gulf between intent and execution. But I at least wanted more of a thematic consistency in The Art of the Lathe; I hoped that there would be a development between the strangeness, even forbiddenness, of the idea of beauty in the first poem and the location and celebration of it in the work itself (that is, the machine work) in the title poem which closes the book. Early Occult Memory Systems has two memory systems and two centers. One, the subject of the first poem, the title poem, I invented for mysel f as a child. It is about not only memory but memory's desire: to forget nothing, to hold on to everything as if one were going to live forever. The other memory system is the one that was so important to Renaissance intellectuals such as Giordano Bruno, whose wonderful memory theater really derived from classical rhetoricians (thus the Renaissance habit of referring to such systems as "occult," meaning simply pre-Christian or pagan). One center of the book occurs in the middle of the long poem, "The Blue Buick," when Roy Garcia, having taught the boy-narrator Bruno's system, says that the boy would then forget nothing and "everything would be imprinted on his soul." The other center is "The Deposition," in which the eyes of the dead Christ twice say to the persona, "I know who you are." Here is the idea that one can never know oneself truly, that a finite mind can only be fully comprehended by an infinite one. This poem lies between the epigraph from James Agee that ends in the child's voice, "these [the adults] receive me... but will not ever tell me who I am," and the very last sentence of the final poem of the book, "The Memory Palace": "and still you do not know who you are." In that final poem, the two centers merge: the boy from "The Blue Buick," now an old man in the final moments of dying, uses Bruno's memory system to remember everything that he loved. He wants to achieve memory's desire, the same desire he had as a child, to forget nothing, to hold on to everything for ever. Image: There's not a great deal in your poems about your wife and children; that is, there's no self-portrait of yourself as husband and father. Instead, the focus is on you as a young man in the working world of Kansas. Would you care to say something about your parents as shapers? Your father is everywhere, your mother less so, except perhaps in The Memory Palace. Why is this? BHF: There are perfectly natural reasons, including the usual psychological ones, for family, especially parents, to appear in one's poems. However, in my case they were also playing out a quintessentially American story, though I became conscious of that only in retrospect. Like so many of their generation, they grew up on small, homestead farms, and ? subsistence farming being an extremely hard life ? migrated to towns and cities, learned a trade, struggled through the depression of the thirties, then World War II, and finally came upon that slim opportunity, like the light seeping through a crack in the door, to pull themselves up into the middle class through unrelenting work and sacrifice and a little luck. My father had to quit high school in the tenth grade to help support his family ? a fairly common story in those days ? but he was smart, strong, and, like my mom, could work harder than any human being I had ever seen. I much preferred the years when he was a wage-earning lathe machinist in Texas to later, when he risked everything they had saved to own a small piece of20a machine shop in Kansas. That shop was built on rumors about the Hugoton gas field that never played out, sank entirely into the red in its first few years, looked every day like it was going under, and exacted a huge toll on the emotional life of our family and on my parents' marriage. My father was the most exploited worker in the shop. He frequently worked sixteen-hour days, often worked at night (he once stood over a lathe for forty-eight hours straight), never had weekends, and brought home, it seemed, nothing but worry and despair about losing everything. In the early years in Texas, from a child's point of view, life was wonderful; in fact, you could say I was, in William Matthews's phrase, the victim of a happy childhood. If your father had come home from World War II ? and that's a very big if ? growing up in the late forties in a blue-collar neighborhood could be paradise. There were fathers in undershirts at twilight, home from work, watering their lawns, hose in one hand, beer in the other, mothers talking on front porches, kids screaming and running through the yards, playing stickball in the street, all of this until dark. This was before the great narcotic, television, came along to pull everyone inside and turn neighborhoods into cemeteries. There was the occasional weekend fishing trip to the beach in Galveston. But then came the move to Kansas, exile from paradise, and that constant, unvarying cycle of work/eat/sleep that made less and less sense to me until it made no sense at all. For reasons that are fairly evident if you read the poems, I have written more about my father than my mother. But my mother made me the obsessive reader I became, by putting books in my hands at an early age so that I was reading pretty well by the age of four. I was sick a lot as a kid, and for me being sick was almost pleasurable, because she would always place a stack of new books beside me in bed. She also taught me there was such a thing as unconditional love. On the other hand, among my earliest memories is standing by my father as he operated a lathe. He was a perfectionist and so introduced me to the idea of craft, "a small thing done well." The odd fact that I fell in love with craft itself before I ever came to poetry has had a huge influence on the way I think about poetry. I vividly remember how he would point out something another machinist had done as "good work," clearly the highest kind of praise, and how disdainfully he would refer to other work as "sloppy." It was a moral distinction as much as an aesthetic one and made a deep impression on me. But then later, in Kansas, came the financial pressures, despair, and anger, and I was increasingly drawn to what was called "the life of the mind." Even later came the political arguments, and the sense of having failed him. It's an old story, isn't it? And a very American one. Image: Could you say something about your interest in those American obsessions that keep20cropping up in your poems? I mean cars, baseball, and jazz. BHF: During the bad years, the one thing between my father and me that did not sour was baseball. He and his brothers had been terrific ballplayers, and baseball was the only sport I wasn't terrible at. In fact, one of my earliest aesthetic experiences ? the sense of something that might be called beauty, though I could not have said so at the time ? was playing second base in a double play. It went so smoothly, a perfect line reeled out from the shortstop to me to first base, and I felt my body disappear inside a motion, gave myself to something larger than myself, something that might possibly be called beautiful. So, without planning to do so, I seem to have written several poems about baseball. I don't follow the majors the way I used to, though Boston's victory last year in the series brought tears to my eyes. For just a few moments it felt like Brooklyn in 1955, and all the old feeling came back. Image: What about your connection with jazz? BHF: As the work/eat/sleep cycle began to dominate everything, to appear inevitable and unending, and as the isolation of the town became claustrophobic (the nearest large town was Amarillo, Texas, 180 miles away, which was also the nearest bookstore), I think I would have died if it hadn't been for the excellent local library and jazz. I was fascinated with bebop, though it was hard to get records (a drive to Amarillo again). I have a poem in Early Occult Me mory Systems about hearing Charlie Parker for the first time over WNOE, a station in New Orleans that we could sometimes pick up late at night. I played tenor saxophone pretty well, though I had a completely oversized sense of my own talent. I used to dream about running off to Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, the center of bebop at that time. If I had, I wouldn't have lasted five minutes. I somehow discovered Downbeat magazine and would wait patiently for my subscription to arrive each month. Nat Hentoff, the famous jazz critic and later equally famous civil rights champion, had a regular column with record reviews, and it was another ridiculous fantasy of mine that Hentoff would someday review a record of mine. Some forty years later I walked into my house and turned on my answering machine, and a voice said, "Hi. I'm Nat Hentoff, and I'd like to review your recent book of poems for the Wall Street Journal." Suddenly I was eighteen years old all over again. I couldn't shut up about it, though my wife suggested that might be a good idea. My father hated the poems, but he would have been very proud to see me mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. Image: Does your ongoing interest in jazz figure into the musical phrasing of your own poetry? I'm wondering about what Pound calls melopoeia, the musical sense of the line. BHF: I don't think jazz had any direct influence on syntactical phrasing or improvised meter in my work, meter with variations being, even in Shakespeare, inherently analogo us to an improvised melodic line in jazz, regardless of influence. Any kind of musical training gives one an ear for the auditory dimension of poetry, especially sound texture and pulse. I was constantly attracted to someone's sound, whether Lowell, Hecht, Plath, Hugo, whoever. Plath loved internal rhyme and the occasional monosyllabic with strong consonants on each end, while Hugo had that very strong duple meter ? whether iambic or trochaic ? running through his poems. Image: Can you say something about the world of art as it appears in your work? I'm thinking not only of the Bargello, but of the seventeenth-century Dutch realists as complements to your work, and even more of Edward Hopper, that quintessentially American poet of isolation, even to the point of finally emptying his lighted rooms of human presence altogether. You have a poem in The Art of the Lathe called "All the People in Hopper's Paintings." BHF: That poem attempts to put into words the almost ineffable effect his work had on me and so many other American poets. I never entered an art museum until college, so I had only seen his paintings in books, but even then they stunned me, and I would linger in awe and wonder over them for hours. They explained something in me and in the America I had lived in that I could simply not articulate. Recently I gave a reading at Yale and happened onto their little art museum, which has to be one of the best of any college in this country. I went up to the second flo or, walked to the end of the hall, and there were four Hoppers, including three of my favorites, especially Western Motel, which can almost be read as an allegory about southern California. I got paid well for the reading, but seeing those paintings was the real pay-off. Image: You've also been influenced by William Stafford. BHF: It was a wonderful surprise to discover in my mid-thirties that Stafford had graduated from my high school. I heard him read in Texas, and he prefaced a poem by referring to one of his high school teachers, who had also taught my sister and appears as a librarian in one of my poems. We corresponded a bit after that, and I would attend his readings in my area in California whenever I could. I was very proud of my hometown when they recently decided to name the high school library after him. His son, Kim, a prince of a guy who has written an absolutely beautiful memoir of his father, was there for the dedication. But I first met Stafford much earlier, when he visited my fiction class in 1962 at the University of Kansas. He tried to explain that writing was really easy, and I was offended because I was young and angry and wanted to think that writing was the most difficult task in the world. In my office I have a photo of Stafford and myself next to his poem, "What I Heard Whispered at the Edge of Liberal, Kansas." Image: I want to go back for a moment to Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, whose very title evokes for me the20great Jesuit Matteo Ricci teaching the Confucian scholars in Beijing, as well as the figures of Cicero and Bruno. There's something evocative and spiritual ? perhaps religious ? about the poems, which shed a light of something like grace on the lost world of the machine shop and the lathe. It's something you seem to do so quietly and yet insistently. BHF: I think that in that way Early Occult Memory Systems might be called a religious book (I am avoiding the word spiritual, which the New Age people seem to have beaten to death). I was raised a Methodist, then spent twenty years disguised to myself as an agnostic, then became a Lutheran, and finally an Anglican. I know: that would seem to be the slow boat to Rome, but it's a big ocean, after all. The hunger never abates. One reads constantly out of the hunger, sometimes foolishly, I think ? Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Weil, Bonhoeffer, Merton, the whole boatload, and especially now Ren? Girard ? but it's always there. At this point in my life, I don't think it's a problem of belief anymore. It's simply who I am. Image: I'm curious: why Ren? Girard in particular? And what do you mean that at this point in your life this is simply who you are? BHF: Girard is an anthropologist and literary theorist who, in his Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, among other books, offers a non-sacrificial reading of the crucifixion based on the ideas of mimetic rivalries and scapegoat mechanisms. It 's an exciting reading, utterly convincing, and nobody has ever seen Christ's sacrifice in this way. As for the second question, I mean that being a Christian no longer seems to present a problem of belief for me, or at least not in the same way it once did (I'm thinking of Paul Tillich's dialectic of belief: doubt and faith as two sides of the same coin). It's simply who I am. That is, it seems to be a fact or condition of my being at an even deeper level than doubt itself. My wife began learning Hebrew in high school and then converted to Judaism. One thing I envy her is that arguing with God is very much a part of her Jewish tradition. I wish that were so, or more so, in the Christian tradition. Image: I find a certain undeniable sacramental quality in many of your poems, as if you were standing outside yourself and looking back at the world of your youth, a world that exists now largely in the golden alembic of your esthetic memory. In particular you point readers to the sacramental nature of work. You show us work's spiritual dimension, the sense in which it can dignify, valorize, and make holy the individual. BHF: Yes, work can be sacramental, especially work that you do with your hands. I think for my father it was often sacramental, though he would have been embarrassed by that phrase as being too grand. The trouble is that in a capitalist economy, corporate employers constantly take advantage of that, saying, in effect, "If the work is so important to them, so20sacred, they won't mind a cut in wages." The work of teaching can certainly be sacramental, and in the same way boards of regents will say, "If they love teaching so much, they won't quit if we double the class size." The working-class ethic is very simple: do the best work you can do, do it on time, and never work for free, because that means you place no value on what you do for a living. If the work is sacred, then by God place a value on it. ? What they're saying?about The Art of the Lathe ?"The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic?a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched?.workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music?" ?Los Angeles Times ? "With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work....Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration." ?from the introduction by Anthony Hecht ? "These remarkably textured, generous, haunting poems articulate the absence and longing that are created by experience and that in turn keep experience alive. Anyone who wishes to understand not only the contemporary American idiom but the reasons for that idiom will have to read B.H. Fairchild?s The Art of the Lathe." ?Wyatt Prunty ? ? ?"The Art of the La the by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic?a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched?.workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music?" ?Los Angeles Times ? "With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work....Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration." ?from the introduction by Anthony Hecht ? "These remarkably textured, generous, haunting poems articulate the absence and longing that are created by experience and that in turn keep experience alive. Anyone who wishes to understand not only the contemporary American idiom but the reasons for that idiom will have to read B.H. Fairchild?s The Art of the Lathe." ?Wyatt Prunty ? ? ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/ec7248d1/attachment.html From AlMaginnes at aol.com Sun Feb 8 20:39:33 2009 From: AlMaginnes at aol.com (AlMaginnes@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:08 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild Message-ID: A terrific poem by a wonderful poet. **************Who's never won? Biggest Grammy Award surprises of all time on AOL Music. (http://music.aol.com/grammys/pictures/never-won-a-grammy?ncid=emlcntusmusi00000003) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/00f2db3d/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Sun Feb 8 20:49:12 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:08 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Literary Publshing Certificate Message-ID: <8CB586FBDF0A261-1730-85@WEBMAIL-DZ28.sysops.aol.com> Someone sent me a link to this program. I must admit I thought it was another idea to scam a couple grand off of unsuspecting young people: Pay us now, so?you can really?lose some serious loot later publishing literary titles... http://www.emerson.edu/ce/programs/certificate/Literary-Publishing-Certificate.cfm Although David Baratier could teach a master class in this subject, I'm sure...so maybe there is way to teach someone to make a living in literary publishing without the luck of finding a couple Li-Young Lees early on to publish. Finnegan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/ce458730/attachment.html From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 21:00:17 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:08 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <731bb17a0902081800o377811e2tfaa37a6e3552284c@mail.gmail.com> I like *Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest* quite a lot, ditto *Art of the Lathe*. I bought a copy of *Local Knowledge*, however, and I can't seem to finish it, though that fact may have more to do with me than with the poems. I find Fairchild's experimentation with narrative both compelling and unique. His longish poems have an energy that I associate with the most packed, short lyric poems. And yet his narrative never seems to grind to a halt. I heard him read at a conference a few years ago. He's a great reader; he simultaneously chants his poems and tells a story--a mirror of his poetics. I've not heard anything from him for a while. I wonder what he's writing these days. Best, Jeff Newberry On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 8:39 PM, wrote: > A terrific poem by a wonderful poet. > > ------------------------------ > Who's never won? Biggest Grammy Award surprises of all time on AOL Music > . > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experience, from which each according to his own immediate and peculiar needs may drawn his own conclusion. --W.H. Auden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/c627df7c/attachment.html From AlMaginnes at aol.com Sun Feb 8 21:17:02 2009 From: AlMaginnes at aol.com (AlMaginnes@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild Message-ID: There's a new collection coming out this spring. I think he's been riding the visiting poet circuit pretty hard and enjoying his new status. that's understandable; he worked a long time to get there and was well into his 50's before he had much success at all. **************Who's never won? Biggest Grammy Award surprises of all time on AOL Music. (http://music.aol.com/grammys/pictures/never-won-a-grammy?ncid=emlcntusmusi00000003) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/f21429c2/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Feb 8 22:09:05 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild Message-ID: A great poem. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090208/b0a75972/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Feb 9 06:09:15 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <49900EDB.7050003@nut-n-but.net> Hey, surprise--I approve this poem. --Bob G. From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Mon Feb 9 15:00:51 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Larkin on Auden Message-ID: <731bb17a0902091200q6787be99kc66aedfaff2e94dc@mail.gmail.com> Does anyone know if there is a hypertext version of Larkin's essay "What's Become of Wystan?" available online somewhere? I've tried Google, but I've had no luck. Best, Jeff Newberry -- You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experience, from which each according to his own immediate and peculiar needs may drawn his own conclusion. --W.H. Auden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090209/8b1a3f62/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Mon Feb 9 19:15:21 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Adjectives, who needs 'em? Message-ID: <8CB592BCBAAEAB6-F38-1364@webmail-de10.sysops.aol.com> http://lughat.blogspot.com/2009/01/adjectives-who-needs-em.html So clearly people can do without some adjectives, and clearly the behaviour of adjectives tends to be very similar to the behaviour of some other word class. Why not do without them altogether? It would be easy enough to construct a language where no morphological or syntactic tests could distinguish adjectives from verbs, or from nouns. So if practically every language does take the trouble to distinguish them, there must be some pretty powerful cognitive motivation for it - and some pretty powerful historical tendencies acting to separate adjectives from verbs and/or nouns. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090209/fef92b77/attachment.html From editor at pavementsaw.org Tue Feb 10 10:22:23 2009 From: editor at pavementsaw.org (David Baratier) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Literary Publshing Certificate In-Reply-To: <200902091700.n19H060N029682@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <825128.99946.qm@web45608.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Jim-- ? I think the idea of a literary journal certificate is weird, but might be becoming current fashion. University of Houston wanted my input on a Masters program of the same sort they are considering instituting, a solid two year program. A three hour certificate just seems fluffy. Literary journals and poetry publishers?are losers, paper and raw materials is worth more left alone than after production.? It takes more than a three credit class to overcome that obstacle. But why not, instead,?take all the tuition and start publishing anyways and assume all the money is lost? Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press 321 Empire Street Montpelier OH 43543 http://pavementsaw.org Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1 From: jforjames@aol.com Subject: [New-Poetry] Literary Publshing Certificate To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Message-ID: <8CB586FBDF0A261-1730-85@WEBMAIL-DZ28.sysops.aol.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Someone sent me a link to this program. I must admit I thought it was another idea to scam a couple grand off of unsuspecting young people: Pay us now, so?you can really?lose some serious loot later publishing literary titles... http://www.emerson.edu/ce/programs/certificate/Literary-Publishing-Certificate.cfm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/78a27d71/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Tue Feb 10 13:58:19 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Message-ID: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> I ran across the quote below?& posted it to http://ursprache.blogspot.com/? I wasn't familiar with Walter Anderson. It turns out he was artist...an outsider artist of sorts, who was?from a well-off Mississippi family. See link below to museum (near Biloxi)?with samples of his artwork... http://www.walterandersonmuseum.org/frameset3.htm "The first poetry is always written by sailors and farmers who sing with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and students, wine drinkers who have learned to know a good thing. The third poetry is sometimes never written; but when it is, it is written by those who have brought nature and art into one thing." ?Walter Anderson (1903-1965), American painter, writer and naturalist. from Quote, Unquote by Jonathan Williams Williams was friend of Basil Bunting's and JW died about year ago, as I recall... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jonathan-williams-poet-essayist-and-publisher-799335.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/89051a51/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Tue Feb 10 15:25:28 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902101225l649acc3fkdfed4609c7a2da13@mail.gmail.com> What a wonderful quote! Thanks, Finnegan. Best, Judy 2009/2/10 > I ran across the quote below & posted it to http://ursprache.blogspot.com/ > > I wasn't familiar with Walter Anderson. It turns out he was artist...an > outsider artist of sorts, who was from a well-off Mississippi family. See > link below to museum (near Biloxi) with samples of his artwork... > http://www.walterandersonmuseum.org/frameset3.htm > > "The first poetry is always written by sailors and farmers who sing with > the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and > students, wine drinkers who have learned to know a good thing. The third > poetry is sometimes never written; but when it is, it is written by those > who have brought nature and art into one thing." > > ?Walter Anderson (1903-1965), American painter, writer and naturalist. > from *Quote, Unquote* by Jonathan Williams > Williams was friend of Basil Bunting's and JW died about year ago, as I > recall... > > http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jonathan-williams-poet-essayist-and-publisher-799335.html > > ------------------------------ > *A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/60d802fd/attachment.html From skip at louisiana.edu Tue Feb 10 16:33:51 2009 From: skip at louisiana.edu (Skip Fox) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902101225l649acc3fkdfed4609c7a2da13@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6F0CEFE2CBCE418D8B3DF238F7E4879C@win.louisiana.edu> ."All things are accomplished through the senses." -Walter Anderson (1903-1965), -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/877c197c/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Tue Feb 10 17:48:19 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] reductio absurdum - the game Message-ID: <8CB59E8CD82B78A-7C8-AC7@WEBMAIL-DC11.sysops.aol.com> Paul Hoover posted this facetious short-changing of contemporary/modernist poets & movements... http://paulhooverpoetry.blogspot.com/ Reviewing poetry is increasingly a lost art, and it's so much work! I've created 26 instant reviews of no more than one line. The idea is match all the poets, critics, or school of poetry with their review. Match all of them and you may win a valuable prize. 1. Emily Dickinson 2. Ted Berrigan 3. Hart Crane 4. John Ashbery 5. Allen Ginsberg 6. Donald Justice 7. Marjorie Welish 8. Language Poetry 9. Marianne Moore 10. Galway Kinnell 11. Laura Riding 12. The New Formalism 13. August Kleinzahler 14. Jack Spicer 15. Gertrude Stein 16. Ezra Pound 17. Lawrence Ferlinghetti 18. Helen Vendler 19. Sharon Olds 20. Charles Olson 21. Dana Gioia 22. Anne Waldman 23. Frank O'Hara 24. Jack Kerouac 25. Gary Snyder 26. Paul Blackburn A. Badda bing, badda boom. B. Does a bear shit in the woods? C. And if not, not. D. My typewriter is bigger than your typewriter. E. Big man, small town. F. A little more uncertainty, please. G. The well-hung muse. H. Rebel angels, measured heaven. I. I think I'll write a dictionary. J. Stiff shirt in a sad closet. K. There's no such thing as post-publication. L. Unsettled by the name Oil Can Boyd. M. I do not think it will signify to me. N. Shyness unrequited O. Nearing the non-ending. P. Daring as never before. Q. What price salience? R. Not waving but drowning S. Admiral and existentialist. T. Let me recite you a ballad. U. Is there sex in this class? V. I've stopped being Theirs - W. The emperor's old clothes. X. Accidents are not itineraries. Y. Spare hanger in a bone closet. Z. How strange to be gone in a minute. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/0f765847/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 10 18:46:33 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net> jforjames@aol.com wrote: > I ran across the quote below & posted it to > http://ursprache.blogspot.com/ > I wasn't familiar with Walter Anderson. It turns out he was > artist...an outsider artist of sorts, who was from a well-off > Mississippi family. See link below to museum (near Biloxi) with > samples of his artwork... > http://www.walterandersonmuseum.org/frameset3.htm > > "The first poetry is always written by sailors and farmers who sing > with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars > and students, wine drinkers who have learned to know a good thing. The > third poetry is sometimes never written; but when it is, it is written > by those who have brought nature and art into one thing." > > ?Walter Anderson (1903-1965), American painter, writer and naturalist. > from /Quote, Unquote/ by Jonathan Williams > Williams was friend of Basil Bunting's and JW died about year ago, as > I recall... > http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jonathan-williams-poet-essayist-and-publisher-799335.html > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > *A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! > * > As James knows, these kind of "deep sayings about poetry" don't click with me. But this one made me wonder seriously about who the first poets really were. It's possible the proper question would be who the first /non-/poets were. That is, maybe poetry was natural to our kind until mutants began seeing reality and describing it accurately. More likely, poets were simply the first truth-seekers, the first members of the tribe to try to understand existence non-utilitarianly, so invented a mixture of science, religion and poetry that eventually evolved and speciated. In this reading, the first true poets were intellectuals. Certainly, the first poets were not farmers and sailors--although I think people truly in love with their trades will be poetic about them, and poets might be inspired by their words. Just expressing my view, folks. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/15a95d45/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Tue Feb 10 20:08:09 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> <499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> When I? read? that the 'first poetry' was written by sailors and farmers with the wind in their teeth,?two Old English poems flashed in my mind: The Seafarer (sailor)?and Caedmon's Hymn (farmer). These are the poets who are?entirely?engaged in?the poetic as a force of nature.? Then, of course, most of fall in the scholar/student category of the second(ary) poetry...who have found a good thing (the art of poetry), and?as wine-drinkers, which I read as 'pleasure reader/writers'; poetry isn't keeping us alive?literally, like it is for those with the wind/song in their teeth. But sometimes a 'third poetry' wells up merging both the nature and art, producing the sublime form. Finnegan -- As James knows, these kind of "deep sayings about poetry" don't click with me.? But this one made me wonder seriously about who the first poets really were.? It's possible the proper question would be who the first non-poets were.? That is, maybe poetry was natural to our kind until mutants began seeing reality and describing it accurately.? More likely, poets were simply the first truth-seekers, the first members of the tribe to try to understand existence non-utilitarianly, so invented a mixture of science, religion and poetry that eventually evolved and speciated.? In this reading, the first true poets were intellectuals.? Certainly, the first poets were not farmers and sailors--although I think people truly in love with their trades will be poetic about them, and poets might be inspired by their words.? Just expressing my view, folks.? --Bob _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/492ba8bf/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Tue Feb 10 20:17:54 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:09 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> <499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net> <8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com> Judy being enthusiastic about your analysis! and enjoying the discussion 2009/2/10 > When I read that the 'first poetry' was written by sailors and farmers > with the wind in their teeth, two Old English poems flashed in my mind: > The Seafarer (sailor) and Caedmon's Hymn (farmer). These are the poets who > are entirely engaged in the poetic as a force > of nature. > Then, of course, most of fall in the scholar/student category of the > second(ary) poetry...who have found a good thing (the art of poetry), and as > wine-drinkers, > which I read as 'pleasure reader/writers'; poetry isn't keeping us > alive literally, like it is for those with the wind/song in their teeth. > > But sometimes a 'third poetry' wells up merging both the nature and art, > producing the sublime form. > Finnegan > -- > As James knows, these kind of "deep sayings about poetry" don't click with > me. But this one made me wonder seriously about who the first poets really > were. It's possible the proper question would be who the first *non-*poets > were. That is, maybe poetry was natural to our kind until mutants began > seeing reality and describing it accurately. More likely, poets were simply > the first truth-seekers, the first members of the tribe to try to understand > existence non-utilitarianly, so invented a mixture of science, religion and > poetry that eventually evolved and speciated. In this reading, the first > true poets were intellectuals. Certainly, the first poets were not farmers > and sailors--although I think people truly in love with their trades will be > poetic about them, and poets might be inspired by their words. > > Just expressing my view, folks. > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing listNew-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.eduhttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > ------------------------------ > *A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/096dc824/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Tue Feb 10 20:33:59 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com><499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net><8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8CB59FFF25D41EA-1904-ED0@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> ???? That man knows not, to whom on earth fairest falls, how I, care-wretched, ice-cold sea dwelt on in winter along the exile-tracks, bereaved both of friend and of kin, behung with rime-crystals. Hail showers flew. I heard nothing there but the sea's sounding, ice-cold wave. (The Seafarer) - -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/8a7c7ecb/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Tue Feb 10 20:49:10 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <8CB59FFF25D41EA-1904-ED0@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> <499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net> <8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com> <8CB59FFF25D41EA-1904-ED0@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902101749q3cd7f075ibaf70f840d22a543@mail.gmail.com> Lovely. You've got me flying to my books now! Judy 2009/2/10 > That man knows not, > to whom on earth fairest falls, > how I, care-wretched, ice-cold sea > dwelt on in winter along the exile-tracks, > bereaved both of friend and of kin, > behung with rime-crystals. Hail showers flew. > I heard nothing there but the sea's sounding, > ice-cold wave. > > (The Seafarer) > > - > > ------------------------------ > *A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090210/630ef349/attachment.html From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Tue Feb 10 20:54:42 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902101749q3cd7f075ibaf70f840d22a543@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com><499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net><8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com><7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com><8CB59FFF25D41EA-1904-ED0@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902101749q3cd7f075ibaf70f840d22a543@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <2C83FD0DAB454A1287661A30D005D93C@RobinPC> Ezra Pound's version. In _Personae_? Michael Alexander probably does it better (not to speak of Edwin Morgan). Pound handles OE metrics more handily when he returns to it obliquely in Canto I. R. ----- Original Message ----- From: Judy Prince To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &,Views Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 1:49 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Lovely. You've got me flying to my books now! Judy 2009/2/10 That man knows not, to whom on earth fairest falls, how I, care-wretched, ice-cold sea dwelt on in winter along the exile-tracks, bereaved both of friend and of kin, behung with rime-crystals. Hail showers flew. I heard nothing there but the sea's sounding, ice-cold wave. (The Seafarer) - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/6e98e330/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Feb 10 21:47:52 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com><499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net> <8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <49923C58.7010308@nut-n-but.net> jforjames@aol.com wrote: > When I read that the 'first poetry' was written by sailors and > farmers with the wind in their teeth, two Old English poems flashed in > my mind: > The Seafarer (sailor) and Caedmon's Hymn (farmer). These are the poets > who are entirely engaged in the poetic as a force > of nature. Ah, I was being (too) literal, thinking of sailors and farmers who were nothing but sailors and farmers, not of poets who were or had ALSO been sailors and farmers. > Then, of course, most of fall in the scholar/student category of the > second(ary) poetry...who have found a good thing (the art of poetry), > and as wine-drinkers, > which I read as 'pleasure reader/writers'; poetry isn't keeping us > alive literally, like it is for those with the wind/song in their teeth. > > But sometimes a 'third poetry' wells up merging both the nature and > art, producing the sublime form. > Finnegan Good defense, but it still seems gush to me. Seems to me a poet is someone who experiences life fully and can write about it, regardless of his day job. And all poetry good or bad is about Nature. As for "merging nature and art," what does it mean? It's just another way of saying one likes it. I guess I'd want to see an example of a poem that merges art and nature and one that does not. Seems to me the merging isn't what counts, but the poetry. How does one write a poem about nature that doesn't merge nature with the poem? --Bob From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Wed Feb 11 01:59:55 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] reductio absurdum - the game In-Reply-To: <8CB59E8CD82B78A-7C8-AC7@WEBMAIL-DC11.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59E8CD82B78A-7C8-AC7@WEBMAIL-DC11.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902102259r787f3f70r85271d0190629e73@mail.gmail.com> I would not be able to put them together. Is there anybody who does? Except for Snyder and the existential question on the bear. On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:48 PM, wrote: > Paul Hoover posted this facetious short-changing of contemporary/modernist > poets & movements... > > http://paulhooverpoetry.blogspot.com/ > > Reviewing poetry is increasingly a lost art, and it's so much work! I've > created 26 instant reviews of no more than one line. The idea is match all > the poets, critics, or school of poetry with their review. Match all of them > and you may win a valuable prize. > > 1. Emily Dickinson > 2. Ted Berrigan > 3. Hart Crane > 4. John Ashbery > 5. Allen Ginsberg > 6. Donald Justice > 7. Marjorie Welish > 8. Language Poetry > 9. Marianne Moore > 10. Galway Kinnell > 11. Laura Riding > 12. The New Formalism > 13. August Kleinzahler > 14. Jack Spicer > 15. Gertrude Stein > 16. Ezra Pound > 17. Lawrence Ferlinghetti > 18. Helen Vendler > 19. Sharon Olds > 20. Charles Olson > 21. Dana Gioia > 22. Anne Waldman > 23. Frank O'Hara > 24. Jack Kerouac > 25. Gary Snyder > 26. Paul Blackburn > > A. Badda bing, badda boom. > B. Does a bear shit in the woods? > C. And if not, not. > D. My typewriter is bigger than your typewriter. > E. Big man, small town. > F. A little more uncertainty, please. > G. The well-hung muse. > H. Rebel angels, measured heaven. > I. I think I'll write a dictionary. > J. Stiff shirt in a sad closet. > K. There's no such thing as post-publication. > L. Unsettled by the name Oil Can Boyd. > M. I do not think it will signify to me. > N. Shyness unrequited > O. Nearing the non-ending. > P. Daring as never before. > Q. What price salience? > R. Not waving but drowning > S. Admiral and existentialist. > T. Let me recite you a ballad. > U. Is there sex in this class? > V. I've stopped being Theirs - > W. The emperor's old clothes. > X. Accidents are not itineraries. > Y. Spare hanger in a bone closet. > Z. How strange to be gone in a minute. > > ------------------------------ > *A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/bdd9f373/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Wed Feb 11 12:21:32 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] from today's Almanac Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902110921p160e9e2bpc3b54281e39ff5a1@mail.gmail.com> Coming Home by Mary Oliver When we're driving, in the dark, on the long road to Provincetown, which lies empty for miles, when we're weary, when the buildings and the scrub pines lose their familiar look, I imagine us rising from the speeding car, I imagine us seeing everything from another place ? the top of one of the pale dunes or the deep and nameless fields of the sea ? and what we see is the world that cannot cherish us but which we cherish, and what we see is our life moving like that, along the dark edges of everything ? the headlights like lanterns sweeping the blackness ? believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things, looking out for sorrow, slowing down for happiness, making all the right turns right down to the thumping barriers to the sea, the swirling waves, the narrow streets, the houses, the past, the future, the doorway that belongs to you and me. "Coming Home" by Mary Oliver, from *Dream Work*. (c) The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/f89b1851/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Wed Feb 11 13:29:32 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] reductio absurdum - the game In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902102259r787f3f70r85271d0190629e73@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB59E8CD82B78A-7C8-AC7@WEBMAIL-DC11.sysops.aol.com> <4b65c2d70902102259r787f3f70r85271d0190629e73@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8CB5A8DD11495C9-1580-F08@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> Anny, I think I?got maybe 2/3rds of them, but I can't check because he didn't post the answer, at least not?yet.? It reminded me of a game where people make up one-line glosses to famous poems. Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Anny Ballardini Sent: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 1:59 am Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] reductio absurdum - the game I would not be able to put them together. Is there anybody who does? Except for Snyder and the existential question on the bear. On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:48 PM, wrote: Paul Hoover posted this facetious short-changing of contemporary/modernist poets & movements... http://paulhooverpoetry.blogspot.com/ Reviewing poetry is increasingly a lost art, and it's so much work! I've created 26 instant reviews of no more than one line. The idea is match all the poets, critics, or school of poetry with their review. Match all of them and you may win a valuable prize. 1. Emily Dickinson 2. Ted Berrigan 3. Hart Crane 4. John Ashbery 5. Allen Ginsberg 6. Donald Justice 7. Marjorie Welish 8. Language Poetry 9. Marianne Moore 10. Galway Kinnell 11. Laura Riding 12. The New Formalism 13. August Kleinzahler 14. Jack Spicer 15. Gertrude Stein 16. Ezra Pound 17. Lawrence Ferlinghetti 18. Helen Vendler 19. Sharon Olds 20. Charles Olson 21. Dana Gioia 22. Anne Waldman 23. Frank O'Hara 24. Jack Kerouac 25. Gary Snyder 26. Paul Blackburn A. Badda bing, badda boom. B. Does a bear shit in the woods? C. And if not, not. D. My typewriter is bigger than your typewriter. E. Big man, small town. F. A little more uncertainty, please. G. The well-hung muse. H. Rebel angels, measured heaven. I. I think I'll write a dictionary. J. Stiff shirt in a sad closet. K. There's no such thing as post-publication. L. Unsettled by the name Oil Can Boyd. M. I do not think it will signify to me. N. Shyness unrequited O. Nearing the non-ending. P. Daring as never before. Q. What price salience? R. Not waving but drowning S. Admiral and existentialist. T. Let me recite you a ballad. U. Is there sex in this class? V. I've stopped being Theirs - W. The emperor's old clothes. X. Accidents are not itineraries. Y. Spare hanger in a bone closet. Z. How strange to be gone in a minute. A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/5f64c188/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Wed Feb 11 13:39:17 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <2C83FD0DAB454A1287661A30D005D93C@RobinPC> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com><499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net><8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com><7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com><8CB59FFF25D41EA-1904-ED0@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com><7db1d01b0902101749q3cd7f075ibaf70f840d22a543@mail.gmail.com> <2C83FD0DAB454A1287661A30D005D93C@RobinPC> Message-ID: <8CB5A8F2D4F1B00-1580-FCD@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> Robin, I'm afraid I just did the ol' Google & clip, here...? http://faculty.uca.edu/jona/texts/seafarer.htm That section also appears as the epigraph to play of the same name by Colin McPherson, using Richard Hamer?s translation from the Anglo-Saxon, rendered thus: He knows not Who lives most easily on land, how I Have spent my winter on the ice-cold sea Wretched and anxious, in the paths of exile Lacking dear friends, hung round by icicles While hail flew past in showers? http://www.steppenwolf.org/watchlisten/backstage/detail.aspx?id=189 Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Robin Hamilton Sent: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 8:54 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Ezra Pound's version.? In _Personae_? ? Michael Alexander probably does?it better (not to speak of Edwin Morgan).? ? Pound handles OE metrics more handily when he returns to it obliquely in Canto I. ? R. ----- Original Message ----- From: Judy Prince To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &,Views Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 1:49 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Lovely. ?You've got me flying to my books now! Judy 2009/2/10 ???? That man knows not, to whom on earth fairest falls, how I, care-wretched, ice-cold sea dwelt on in winter along the exile-tracks, bereaved both of friend and of kin, behung with rime-crystals. Hail s howers flew. I heard nothing there but the sea's sounding, ice-cold wave. (The Seafarer) - A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ ew-Poetry mailing list ew-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu ttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/dfd4432f/attachment.html From Sigauke at crc.losrios.edu Wed Feb 11 13:47:47 2009 From: Sigauke at crc.losrios.edu (Sigauke, Emmanuel) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Our poetry communities: Sacramento In-Reply-To: <8CB5A8F2D4F1B00-1580-FCD@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com><499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net><8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com><7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com><8CB59FFF25D41EA-1904-ED0@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com><7db1d01b0902101749q3cd7f075ibaf70f840d22a543@mail.gmail.com> <2C83FD0DAB454A1287661A30D005D93C@RobinPC> <8CB5A8F2D4F1B00-1580-FCD@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8AB6AE105E0CE34EA7047DA0D6F0A971143DD0000A@lrccd-exch08.LRCCD.ad.losrios.edu> http://sigaukereviews.today.com/2009/02/10/sacramento-poetry-center-history/ From: new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto:new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of jforjames@aol.com Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:39 AM To: robin.hamilton2@btinternet.com; new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Robin, I'm afraid I just did the ol' Google & clip, here... http://faculty.uca.edu/jona/texts/seafarer.htm That section also appears as the epigraph to play of the same name by Colin McPherson, using Richard Hamer?s translation from the Anglo-Saxon, rendered thus: He knows not Who lives most easily on land, how I Have spent my winter on the ice-cold sea Wretched and anxious, in the paths of exile Lacking dear friends, hung round by icicles While hail flew past in showers? http://www.steppenwolf.org/watchlisten/backstage/detail.aspx?id=189 Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Robin Hamilton Sent: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 8:54 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Ezra Pound's version. In _Personae_? Michael Alexander probably does it better (not to speak of Edwin Morgan). Pound handles OE metrics more handily when he returns to it obliquely in Canto I. R. ----- Original Message ----- From: Judy Prince To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &,Views Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 1:49 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Lovely. You've got me flying to my books now! Judy 2009/2/10 > That man knows not, to whom on earth fairest falls, how I, care-wretched, ice-cold sea dwelt on in winter along the exile-tracks, bereaved both of friend and of kin, behung with rime-crystals. Hail showers flew. I heard nothing there but the sea's sounding, ice-cold wave. (The Seafarer) - ________________________________ A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry ________________________________ _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry ________________________________ A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/29b6098a/attachment.html From Sigauke at crc.losrios.edu Wed Feb 11 13:51:05 2009 From: Sigauke at crc.losrios.edu (Sigauke, Emmanuel) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:10 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Award winning Zimbabwean poet to read at San Francisco conference In-Reply-To: <8CB5A8F2D4F1B00-1580-FCD@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com><499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net><8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com><7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com><8CB59FFF25D41EA-1904-ED0@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com><7db1d01b0902101749q3cd7f075ibaf70f840d22a543@mail.gmail.com> <2C83FD0DAB454A1287661A30D005D93C@RobinPC> <8CB5A8F2D4F1B00-1580-FCD@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8AB6AE105E0CE34EA7047DA0D6F0A971143DD0000B@lrccd-exch08.LRCCD.ad.losrios.edu> http://sigaukereviews.today.com/2009/02/05/ignatius-mabasa-to-read-shona-poetry-in-san-francisco/ From: new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto:new-poetry-bounces@wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of jforjames@aol.com Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:39 AM To: robin.hamilton2@btinternet.com; new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Robin, I'm afraid I just did the ol' Google & clip, here... http://faculty.uca.edu/jona/texts/seafarer.htm That section also appears as the epigraph to play of the same name by Colin McPherson, using Richard Hamer?s translation from the Anglo-Saxon, rendered thus: He knows not Who lives most easily on land, how I Have spent my winter on the ice-cold sea Wretched and anxious, in the paths of exile Lacking dear friends, hung round by icicles While hail flew past in showers? http://www.steppenwolf.org/watchlisten/backstage/detail.aspx?id=189 Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Robin Hamilton Sent: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 8:54 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Ezra Pound's version. In _Personae_? Michael Alexander probably does it better (not to speak of Edwin Morgan). Pound handles OE metrics more handily when he returns to it obliquely in Canto I. R. ----- Original Message ----- From: Judy Prince To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &,Views Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 1:49 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson Lovely. You've got me flying to my books now! Judy 2009/2/10 > That man knows not, to whom on earth fairest falls, how I, care-wretched, ice-cold sea dwelt on in winter along the exile-tracks, bereaved both of friend and of kin, behung with rime-crystals. Hail showers flew. I heard nothing there but the sea's sounding, ice-cold wave. (The Seafarer) - ________________________________ A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry ________________________________ _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry ________________________________ A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/525edff8/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Wed Feb 11 15:16:10 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:11 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] reductio absurdum - the game In-Reply-To: <8CB5A8DD11495C9-1580-F08@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59E8CD82B78A-7C8-AC7@WEBMAIL-DC11.sysops.aol.com> <4b65c2d70902102259r787f3f70r85271d0190629e73@mail.gmail.com> <8CB5A8DD11495C9-1580-F08@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902111216n7fdce19dtaaf453f9c4f3d796@mail.gmail.com> Do you have any famous examples of those glosses, Finnegan? Judy 2009/2/11 > Anny, > I think I got maybe 2/3rds of them, but I can't check because he didn't > post the answer, at least not yet. > It reminded me of a game where people make up one-line glosses to famous > poems. > Finnegan > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Anny Ballardini > Sent: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 1:59 am > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] reductio absurdum - the game > > I would not be able to put them together. Is there anybody who does? > Except for Snyder and the existential question on the bear. > > On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:48 PM, wrote: > >> Paul Hoover posted this facetious short-changing of contemporary/modernist >> poets & movements... >> >> http://paulhooverpoetry.blogspot.com/ >> >> Reviewing poetry is increasingly a lost art, and it's so much work! I've >> created 26 instant reviews of no more than one line. The idea is match all >> the poets, critics, or school of poetry with their review. Match all of them >> and you may win a valuable prize. >> >> 1. Emily Dickinson >> 2. Ted Berrigan >> 3. Hart Crane >> 4. John Ashbery >> 5. Allen Ginsberg >> 6. Donald Justice >> 7. Marjorie Welish >> 8. Language Poetry >> 9. Marianne Moore >> 10. Galway Kinnell >> 11. Laura Riding >> 12. The New Formalism >> 13. August Kleinzahler >> 14. Jack Spicer >> 15. Gertrude Stein >> 16. Ezra Pound >> 17. Lawrence Ferlinghetti >> 18. Helen Vendler >> 19. Sharon Olds >> 20. Charles Olson >> 21. Dana Gioia >> 22. Anne Waldman >> 23. Frank O'Hara >> 24. Jack Kerouac >> 25. Gary Snyder >> 26. Paul Blackburn >> >> A. Badda bing, badda boom. >> B. Does a bear shit in the woods? >> C. And if not, not. >> D. My typewriter is bigger than your typewriter. >> E. Big man, small town. >> F. A little more uncertainty, please. >> G. The well-hung muse. >> H. Rebel angels, measured heaven. >> I. I think I'll write a dictionary. >> J. Stiff shirt in a sad closet. >> K. There's no such thing as post-publication. >> L. Unsettled by the name Oil Can Boyd. >> M. I do not think it will signify to me. >> N. Shyness unrequited >> O. Nearing the non-ending. >> P. Daring as never before. >> Q. What price salience? >> R. Not waving but drowning >> S. Admiral and existentialist. >> T. Let me recite you a ballad. >> U. Is there sex in this class? >> V. I've stopped being Theirs - >> W. The emperor's old clothes. >> X. Accidents are not itineraries. >> Y. Spare hanger in a bone closet. >> Z. How strange to be gone in a minute. >> >> ------------------------------ >> *A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! >> * >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > > -- > Anny Ballardini > http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome > http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html > I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing > star! > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing listNew-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.eduhttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > ------------------------------ > *A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/5b0a198c/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Wed Feb 11 16:11:31 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:11 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <8CB5A8F2D4F1B00-1580-FCD@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> <499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net> <8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com> <8CB59FFF25D41EA-1904-ED0@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902101749q3cd7f075ibaf70f840d22a543@mail.gmail.com> <2C83FD0DAB454A1287661A30D005D93C@RobinPC> <8CB5A8F2D4F1B00-1580-FCD@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902111311k3672240mf8519b2924f0ef45@mail.gmail.com> Finnegan and Robin, Here, from his enticingly lucid The Earliest English Poems [Penguin, 3rd ed, 1991], is Michael Alexander's translation of that portion of 'The Seafarer', lines 10 thru 23: " Cold then nailed my feet, frost shrank on its chill clamps, cares sighed hot about heart, hunger fed on a mere-wearied mind. No man blessed with a happy land-life is like to guess how I, aching-hearted, on ice-cold seas have wasted whole winters; the wanderer's beat, cut off from kind. . . . hung with hoar-frost. Hail flew in showers, there was no sound there but the slam of waves along an icy sea." ------------------- Best, Judy 2009/2/11 > Robin, > I'm afraid I just did the ol' Google & clip, here... > http://faculty.uca.edu/jona/texts/seafarer.htm > > That section also appears as the epigraph to play of the same name by Colin > McPherson, > using Richard Hamer's translation from the Anglo-Saxon, rendered thus: > > He knows not > Who lives most easily on land, how I > Have spent my winter on the ice-cold sea > Wretched and anxious, in the paths of exile > Lacking dear friends, hung round by icicles > While hail flew past in showers? > > http://www.steppenwolf.org/watchlisten/backstage/detail.aspx?id=189 > > Finnegan > > -----Original Message----- > From: Robin Hamilton > Sent: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 8:54 pm > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson > > Ezra Pound's version. In _Personae_? > > Michael Alexander probably does it better (not to speak of Edwin > Morgan). > > Pound handles OE metrics more handily when he returns to it obliquely in > Canto I. > > R. > > ----- Original Message ----- > *From:* Judy Prince > *To:* NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &,Views > *Sent:* Wednesday, February 11, 2009 1:49 AM > *Subject:* Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson > > Lovely. You've got me flying to my books now! > Judy > > 2009/2/10 > >> That man knows not, >> to whom on earth fairest falls, >> how I, care-wretched, ice-cold sea >> dwelt on in winter along the exile-tracks, >> bereaved both of friend and of kin, >> behung with rime-crystals. Hail showers flew. >> I heard nothing there but the sea's sounding, >> ice-cold wave. >> >> (The Seafarer) >> >> - >> >> >> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/c3483949/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Wed Feb 11 18:57:42 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:11 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] reductio absurdum - the game In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902111216n7fdce19dtaaf453f9c4f3d796@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB59E8CD82B78A-7C8-AC7@WEBMAIL-DC11.sysops.aol.com><4b65c2d70902102259r787f3f70r85271d0190629e73@mail.gmail.com><8CB5A8DD11495C9-1580-F08@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902111216n7fdce19dtaaf453f9c4f3d796@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8CB5ABBA93E88D6-77C-615@mblk-d33.sysops.aol.com> Judy, I thought I did, but I can't find any. Something like, and I made this up on spur of the moment: Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - "Man in fugue state wanders?the streets of?London talking to himself." Finnegan Do you have any famous examples of those glosses, Finnegan? Judy 2009/2/11 Anny, I think I?got maybe 2/3rds of them, but I can't check because he didn't post the answer, at least not?yet.? It reminded me of a game where people make up one-line glosses to famous poems. Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Judy Prince Sent: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 3:16 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] reductio absurdum - the game Do you have any famous examples of those glosses, Finnegan? Judy 2009/2/11 Anny, I think I?got maybe 2/3rds of them, but I can't check because he didn't post the answer, at least not?yet.? It reminded me of a game where people make up one-line glosses to famous poems. Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Anny Ballardini Sent: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 1:59 am Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] reductio absurdum - the game I would not be able to put them together. Is there anybody who does? Except for Snyder and the existential question on the bear. On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:48 PM, wrote: Paul Hoover posted this facetious short-changing of contemporary/modernist poets & movements... http://paulhooverpoetry.blogspot.com/ Reviewing poetry is increasingly a lost art, and it's so much work! I've created 26 instant reviews of no more than one line. The idea is match all the poets, critics, or school of poetry with their review. Match all of them and you may win a valuable prize. 1. Emily Dickinson 2. Ted Berrigan 3. Hart Crane 4. John Ashbery 5. Allen Ginsberg 6. Donald Justice 7. Marjorie Welish 8. Language Poetry 9. Marianne Moore 10. Galway Kinnell 11. Laura Riding 12. The New Formalism 13. August Kleinzahler 14. Jack Spicer 15. Gertrude Stein 16. Ezra Pound 17. Lawrence Ferlinghetti 18. Helen Vendler 19. Sharon Olds 20. Charles Olson 21. Dana Gioia 22. Anne Waldman 23. Frank O'Hara 24. Jack Kerouac 25. Gary Snyder 26. Paul Blackburn A. Badda bing, badda boom. B. Does a bear shit in the woods? C. And if not, not. D. My typewriter is bigger than your typewriter. E. Big man, small town. F. A little more uncertainty, please. G. The well-hung muse. H. Rebel angels, measured heaven. I. I think I'll write a dictionary. J. Stiff shirt in a sad closet. K. There's no such thing as post-publication. L. Unsettled by the name Oil Can Boyd. M. I do not think it will signify to me. N. Shyness unrequited O. Nearing the non-ending. P. Daring as never before. Q. What price salience? R. Not waving but drowning S. Admiral and existentialist. T. Let me recite you a ballad. U. Is there sex in this class? V. I've stopped being Theirs - W. The emperor's old clothes. X. Accidents are not itineraries. Y. Spare hanger in a bone closet. Z. How strange to be gone in a minute. A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/c11b3783/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Wed Feb 11 19:06:07 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:11 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] latest report from the field of flarf Message-ID: <8CB5ABCD696A58E-77C-6A8@mblk-d33.sysops.aol.com> http://lime-tree.blogspot.com/2009/02/dale-smith-deals-death-blow-to-flarf.html Dale and other anti-Flarfists have probably suspected: the incriminating weight of their arguments is simply too heavy to ignore or resist, and thus any attempts at self-defense must necessarily appear bloodless and ill-considered. In plain terms, Dale is right and we are wrong. Flarf is an untenable poetic adventure -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090211/aca199ac/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Thu Feb 12 03:49:54 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:11 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] JACKET ! Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902120049m6686769dh62353a4c363ab284@mail.gmail.com> Editor: John Tranter -- Associate Editor: Pam Brown Announcing Jacket 36: late 2008 (late as usual!) Special "Literature Bail-Out" issue, at: http://jacketmagazine.com/36/index.shtml Feature: Barbara Guest: This feature supplements Chicago Review's Northern Summer 2008 feature on Barbara Guest. == Matthew Cooperman: Envy and Architecture: On Barbara Guest's Realisms == Rachel Blau DuPlessis: 'The other window is the lark': on Barbara Guest == Ken Edwards: Pageant of creativity == Catherine Kasper: Barbara Guest's Career: Defensive Rapture == Erica Kaufman: On "The Location of Things" == Will Montgomery: Sound Leads to Structure: Dissonant lyricism in Barbara Guest's "Miniatures" == Elizabeth Robinson: Direction == Marjorie Welish: Spaced Intertext Feature: New Russian Poetry Editor: Peter Golub | Co-editor: Tatyana Golub == Peter Golub: A New Beginning: The Young Post-Soviet Poets == Peter Golub: Who is Helping the New Russian Poetry? == Interview: Mikhail Aizenberg in conversation with Peter Golub == Oleg Dark: On Anastasia Afanasieva Tr. Marian Schwartz == Anastasia Afanasieva: Tr. Peter Golub == Olga Livshin: Nina Iskrenko (1951-1995): Lyricism at the End of an Era == Nina Iskrenko: Tr. Vitaly Chernetsky == Nina Iskrenko: Tr. Olga Livshin == Maxim Amelin: Tr. Christine A. Dunbar == Aleksandr Anashevich: Tr. Vitaly Chernetsky == Polina Andrukovich: Tr. Christine A. Dunbar == Nikolai Baitov: Tr J. Kates == Polina Barskova: Tr. Peter Golub == Sveta Bodrunova: Tr. Matvei Yankelevich == Dmitry Bushuev: Tr. Rebecca Gould and Peter Golub == Danila Davydov: Tr. Peter Golub == Alexei Denisov: Tr. Peter Golub == Nastya Denisova: Tr. Peter Golub == Elena Fanailova: Tr. Stephanie Sandler and Genya Turovskaya == Sergey Gandlevsky: Tr. Philip Metres == Dina Gatina: Tr. Peter Golub == Marianna Geide: Tr. Peter Golub == Pavel Goldin: Tr. Peter Golub == Dmitry Golynko: Tr. Eugene Ostashevsky == Lenor Goralik: Tr. Peter Golub == Anna Gorenko: T. J. Kates and Sibelan Forrester == Mikhail Gronas: Tr. Christopher Mattison with the author == Julia Idlis: Tr. Peter Golub == Viktor Ivaniv: Tr. Peter Golub == Vadim Kalinin: Tr. Peter Golub == Gennady Kanevsky: Tr. Matvei Yankelevich == Natalya Kluchareva: Tr. Peter Golub == Mikhail Kotov: Tr. Peter Golub == Ilya Kriger: Tr. Peter Golub == Sergei Kruglov: Tr. Vitaly Chernetsky == Sergei Kruglov: Tr. J. Kates == Ilya Kukulin: Tr. Matvei Yankelevich == Inga Kuznetsova: Tr. Chris Mattison == Zhenya Lavut: Tr. Matvei Yankelevich == Dmitry Lazutkin: Tr. Vitaly Chernetsky == Valery Ledenev: Tr. Peter Golub == Olga Livshin: Original work == Anna Logvinova: Tr. Christopher Mattison == Gila Loran: Tr. Peter Golub == Stanislav Lvovsky: Tr. Peter Golub == Mara Malanova: Tr. Stephanie Sandler == Ksenya Marennikova: Tr. Peter Golub == Kiril Medvedev: Tr. Peter Golub == Tatyana Moseeva: Tr. Peter Golub == Valery Nugatov: Tr. Peter Golub == Oleg Pashchenko: Tr. Peter Golub and Sibelan Forrester == Alexandra Petrova: Tr. Stephanie Sandler == Andrei Polyakov: Tr. Peter Golub == Peter Popov: Tr. Peter Golub == Dmitri Prigov: Tr. Chris Mattison and Philip Metres == Evgenii Proshchin (Egor Kirsanov): Tr. Sibelan Forrester == Eugenia Ritz: Tr. Peter Golub == Andrei Rodionov: Tr. Matvei Yankelevich == Arseny Rovinsky: Tr. Peter Golub == Lev Rubinstein: Tr. Philip Metres == Anna Russ: Tr. Matvei Yankelevich == Boris Ryzhii: Tr. Tom Dolack == Sveta Sdvig: Tr. Peter Golub == Andrei Sen-Senkov: Tr. Matvei Yankelevich == Irina Shostakovskaya: Tr. Zachary Schomburg == Gleb Shulpyakov: Tr. Chris Mattison == Aleksandr Skidan: Tr. Genya Turovskaya and Natasha Randall == Maria Stepanova: Tr. Tatyana Golub and Rebecca Gould == Daria Sukhovei: Tr. Peter Golub == Fyodor Svarovsky: Tr. Peter Golub == Dmitry Tonkonogov: Tr. Peter Golub == Dmitry Vodennikov: Tr. Matvei Yankelevich, Peter Golub, and Tatyana Golub == Olga Zonberg: Tr. Peter Golub == Nikolai Zvyagintsev: Tr. Peter Golub and Matvei Yankelevich == List of Translators Feature: Maged Zaher == Three Egyptian Poets: edited by Maged Zaher: Osama El-Dinasouri, Mohamed Metwalli, Ahmed Taha Interviews == A Document of Listening: H L Hix in conversation with Philip Metres, November 2007-May 2008 == Clayton Eshleman in conversation with Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff: "Sulfur" and "New American Writing": A Dialogue == Clayton Eshleman in conversation with Ian Irvine == 'The Truth is in the Work': Barry Gifford in conversation with Noel King, Berkeley, California, 2007 == Dennis Phillips in conversation with Sheila Murphy, 2008 == Hope: an excerpt from Dennis Phillips' novel Hope. Articles == Thomas Basboll: Decision and Desire: A 'Rain-sparkling Crystogram' in Nabokov's "The Defence" == Art Beck: And Yet Another Archaic Torso -- Why? == Rachel Blau DuPlessis: The Hole: Death, Sexual Difference, and Gender Contradictions in Creeley's Poetry == Rachel Blau DuPlessis and William Watkin: "Draft 33: Deixis"/Notes on "Deixis": a Midrashic Chain: an exchange of thoughts == Susan Briante: Coultas and Robertson Write the City from Surface to Detritus, from I to We == Emily Carr: Happily, Revision: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop's "The Reproduction of Profiles" == Ian Davidson: Frank O'Hara's Places == Seth Forrest: The Body of the Text: Cerebral Palsy, Projective Verse and Prosthetics in Larry Eigner's Poetry == Andy Frazee: "Present-Absent": The Dependence on/Transcendence of "Shakespeare" in Stephen Ratcliffe's "[where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG" and Jen Bervin's "NETS" == Paul Hoover: Black Painting Divided by a White Painting: Newlipo: Bringing Proceduralism and Chance-Poetics into the 21st Century. == Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: Essay: Mistaken Indemnities == Kent Johnson: Notes on Notes on Translation: 'Translation must seek to bring over the strangeness, obvious or latent, of the original, and always guard against the temptation to familiarize it. It is this, after all, that is the gain of translation -- the new surplus, semantic or grammatical, that languages can invest in the general economies of others.' == Basil King: Learning to Draw/A History: 14 Eyes -- Desire: on Paul Blackburn == Graham Lyons: Citation as Explanation: Walter Benjamin and Louis Zukofsky, Colporteurs == Deborah Meadows: Lecture Notes on Icons and Iconoclasts == John Muckle: Hazlitt's Paroxysms == David B. Olsen: People are Stranger: Listening to Graham Foust == Richard Owens: Gael Turnbull: The Bricklayer Reconsidered: Editing Gael Turnbull's Collected Poems == Andrew Schelling: In Which Our Current Post Coyote Poetry Gets Tracked to the 1970s == Jeffrey Side: Empirical and Non-Empirical Identifiers == Jordan Stempleman: Still, Life Supports a Tending == J. Townsend: Spiritual Man, Modern Man: The Poetics of Frank Samperi == William Watkin: "Though we keep company with cats and dogs": Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia and Happiness in the work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben == Donald Wellman: Seventies prosody: "the tone leading vowels" Feature == Clayton Eshleman: Tavern of the Scarlet Bagpipe: On Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" Feature: Denise Levertov: Editor: Kevin Gallagher == Kevin Gallagher: Templum: Introduction == Anne-Marie Cusac: Reading Levertov in Wartime == Anne Dewey: Gender Difference and the Construction of Social Space in Levertov's Writing after the Duncan-Levertov Debate == John Felstiner: "that witnessing presence": Life Illumined Around Denise Levertov == Sam Hamill: In Her Company: Denise Levertov == Donna Krolik Hollenberg: A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov: An excerpt from Donna Krolik Hollenberg's biography: from Part Two: Chapter Seven == Rachelle K. Lerner: Ecstasy of Attention: Denise Levertov and Kenneth Rexroth == Dick Lourie: Two poems == Mark Pawlak: Draft: From "Glover Circle Notebooks" == Jose Rodriguez Herrera: In Homage to Levertov: Translating Sands of the Well == Ron Silliman: Unerasing Early Levertov == Tino Villanueva: Poet in the World: A Tribute to Denise Levertov == Also see: Denise Levertov (poem): Eros, in Jacket 16 == Also see: Robert J. Bertholf: From Robert Duncan's Notebooks: On Denise Levertov, in Jacket 28 == Also see: Robert J. Bertholf: The Robert Duncan / Denise Levertov Correspondence: Duncan's View, in Jacket 28 Feature: George Oppen: Editor: Thomas Devaney == Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Oppen from seventy-five to a hundred, 1983-2008 == Pat Clifford: George Oppen, Buddhadev Bose and Translation == Stephen Cope: As if Objectivist: Oppen's Political Epistemophelia == George Evans: Pacific == Al Filreis: Believing in the World Because It Is Impossible == Zack Finch: "I am / of that people the grass / blades touch": Walt Whitman and the Aesthetics of Curiosity in George Oppen's Critique of Violence == Kathleen Fraser: This in which I remember George Oppen == Bobbie Louise Hawkins: George Oppen, Mary Oppen and a Poem == Michael Heller: from "Oppen's Thematics: [what are poets for?]" (a talk given at the Kelly Writers House celebration of George Oppen, April 7, 2008) == Eric Hoffman: Of Hours: George Oppen, Albert Camus and the Illuminated World == Geoffrey O'Brien: In Memory of Oppen == Bob Perelman: Oppen's Poetics and Politics Today == Patrick Pritchett: Writing the Disasters: Late Modernism and the Persistence of the Messianic in George Oppen and Michael Palmer Reviews == Robert Adamson: "The Golden Bird: New and selected poems", reviewed by Joseph Donahue == Unexplained evidence: George Albon: "Momentary Songs", reviewed by Michael Cross == Textures of otherness: Charles Alexander: "Certain Slants", reviewed by Jonathan Stalling == Questions of Travel: Ana Bozicevic-Bowling: "Document", reviewed by Matthew Thorburn == A Gathering of Words: Michael Brennan: "Unanimous Night", reviewed by David McCooey == Julie Carr: "Equivocal", reviewed by Andy Frazee == Reflections on a Paper Mirror: Joel Chace: "Cleaning The Mirror", reviewed by John Olson == Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian: "Situations, Sings" (collaborative poems), reviewed by Robert Grenier == Haunting: Brenda Coultas: "The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations", reviewed by Jesse Morse == Our Best Failed Distinctions: Thomas Devaney: "A Series of Small Boxes", reviewed by John Emil Vincent == Stuart Dybek: "Streets in Their Own Ink", reviewed by Virginia Konchan == Geoffrey Gatza: "Not So Fast Robespierre", reviewed by Jared Schickling == "The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood " edited by Robert Sheppard (Salt, 2007) reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan == The voice of instinct: Christine Hume: "Lullaby", reviewed by Chris Glomski == Brenda Iijima: "Animate, Inanimate Aims", reviewed by Thomas Fink == Patrick Jones and Peter O'Mara: "How To Do Words With Things", reviewed by Astrid Lorange == Daniil Kharms: "Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms" Edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich; reviewed by Larissa Shmailo == Strange meetings: Kent Johnson: "I Once Met", reviewed by Cralan. == Hank Lazer: Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008, reviewed by Sue Walker == Greg McLaren: "The Kurri-Kurri Book of the Dead" reviewed by Nick Riemer == Escape from New York: Ange Mlinko: "Starred Wire" and "The Children's Museum", reviewed by Dan Thomas-Glass == 'Love boats of rainbow alien barf': Sharon Mesmer: "Annoying Diabetic Bitch" reviewed by Stan Apps == George Messo: Entrances, reviewed by Alistair Noon == Three books, reviewed by Micaela Morrissette: "The Glimmer Palace" by Beatrice Colin; "Tranquility", by Attila Bartis, translated by Imre Goldstein; and "Train to Trieste" by Domnica Radulescu == Jennifer Moxley: "The Line", Reviewed by Matt Gagnon == Bern Mulvey: "The Fat Sheep Everybody Wants", reviewed by Virginia Konchan == "Intersection, Sidewalks and Public Space". ed. Marci Nelligan & Nicole Mauro, reviewed by jose felipe alvergue == Gavin Selerie: "Roxy" and "Le Fanu's Ghost", reviewed by Robert Hampson == "To educate desire," "to repurpose kitsch": Robert Sheppard: "Complete Twentieth Century Blues", reviewed by Todd Nathan Thorpe == My colonic is my confession: Eleni Stecopoulos: "Autoimmunity", reviewed by Thom Donovan == The tragic and the wacky: Gary Sullivan: "PPL in a Depot" reviewed by Stan Apps == "As if you could open a jar of sugar forever": Cole Swensen: "Ours", reviewed by Donna Stonecipher == Flight from 'The Ten Thousand Things': Nathaniel Tarn: "Recollections of Being", reviewed by Martin Anderson == Carol Watts: "When blue light falls", reviewed by Robert Grenier == "The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen", reviewed by Laurie Duggan == The Lyricism of Sluts and Drunks: Meg Withers: "A Communion of Saints" reviewed by L.J. Moore == 'Each evening he would write/ what had happened to him': Formality and occasionality in the poems of Mark Young: "Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008" Poems by Mark Young, reviewed by Nicholas Manning. Poems == Robert Adamson: Poem: At Rock River == Adam Aitken: Three poems: Pol Pot in Paris / Letter to Marguerite Duras / Lines from "The Lover" == Iain Britton: Two poems: The Ornamental Room / Still Fall the Clear Steel Nibs of Night == Janet Charman: Three poems: singer machine / debate / the forgetting option == Maxine Chernoff: Three poems: Oracular / And words for / What it contains == Tom Clark: Two poems: O Friend! / Fireside Chat == Chris Edwards: So Not Orpheus: Rilke Renditions 1-11 == Phillip A Ellis: Emily Dickinson's Birds == Stephen Emmerson: Two poems == Michael Farrell: Two poems: structures p / bad diction == Annie Finch: Three poems: She That / Resolution / Night Rain == Norman Fischer: Felstentor == Barry Gifford: Three poems and a play: Monk's Funeral / The Generalissimo Waves / Hey, Ludwig, Grab Yourself a Pigfoot / The Farm Team (A story in the form of a play) == Noah Eli Gordon: Diminishing Returns == Andrej Khadanovich: Three Poems. Translated by David Kennedy with the assistance of Valzhyna Mort == Michele Leggott: Four poems: ascensore / passaggiata / primavera / redentore == Rachel Loden: Two poems from "Dick of the Dead": Cheney Agonistes / Autumn Daze == Nicolas Mansito III: Four poems from "On Third and Seventh" == Andrew Mossin: Nocturne == John Muckle: Two poems: I Should Be So Lucky / On Ebury Bridge Road == Sheila E Murphy and Douglas Barbour: Continuations LVIII == Stephen Vincent: Ocean Beach _______________ John Tranter 39 Short Street, Balmain 2041, Australia http://johntranter.com/ http://jacketmagazine.com/ -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090212/ca5e8942/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 12 14:45:51 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:11 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poem for Darwin's 200th (& Liincoln's too) Message-ID: <8CB5B61A4FFC0D0-BEC-12D7@WEBMAIL-MA04.sysops.aol.com> At The Smithville Methodist Church by Stephen Dunn It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week, but when she came home with the "Jesus Saves" button, we knew what art was up, what ancient craft. She liked her little friends. She liked the songs they sang when they weren't twisting and folding paper into dolls. What could be so bad? Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith in good men was what we had to do to stay this side of cynicism, that other sadness. OK, we said, One week. But when she came home singing "Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so," it was time to talk. Could we say Jesus doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible is a great book certain people use to make you feel bad? We sent her back without a word. It had been so long since we believed, so long since we needed Jesus as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was sufficiently dead, that our children would think of him like Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson. Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief to a child, only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story nearly as good. On parents' night there were the Arts & Crafts all spread out like appetizers. Then we took our seats in the church and the children sang a song about the Ark, and Hallelujah and one in which they had to jump up and down for Jesus. I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain about what's comic, what's serious. Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes. You can't say to your child "Evolution loves you." The story stinks of extinction and nothing exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have a wonderful story for my child and she was beaming. All the way home in the car she sang the songs, occasionally standing up for Jesus. There was nothing to do but drive, ride it out, sing along in silence. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090212/17f02280/attachment.html From halvard at gmail.com Thu Feb 12 14:59:11 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:11 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] RIP Keith Wilson (1927-2009) Message-ID: Keith Wilson died the other day. He was a friend I've known since the mid-60s, when I spent some years living in El Paso while he was living in southern New Mexico: Anthony, right on the Texas-New Mexico border; then San Miguel, farther north, up the Mesilla Valley of the Rio Grande; and then Las Cruces. Any house of Keith and Heloise Wilson was full of music and wine and poetry, a caravanserai for poets traveling north or south, east or west. Keith, at one stage of his life, often wrote of the sea, and his sea poems were among the best poems to come out of the Korean War. Here's one that's not overtly war related: The Sea "On the beach the ocean ends in water. --George Oppen *The Materials* The crisp line, taut, in all intimations, thrown out, cork circling the water, spash, my hand reaching out --the call, rightly named, these *Materials*, the call is there simple, demanding response and a certain attention to pulse, the movement of whatever the work asks of man--is that what I'm trying to say, a man, and how, sometimes, he doesn't drown. Coming up spitting salt water, safely past the screws, it *is* a man intact who waves from the calm wake; behind him the sea clear, oceans held in place by a line. And he wrote of dusty New Mexico towns: The Politicians come come here with full bellies & shined shoes to the one street of San Miguel, talking, waving hands, their harsh gringo Spanish shouted in the hanging dust of the square the men of the town stand uneasy, aware of their hard hands, the blue of the stranger's eyes, their own mudcrusted boots stiff with clay they are ashamed these men whose hands are strong with work & loving. they listen. then go to the bar, beer & red wine, juke box Infante songs, his dead voice singing of a Mexico which was sad, beautiful, but theirs --riding free across a green land, *gritos* on their lips & dead politicians fall, one-by-one before their dreaming guns. --both from *Graves Registry and Other Poems* [New York: Grove Press, 1969] Coincidentally, while 1969 did not mark the first publication of a collection of poems by Keith Wilson, it did mark the first publication of a collection of poems by me. And it was Keith Wilson who sat me down on his living room floor and showed me how to put a collection of poems together. That first book that bore a epigraph by Keith Wilson: "a sunlit unity / desperately sought" and contained this poem written on the occasion of Keith's and Heloise's moving from Anthony, New Mexico, to a big new (well, not new new) house in San Miguel: Moving Out for Keith & Heloise Wilson saying goodbye is no trouble: a house is a skin to be shucked wriggled out of room by room closet by closet until what remains is piles of boxes, a few empty hangers, a heap of debris on the kitchen floor which never seemed so wide, a neighbor's dog who come to say goodbye from a respectable distance. fr. *Transparencies and Projections* [New York: New Rivers Press, 1969] --HJ -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090212/1dd2116b/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Thu Feb 12 14:59:36 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:11 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poem for Darwin's 200th (& Liincoln's too) In-Reply-To: <8CB5B61A4FFC0D0-BEC-12D7@WEBMAIL-MA04.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB5B61A4FFC0D0-BEC-12D7@WEBMAIL-MA04.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902121159u35b19b98pc65fce1fb879b90c@mail.gmail.com> I don't know if I believed more in Jesus, the Angel or Santa Claus, maybe in Jesus the least. On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 8:45 PM, wrote: > At The Smithville Methodist Church > by Stephen Dunn > > > It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week, > but when she came home > with the "Jesus Saves" button, we knew what art > was up, what ancient craft. > > She liked her little friends. She liked the songs > they sang when they weren't > twisting and folding paper into dolls. > What could be so bad? > > Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith > in good men was what > we had to do to stay this side of cynicism, > that other sadness. > > OK, we said, One week. But when she came home > singing "Jesus loves me, > the Bible tells me so," it was time to talk. > Could we say Jesus > > doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible > is a great book certain people use > to make you feel bad? We sent her back > without a word. > > It had been so long since we believed, so long > since we needed Jesus > as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was > sufficiently dead, > > that our children would think of him like Lincoln > or Thomas Jefferson. > Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief > to a child, > > only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story > nearly as good. > On parents' night there were the Arts & Crafts > all spread out > > like appetizers. Then we took our seats > in the church > and the children sang a song about the Ark, > and Hallelujah > > and one in which they had to jump up and down > for Jesus. > I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain > about what's comic, what's serious. > > Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes. > You can't say to your child > "Evolution loves you." The story stinks > of extinction and nothing > > exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have > a wonderful story for my child > and she was beaming. All the way home in the car > she sang the songs, > > occasionally standing up for Jesus. > There was nothing to do > but drive, ride it out, sing along > in silence. > > ------------------------------ > *A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! > * > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090212/cd6b356d/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 12 19:17:54 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:12 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Michael Donaghy: poet, thinker and friend Message-ID: <8CB5B87A646E781-AB4-1679@WEBMAIL-MY32.sysops.aol.com> Michael Donaghy: poet, thinker and friend http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/feb/12/adam-o-riordan-michael-donaghy March sees the publication of The Shape of the Dance, the Selected Prose of the poet Michael Donaghy. It looks set to announce the arrival of a major critical voice in contemporary poetry; as Clive James suggests in his introduction, the book places Donaghy as the heir apparent to that other great critic Ian Hamilton. The catch is that Donaghy died almost five years ago. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090212/c0972731/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 12 19:46:52 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:12 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] WorldPo: Don Maclennan, South Africa Message-ID: <8CB5B8BB28B8949-AB4-17BC@WEBMAIL-MY32.sysops.aol.com> http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=139&art_id=vn20090212115936332C833779 "He kept on putting out slim volumes year after year," said his son Ben. A few years ago he won the national Sanlam Poetry Prize. Friends described his work as raunchy, with some despair, full of love, lean, frank, unpretentious but richly compressed. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090212/4e30d306/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 12 19:47:54 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:12 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] International Poetry Forum announces its last season Message-ID: <8CB5B8BD72E9F7F-AB4-17CE@WEBMAIL-MY32.sysops.aol.com> http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09043/948620-85.stm International Poetry Forum announces its last season Thursday, February 12, 2009 By Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Since 1966, the International Poetry Forum stayed true to its mission to bring the world's best poets to Pittsburgh, but its mission is now over. Founder and director Samuel Hazo last night announced that this, the 43rd season, will be its last, a victim of the nation's financial downturn. "It looks like it's our last year," Dr. Hazo said following his poetry reading in Oakland last night. "The reasons are financial." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090212/1771bad9/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Fri Feb 13 05:39:41 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:12 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902111311k3672240mf8519b2924f0ef45@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB59C8AC1748B8-16A0-97@MBLK-M05.sysops.aol.com> <499211D9.3080309@nut-n-but.net> <8CB59FC564EFCB2-1904-D48@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902101717v1a581870m142cb9c062a2094e@mail.gmail.com> <8CB59FFF25D41EA-1904-ED0@FWM-D04.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902101749q3cd7f075ibaf70f840d22a543@mail.gmail.com> <2C83FD0DAB454A1287661A30D005D93C@RobinPC> <8CB5A8F2D4F1B00-1580-FCD@FWM-M11.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902111311k3672240mf8519b2924f0ef45@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902130239t78131647rcbe2d8470ffecd58@mail.gmail.com> Again to Finnegan and Robin, Michael Alexander reports news of the latest edition of his The Earliest English Poems: "The EEP title is now called THE FIRST POEMS IN ENGLISH and was published by Penguin last year. All the prose and apparatus, and the running order, are new, the translations very much the same." Best, Judy now to amazon.com! 2009/2/11 Judy Prince > Finnegan and Robin, > Here, from his enticingly lucid The Earliest English Poems [Penguin, 3rd > ed, 1991], is Michael Alexander's translation of that portion of 'The > Seafarer', lines 10 thru 23: > > > " Cold then > nailed my feet, frost shrank on > its chill clamps, cares sighed > hot about heart, hunger fed > on a mere-wearied mind. > No man blessed > with a happy land-life is like to guess > how I, aching-hearted, on ice-cold seas > have wasted whole winters; the wanderer's beat, > cut off from kind. . . . > hung with hoar-frost. > Hail flew in showers, > there was no sound there but the slam of waves > along an icy sea." > > ------------------- > > Best, > > Judy > > 2009/2/11 > > Robin, >> I'm afraid I just did the ol' Google & clip, here... >> http://faculty.uca.edu/jona/texts/seafarer.htm >> >> That section also appears as the epigraph to play of the same name by >> Colin McPherson, >> using Richard Hamer's translation from the Anglo-Saxon, rendered thus: >> >> He knows not >> Who lives most easily on land, how I >> Have spent my winter on the ice-cold sea >> Wretched and anxious, in the paths of exile >> Lacking dear friends, hung round by icicles >> While hail flew past in showers? >> >> http://www.steppenwolf.org/watchlisten/backstage/detail.aspx?id=189 >> >> Finnegan >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Robin Hamilton >> Sent: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 8:54 pm >> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson >> >> Ezra Pound's version. In _Personae_? >> >> Michael Alexander probably does it better (not to speak of Edwin >> Morgan). >> >> Pound handles OE metrics more handily when he returns to it obliquely in >> Canto I. >> >> R. >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> *From:* Judy Prince >> *To:* NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &,Views >> *Sent:* Wednesday, February 11, 2009 1:49 AM >> *Subject:* Re: [New-Poetry] Quote UnQuote: Walter Anderson >> >> Lovely. You've got me flying to my books now! >> Judy >> >> 2009/2/10 >> >>> That man knows not, >>> to whom on earth fairest falls, >>> how I, care-wretched, ice-cold sea >>> dwelt on in winter along the exile-tracks, >>> bereaved both of friend and of kin, >>> behung with rime-crystals. Hail showers flew. >>> I heard nothing there but the sea's sounding, >>> ice-cold wave. >>> >>> (The Seafarer) >>> >>> - >>> >>> >>> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090213/3116611d/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Fri Feb 13 13:30:24 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:12 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] NYTimes.com: So Typecast You Could Scream In-Reply-To: <4995bbdb.150bca0a.330f.67f6SMTPIN_ADDED@mx.google.com> References: <4995bbdb.150bca0a.330f.67f6SMTPIN_ADDED@mx.google.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902131030j10545b39haa70836e1d32b8db@mail.gmail.com> And with a slide and audio show: Edward Munch [image: The New York Times] [image: E-mail This] *This page was sent to you by: * anny.ballardini@tin.it * ARTS / ART & DESIGN * | February 13, 2009 * Art Review: So Typecast You Could Scream * By ROBERTA SMITH It is the ambition of "Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety and Myth," a thrilling exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, to upend or at least balance Munch's famous persona. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090213/4c4bbcf9/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 03:10:32 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:12 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Now out from Otoliths: Anny Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements In-Reply-To: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> Skipped content of type multipart/alternative-------------- next part -------------- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.552 / Virus Database: 270.10.23/1947 - Release Date: 2/11/2009 6:11 PM -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Ghost Dance front cover.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 221529 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/75c8aa08/GhostDancefrontcover.jpg From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 06:45:01 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:12 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Silvia Levenson Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902140345x406635b7j943e7dcc8a14577e@mail.gmail.com> Silvia Levenson is a good friend and a fantastic glass artist, she works glass in all its forms. I remember her series of glass shoes, glass underwear, glass... for the Spring Anthology she forwarded the following: http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=2879 a glass knife. And here is the Spring anthology, already shaping itself superbly: http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=333 -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/ddb006b0/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 06:49:07 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:12 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] like attracts like Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902140349ie00c945o86fa52b025078744@mail.gmail.com> http://www.livescience.com/culture/090213-men-want.html -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/88f1db87/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sat Feb 14 11:10:58 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:12 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Now out from Otoliths: Anny Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it> <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4996ED12.90702@opus40.org> I'll buy one as soon as I can -- very tight right now. But for sure I'll buy one. Anny Ballardini wrote: > Happy Saint Valentine's to You all. I had the pleasant surprise this > morning to find the present announcement in my mailbox. > > Mark Young, the Editor, told me that he has to sell 100 copies to cut > down his expenses, and I dearly recommend that at least 100 people buy > it. But if you cannot, please send me your address and as soon as I > have several addresses, I will buy a bunch and have them sent through > lulu. > > > > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: Now out from Otoliths: Anny Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 > Movements > Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:06:16 +1000 > From: Otoliths Editor > > > > > *Ghost Dance in 33 Movements* > > Anny Ballardini > > 80 pages > > Otoliths 2009 > > ISBN: 978-0-9805096-8-7 > > $13.50 + p&h > > URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078 > > > > > > A schooling in experimental cinema happening before our eyes. A > screening. Frame upon frame, the seeing I making her way. In these > remarkable poems, Anny Ballardini creates an important new space, a > new kind of poem?note, notation, response, criticism, a philosophy of > our lives as films responding to films, poems made from & making our > new dwelling place. "The eye of the camera centers on their hidden > hearts." Made of quotation, of citation, of sight, of insight?always > the moving site?a dance in many movements. And a fine, inviting, > moving dance it is, Anny's /Ghost Dance in 33 Movements/! ?*Hank Lazer* > > > > Anny Ballardini is the unofficial poet laureate of UbuWeb; from her > perch in Italy she has watched the 20th century avant-garde stream > through her computer's screen and has taken copious notes on it. These > notes?at once literary criticism, poetry, oblique autobiography and > amazing eavesdrop?come to us as an idiosyncratic transcript of a > cultural and personal archive. This is 21st century ekphrasis written > to an art that flickers and sings and sometimes screams. ?*Susan M. > Schultz* > > > > > > > > -- > Anny Ballardini > http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome > http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html > I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a > dancing star! > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From ciccariello at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 11:16:05 2009 From: ciccariello at gmail.com (Peter Ciccariello) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Now out from Otoliths: Anny Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it> <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8f3fdbad0902140816u2f845bema18b661605590711@mail.gmail.com> I'm going to order one too...congratulations Anny, and what an outstanding cover! - Peter On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Anny Ballardini wrote: > Happy Saint Valentine's to You all. I had the pleasant surprise this > morning to find the present announcement in my mailbox. > > Mark Young, the Editor, told me that he has to sell 100 copies to cut down > his expenses, and I dearly recommend that at least 100 people buy it. But if > you cannot, please send me your address and as soon as I have several > addresses, I will buy a bunch and have them sent through lulu. > > > > -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Now out from Otoliths: Anny > Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:06:16 > +1000 From: Otoliths Editor > > *Ghost Dance in 33 Movements* > > Anny Ballardini > > 80 pages > > Otoliths 2009 > > ISBN: 978-0-9805096-8-7 > > $13.50 + p&h > > URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078 > > > > > > A schooling in experimental cinema happening before our eyes. A > screening. Frame upon frame, the seeing I making her way. In these > remarkable poems, Anny Ballardini creates an important new space, a new kind > of poem?note, notation, response, criticism, a philosophy of our lives as > films responding to films, poems made from & making our new dwelling place. > "The eye of the camera centers on their hidden hearts." Made of > quotation, of citation, of sight, of insight?always the moving site?a dance > in many movements. And a fine, inviting, moving dance it is, Anny's *Ghost > Dance in 33 Movements*! ?*Hank Lazer* > > > > Anny Ballardini is the unofficial poet laureate of UbuWeb; from her perch > in Italy she has watched the 20th century avant-garde stream through her > computer's screen and has taken copious notes on it. These notes?at once > literary criticism, poetry, oblique autobiography and amazing eavesdrop?come > to us as an idiosyncratic transcript of a cultural and personal archive. > This is 21st century ekphrasis written to an art that flickers and sings and > sometimes screams. ?*Susan M. Schultz* > > > > > > > -- > Anny Ballardini > http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome > http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html > I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing > star! > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/2d07a6f9/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 12:48:10 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Now out from Otoliths: Anny Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements In-Reply-To: <8f3fdbad0902140816u2f845bema18b661605590711@mail.gmail.com> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it> <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> <8f3fdbad0902140816u2f845bema18b661605590711@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902140948m3c65d5d4o5fa22cac04362ce4@mail.gmail.com> Thank You and Thank You! The cover is by harry k. stammer with a picture by me. Said by a professional artist and photographer, it is music to my ears, flattered, indeed. On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Peter Ciccariello wrote: > I'm going to order one too...congratulations Anny, and what an outstanding > cover! > > - Peter > > > > On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Anny Ballardini < > anny.ballardini@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Happy Saint Valentine's to You all. I had the pleasant surprise this >> morning to find the present announcement in my mailbox. >> >> Mark Young, the Editor, told me that he has to sell 100 copies to cut down >> his expenses, and I dearly recommend that at least 100 people buy it. But if >> you cannot, please send me your address and as soon as I have several >> addresses, I will buy a bunch and have them sent through lulu. >> >> >> >> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Now out from Otoliths: Anny >> Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:06:16 >> +1000 From: Otoliths Editor >> >> *Ghost Dance in 33 Movements* >> >> Anny Ballardini >> >> 80 pages >> >> Otoliths 2009 >> >> ISBN: 978-0-9805096-8-7 >> >> $13.50 + p&h >> >> URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078 >> >> >> >> >> >> A schooling in experimental cinema happening before our eyes. A >> screening. Frame upon frame, the seeing I making her way. In these >> remarkable poems, Anny Ballardini creates an important new space, a new kind >> of poem?note, notation, response, criticism, a philosophy of our lives as >> films responding to films, poems made from & making our new dwelling place. >> "The eye of the camera centers on their hidden hearts." Made of >> quotation, of citation, of sight, of insight?always the moving site?a dance >> in many movements. And a fine, inviting, moving dance it is, Anny's *Ghost >> Dance in 33 Movements*! ?*Hank Lazer* >> >> >> >> Anny Ballardini is the unofficial poet laureate of UbuWeb; from her perch >> in Italy she has watched the 20th century avant-garde stream through her >> computer's screen and has taken copious notes on it. These notes?at once >> literary criticism, poetry, oblique autobiography and amazing eavesdrop?come >> to us as an idiosyncratic transcript of a cultural and personal archive. >> This is 21st century ekphrasis written to an art that flickers and sings and >> sometimes screams. ?*Susan M. Schultz* >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> Anny Ballardini >> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ >> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome >> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html >> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing >> star! >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/0e9cd2a1/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sat Feb 14 13:40:09 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Now out from Otoliths: Anny Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902140948m3c65d5d4o5fa22cac04362ce4@mail.gmail.com> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it> <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> <8f3fdbad0902140816u2f845bema18b661605590711@mail.gmail.com> <4b65c2d70902140948m3c65d5d4o5fa22cac04362ce4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902141040j340e5074t3682f18730330d07@mail.gmail.com> YUP, awesome photo, Anny! How about a sample poem from the book, maybe a brief one, so that I know what I'm getting into when I order it? Best, Judy 2009/2/14 Anny Ballardini > Thank You and Thank You! > The cover is by harry k. stammer with a picture by me. > Said by a professional artist and photographer, it is music to my ears, > flattered, indeed. > > > On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Peter Ciccariello wrote: > >> I'm going to order one too...congratulations Anny, and what an outstanding >> cover! >> >> - Peter >> >> >> >> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Anny Ballardini < >> anny.ballardini@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Happy Saint Valentine's to You all. I had the pleasant surprise this >>> morning to find the present announcement in my mailbox. >>> >>> Mark Young, the Editor, told me that he has to sell 100 copies to cut >>> down his expenses, and I dearly recommend that at least 100 people buy it. >>> But if you cannot, please send me your address and as soon as I have several >>> addresses, I will buy a bunch and have them sent through lulu. >>> >>> >>> >>> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Now out from Otoliths: Anny >>> Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 >>> 14:06:16 +1000 From: Otoliths Editor >>> >>> *Ghost Dance in 33 Movements* >>> >>> Anny Ballardini >>> >>> 80 pages >>> >>> Otoliths 2009 >>> >>> ISBN: 978-0-9805096-8-7 >>> >>> $13.50 + p&h >>> >>> URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078 >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> A schooling in experimental cinema happening before our eyes. A >>> screening. Frame upon frame, the seeing I making her way. In these >>> remarkable poems, Anny Ballardini creates an important new space, a new kind >>> of poem?note, notation, response, criticism, a philosophy of our lives as >>> films responding to films, poems made from & making our new dwelling place. >>> "The eye of the camera centers on their hidden hearts." Made of >>> quotation, of citation, of sight, of insight?always the moving site?a dance >>> in many movements. And a fine, inviting, moving dance it is, Anny's *Ghost >>> Dance in 33 Movements*! ?*Hank Lazer* >>> >>> >>> >>> Anny Ballardini is the unofficial poet laureate of UbuWeb; from her perch >>> in Italy she has watched the 20th century avant-garde stream through her >>> computer's screen and has taken copious notes on it. These notes?at once >>> literary criticism, poetry, oblique autobiography and amazing eavesdrop?come >>> to us as an idiosyncratic transcript of a cultural and personal archive. >>> This is 21st century ekphrasis written to an art that flickers and sings and >>> sometimes screams. ?*Susan M. Schultz* >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Anny Ballardini >>> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ >>> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome >>> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html >>> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing >>> star! >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> New-Poetry mailing list >>> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > > -- > Anny Ballardini > http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome > http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html > I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing > star! > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/e108bdc4/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 17:16:27 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Now out from Otoliths: Anny Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902141040j340e5074t3682f18730330d07@mail.gmail.com> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it> <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> <8f3fdbad0902140816u2f845bema18b661605590711@mail.gmail.com> <4b65c2d70902140948m3c65d5d4o5fa22cac04362ce4@mail.gmail.com> <7db1d01b0902141040j340e5074t3682f18730330d07@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902141416q179785fbydd3e7895c357ca1f@mail.gmail.com> Thank you for your interest, Judy. 10. Nam June Paik, 11. Joseph Beuys, & 12. Terry Fox appeared in *Exquisite Corpse* 19. Jorge Luis Borges appeared in *The Salt River Review* 27. David Byrne will be in *Fulcrum*. I will lead you to The Salt River Review of our James Cervantes, also for its impeccable layout (thank you James!): http://www.poetserv.org/SRR32/ballardini.html * On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Judy Prince wrote: > YUP, awesome photo, Anny! How about a sample poem from the book, maybe a > brief one, so that I know what I'm getting into when I order it? > Best, > > Judy > > 2009/2/14 Anny Ballardini > > Thank You and Thank You! >> The cover is by harry k. stammer with a picture by me. >> Said by a professional artist and photographer, it is music to my ears, >> flattered, indeed. >> >> >> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Peter Ciccariello > > wrote: >> >>> I'm going to order one too...congratulations Anny, and what an >>> outstanding cover! >>> >>> - Peter >>> >>> >>> >>> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Anny Ballardini < >>> anny.ballardini@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> Happy Saint Valentine's to You all. I had the pleasant surprise this >>>> morning to find the present announcement in my mailbox. >>>> >>>> Mark Young, the Editor, told me that he has to sell 100 copies to cut >>>> down his expenses, and I dearly recommend that at least 100 people buy it. >>>> But if you cannot, please send me your address and as soon as I have several >>>> addresses, I will buy a bunch and have them sent through lulu. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Now out from Otoliths: >>>> Anny Ballardini's Ghost Dance in 33 Movements Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 >>>> 14:06:16 +1000 From: Otoliths Editor >>>> >>>> *Ghost Dance in 33 Movements* >>>> >>>> Anny Ballardini >>>> >>>> 80 pages >>>> >>>> Otoliths 2009 >>>> >>>> ISBN: 978-0-9805096-8-7 >>>> >>>> $13.50 + p&h >>>> >>>> URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078 >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> A schooling in experimental cinema happening before our eyes. A >>>> screening. Frame upon frame, the seeing I making her way. In these >>>> remarkable poems, Anny Ballardini creates an important new space, a new kind >>>> of poem?note, notation, response, criticism, a philosophy of our lives as >>>> films responding to films, poems made from & making our new dwelling place. >>>> "The eye of the camera centers on their hidden hearts." Made of >>>> quotation, of citation, of sight, of insight?always the moving site?a dance >>>> in many movements. And a fine, inviting, moving dance it is, Anny's *Ghost >>>> Dance in 33 Movements*! ?*Hank Lazer* >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> Anny Ballardini is the unofficial poet laureate of UbuWeb; from her >>>> perch in Italy she has watched the 20th century avant-garde stream through >>>> her computer's screen and has taken copious notes on it. These notes?at once >>>> literary criticism, poetry, oblique autobiography and amazing eavesdrop?come >>>> to us as an idiosyncratic transcript of a cultural and personal archive. >>>> This is 21st century ekphrasis written to an art that flickers and sings and >>>> sometimes screams. ?*Susan M. Schultz* >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Anny Ballardini >>>> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ >>>> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome >>>> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html >>>> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing >>>> star! >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> New-Poetry mailing list >>>> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >>>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >>>> >>>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> New-Poetry mailing list >>> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Anny Ballardini >> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ >> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome >> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html >> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing >> star! >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/b3fb21ae/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Feb 14 18:40:26 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Bruce Andrews Poem In-Reply-To: <4996ED12.90702@opus40.org> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it><4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> <4996ED12.90702@opus40.org> Message-ID: <4997566A.5010206@nut-n-but.net> I was sure I saved the post that introduced it, but now I can't find it. Can anyone post the Andrews poem again exactly as written? (One thing I'm not sure of is whether it was punctuated or not.) --Bob G. From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sat Feb 14 19:58:21 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Bruce Andrews Poem In-Reply-To: <4997566A.5010206@nut-n-but.net> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it> <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> <4996ED12.90702@opus40.org> <4997566A.5010206@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902141658t2d06b90s619e022b25e49648@mail.gmail.com> Hey, Happy Valentine's Day, Bob! You have 4 hours to send me flowers, chocolates, and little red heart candies----though I druther be taken out to dinner, to be perfectly honest. Here's a near-unassailable source, Robert Pinsky, in The Situation Of Poetry [published in Princeton UP, 1978], as to the way the banana poem was printed in The Paris Review in 1972, and it differs from the version that Barry Spacks gave. Pinsky states that it was published in the center of a page, headed by the author's name, and it was untitled: http://books.google.com/books? id=O3fxPKO08PAC&pg=PA87&dq=% 22paris+review%22+%22bruce+ andrews%22+1972&lr=&as_brr=3& ei=S2OXSdShFYroyATow7XCAg It was printed like a full sentence, i.e., with the first word first-letter capitalised, and the phrase ending with a full stop. I think that the number 87 underneath it is especially significant. Best, Judy 2009/2/14 Bob Grumman > I was sure I saved the post that introduced it, but now I can't find it. > Can anyone post the Andrews poem again exactly as written? (One thing I'm > not sure of is whether it was punctuated or not.) > > --Bob G. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/de46b684/attachment.html From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Sat Feb 14 20:30:27 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Bruce Andrews Poem In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902141658t2d06b90s619e022b25e49648@mail.gmail.com> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it><4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com><4996ED12.90702@opus40.org> <4997566A.5010206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902141658t2d06b90s619e022b25e49648@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <337DD6722A6A42469AA47CDDF9AF328E@RobinPC> From: Judy Prince << ... it differs from the version that Barry Spacks gave. Pinsky states that it was published in the center of a page, headed by the author's name, and it was untitled ... It was printed like a full sentence, i.e., with the first word first-letter capitalised, and the phrase ending with a full stop. >> This gives us two quite distinct poems. The full-sentence Pinsky version: Bananas are an example. ... and the "incomplete" version originally posted by Barry: bananas are an example. Anyone have access to the issue of the Paris Review where it originally appeared, to confirm how Bruce Andrews had it printed? Robin From robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com Sat Feb 14 20:33:25 2009 From: robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com (Robin Hamilton) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Bruce Andrews Poem In-Reply-To: <337DD6722A6A42469AA47CDDF9AF328E@RobinPC> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it><4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com><4996ED12.90702@opus40.org><4997566A.5010206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902141658t2d06b90s619e022b25e49648@mail.gmail.com> <337DD6722A6A42469AA47CDDF9AF328E@RobinPC> Message-ID: Ooops!!! That should have been (no final full stop): bananas are an example R. From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sat Feb 14 21:32:39 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh Message-ID: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> Classic poems are in danger of disappearing from English lessons because teachers with little knowledge of literature are resorting to "lightweight" verse, school inspectors have warned. Only very few primary schools are tackling works such as Wordworth's Daffodils or Coleridge's the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Too many primary teachers do not know enough about poetry to cover the subject properly and concentrate instead on a narrow range of easier works, often by modern writers. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-500174/Schools-scrapping-classic-poetry-lightweight-verse.html -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Feb 14 21:37:04 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Bruce Andrews Poem In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902141658t2d06b90s619e022b25e49648@mail.gmail.com> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it><4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com><4996ED12.90702@opus40.org> <4997566A.5010206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902141658t2d06b90s619e022b25e49648@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49977FD0.4030601@nut-n-but.net> Judy Prince wrote: > Hey, Happy Valentine's Day, Bob! You have 4 hours to send me > flowers, chocolates, and little red heart candies----though I druther > be taken out to dinner, to be perfectly honest. No, Judy, it's a new world, genderwise: I'm the one supposed to get all that stuff. > > Here's a near-unassailable source, Robert Pinsky, in The Situation Of > Poetry [published in Princeton UP, 1978], as to the way the banana > poem was printed in The Paris Review in 1972, and it differs from the > version that Barry Spacks gave. Pinsky states that it was published in > the center of a page, headed by the author's name, and it was untitled: > http://books.google.com/books? > id=O3fxPKO08PAC&pg=PA87&dq=% > 22paris+review%22+%22bruce+ > andrews%22+1972&lr=&as_brr=3& > ei=S2OXSdShFYroyATow7XCAg > > > > It was printed like a full sentence, i.e., with the first word > first-letter capitalised, and the phrase ending with a full stop. I > think that the number 87 underneath it is especially significant. Interesting. I remembered it as "Take bananas for instance." Which proves it's not memorable, so not excellent, right? (I also remembered it as being in the Partisan Review rather than the Paris Review. I was surprised to see that Pinsky pretty much said all that can be said about the piece. But I'll try tomorrow to do my analysis. Thanks for the help. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/e47d5bc6/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sat Feb 14 22:59:17 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Bruce Andrews Poem In-Reply-To: <49977FD0.4030601@nut-n-but.net> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it> <4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com> <4996ED12.90702@opus40.org> <4997566A.5010206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902141658t2d06b90s619e022b25e49648@mail.gmail.com> <49977FD0.4030601@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902141959s70b145ke3eb4afeb392da75@mail.gmail.com> Me munching the flowers and loving the look of chocolates and heart candies. He who waits, after all, loses out, you see, genderwise new world or no. I do hope, Bob, that you'll ignore Pinsky who's easy to ignore because he's impossible to understand. I find his prose crepuscular, to say the least, but that might be the flowers talking [petals soaked in David Bruce petite sirrah]. And, Bob, it's imperative that you abandon the dissertation format, especially for this banana poem. Try to lighten up and tighten up because we next tackle Sonnet 18, as I recall, and we'll want to swim like Navy Seals rather than get stuck like the Armada in shallow harbors. The banana poem deserves, as well, humour that exposes its humour, not that dull academeeeze that Pinsky [and others] employ to describe 'humor'. You can do it, Bob, oh yes, you can! Judy 2009/2/14 Bob Grumman > Judy Prince wrote: > > Hey, Happy Valentine's Day, Bob! You have 4 hours to send me flowers, > chocolates, and little red heart candies----though I druther be taken out to > dinner, to be perfectly honest. > > No, Judy, it's a new world, genderwise: I'm the one supposed to get all > that stuff. > > > Here's a near-unassailable source, Robert Pinsky, in The Situation Of > Poetry [published in Princeton UP, 1978], as to the way the banana poem was > printed in The Paris Review in 1972, and it differs from the version that > Barry Spacks gave. Pinsky states that it was published in the center of a > page, headed by the author's name, and it was untitled: > http://books.google.com/books? > id=O3fxPKO08PAC&pg=PA87&dq=% > 22paris+review%22+%22bruce+ > andrews%22+1972&lr=&as_brr=3& > ei=S2OXSdShFYroyATow7XCAg > It was printed like a full sentence, i.e., with the first word > first-letter capitalised, and the phrase ending with a full stop. I think > that the number 87 underneath it is especially significant. > > Interesting. I remembered it as "Take bananas for instance." Which proves > it's not memorable, so not excellent, right? (I also remembered it as being > in the Partisan Review rather than the Paris Review. > > I was surprised to see that Pinsky pretty much said all that can be said > about the piece. But I'll try tomorrow to do my analysis. > > Thanks for the help. > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090214/3a096883/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 15 06:28:59 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:13 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Bruce Andrews Poem In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902141959s70b145ke3eb4afeb392da75@mail.gmail.com> References: <499672D5.3070504@tin.it><4b65c2d70902140010s1aa1f712l8903f714d8531aee@mail.gmail.com><4996ED12.90702@opus40.org> <4997566A.5010206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902141658t2d06b90s619e022b25e49648@mail.gmail.com><49977FD0.4030601@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902141959s70b145ke3eb4afeb392da75@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4997FC7B.5030701@nut-n-but.net> > > And, Bob, it's imperative that you abandon the dissertation format, > especially for this banana poem. Try to lighten up and tighten up > because we next tackle Sonnet 18, as I recall, and we'll want to swim > like Navy Seals rather than get stuck like the Armada in shallow harbors. Sorry, Judy, but I'm serious about this stuff. You tackle it your way, I'll tackle it mine. --Bob From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 15 06:54:25 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902150354n226e33abp74cec9e92283b78d@mail.gmail.com> 'Dumbing down' is always a mistake, as you suggest, Mole. Of course, obviously, what some regard as dumb poems others would say are Excellent. Nevertheless, I think that key to keeping Excellent poetry in the teaching repertoire are expanding and modernising poem choices. As we keep seeing with our evaluations on NP, now---as ALWAYS in the arts---most poems don't have what it takes to be 'anthologised' for students. Prob is figuring out which contemporary poems DO have what it takes. I think Bob Grumman's always insistence on including what he calls poems [that I don't call poems, but nevertheless enjoy as visual art], for example, shows us an operating principle, that of expansion, for choosing 'Excellent' contemporary poems. Despite its obvious hazards, our willingness to expand 'classics' to include the widest possible candidates seems essential for poem-reading beginners'----both for appreciating others' works as well as for writing their own. 'Rap' lyrics, for example, gets short shrift as poetry, but some of it's inspired in the ways we've been rating as Excellent on Bob's WEPD [What Excellent Poems Do....or What Excellent Poetry Does]. A grand learning opp for teachers as well as students, would be to use a scale like Bob's WEPD in classes at some early point with 'classics' as well as an array of what the teachers and students think are modern Excellents. A great class, that! Could call it 'Exploring Excellent Poems' [EEP]. No reason why this oughtn't to open out into students commenting on one a nother's poems. If that's too fraught with terror and attacks, then their poems could be passed out untitled or in groups that the students themselves have decided to form, perhaps with a mentor or several mentors. Robin Hamilton could speak to that from his experience with Phillip Hobsbaum at Glasgow and the immensely talented student poets gathered to 'attack' and immeasurably help one a nother. Hobsbaum, no matter where he taught, was a magnet for poets and their development, some now very well known poets. Robin could give details. Your major point about teachers' lack of poem/poet knowledge might be mitigated by what I describe above. Best, Judy 2009/2/14 TheOldMole > Classic poems are in danger of disappearing from English lessons because > teachers with little knowledge of literature are resorting to "lightweight" > verse, school inspectors have warned. > > Only very few primary schools are tackling works such as Wordworth's > Daffodils or Coleridge's the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. > > Too many primary teachers do not know enough about poetry to cover the > subject properly and concentrate instead on a narrow range of easier works, > often by modern writers. > > > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-500174/Schools-scrapping-classic-poetry-lightweight-verse.html > > -- > Tad Richards > http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ > http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ > > Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! > http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/e13579b2/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sun Feb 15 10:02:09 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> I agree with the side of the article that tries to introduce more serious poetry at primary schools. I cannot say how well teachers have done their homework or not. On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 3:32 AM, TheOldMole wrote: > Classic poems are in danger of disappearing from English lessons because > teachers with little knowledge of literature are resorting to "lightweight" > verse, school inspectors have warned. > > Only very few primary schools are tackling works such as Wordworth's > Daffodils or Coleridge's the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. > > Too many primary teachers do not know enough about poetry to cover the > subject properly and concentrate instead on a narrow range of easier works, > often by modern writers. > > > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-500174/Schools-scrapping-classic-poetry-lightweight-verse.html > > -- > Tad Richards > http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ > http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ > > Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! > http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/32176b80/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 15 10:22:04 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4998331C.1010001@nut-n-but.net> You know what, as a poet I don't care what's taught in our indoctrination centers. I think it would be nice if teachers made children aware that poetry exists, but I think teaching it a waste of time. The few genetically capable of appreciating it will find it on their own, as I pretty much did--despite the mostly, to me, unappealing poetry forced on me in school. N one will ever take my advice on the matter, but I would like to see kids given electives which motivated kids could take to find out about things like classical music, pure math, poetry, ancient history, abstract-expressionism, and the like. No grades. No students allowed in who are in any way disruptive. No textbook but a list of books and websites having to do with poetry, with descriptions of what's in or at each. Coverage of all kinds of poetry--and /poetry criticism/. No teacher, just a trustworthy upperclassman with a phone he can call security with if necessary. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/49f339e6/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 15 10:26:15 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49983417.6010104@nut-n-but.net> I've used my check-list on Bruce Andrews's text. My analysis is stream-of-consciousness first-draft confusion. I'm not up to anything more at the moment. The gist of where I'm going should come through, though. Bananas are an example. This text gives me all kinds of trouble as a taxonomist. It's too short for one to be able to tell whether it's lineated or not. Lineation is a form of what I call the flow-break; that, in turn, is in my taxonomy the defining feature of poetry. But it could be a saying, which is another form of literature--or of what I call informrature, words used to convey information. It has made me expand the first requirement of An Excellent Poem according to my check-list to: (1) expresses something importantly true or represents something centrally beautiful-- or gets us to something importantly true or centrally beautiful assuming it doesn't do two or more of these things. On the surface, this text neither expresses anything importantly true nor represents any sort of beauty. However, one can infer from it something importantly true: that meaningfulness is valuable. It may even be said to celebrate rationality in reverse by representing its opposite. I guess I would call it a conceptual poem. Of course, it is a joke, but a good joke needs to say something of value. This one says an insufficiency of data is troublesome. We can't get any information from the text because of such an insufficiency. I now think I would not call it a poem but a specimen of informrature, or words used to provide information. Satire does this by revealing error. This reveals, exemplifies, error. It is funny because in a prestigious magazine by itself on a page, so to be taken as a poem or aphorism of sorts. It is as the latter that I would now take it. If we take it to be a poem, then it is a conceptual poem commenting on poetry. But perhaps also conveying an interesting sense of emptiness--loss, even. It cuts one loose from one's moorings. Adrift. Out of context. We're cut off from some accumulation of information that the text contributes to. We've gotten to the party too late. So it's an expression . . . no, a cause of perplexity, bewilderment. One can give it a happy spin: it frees its reader into intellectual irresponsiblilty, pure reasonlessness. In that manner it may be a poem. As a synecdoche for the ultimate irrationality of life, it may give us pleasurable relief from the anxiety of not knowing what's going on--why should we since nothing can ultimately make sense. Something importantly true for everyone in certain moods. Something else importantly true when we're feeling better is that existence does make sense. As this text reminds us, allows us to re-realize. (2) is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or something that makes its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but eventually achieves Clarity; This text is certainly complicated by Thematic Misdirection--it is a non sequitur, or a one- element jump-cut poem, if we accept it as a poem. We don't easily know what to make of it, though we do quickly overcome our inital puzzlement to understand it as a joke. (3) has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which pulls its elements reasonably close together; It's too short not to be reasonably unified. (4) contains few or no superfluous words; I suppose a four-word sentence could have superfluous words, but this one doesn't. (5) boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have such as uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual art), and imagery; Its mocking disconnection from the implicit law of discourse that require a text's references to have referents is over the top. Other texts exist that are like this but none, I suspect do it exactly the same way or as well.. (6) avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or thought; too overt Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; It is all commonplace, but that is the point. We take it as a matter-of-fact disclosure, then find it subversive. Conclusion: "Bananas are an example" is an excellent text which may be a poem. Bob Grumman From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sun Feb 15 11:15:00 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <49983417.6010104@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <49983417.6010104@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902150815r32b59176hd80965a36396167f@mail.gmail.com> I agree on several points. I like the end, not because it is the end... :-) On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > I've used my check-list on Bruce Andrews's text. My analysis is > stream-of-consciousness first-draft confusion. I'm not up to anything more > at the moment. The gist of where I'm going should come through, though. > > > Bananas are an example. > > This text gives me all kinds of trouble as a taxonomist. It's too short > for one to be able to > tell whether it's lineated or not. Lineation is a form of what I call the > flow-break; that, in > turn, is in my taxonomy the defining feature of poetry. But it could be a > saying, which is > another form of literature--or of what I call informrature, words used to > convey > information. > > It has made me expand the first requirement of An Excellent Poem according > to my > check-list to: > > (1) expresses something importantly true or represents something centrally > beautiful-- > > or gets us to something importantly true or centrally beautiful > > assuming it doesn't do two or more of these things. > > On the surface, this text neither expresses anything importantly true nor > represents any > sort of beauty. However, one can infer from it something importantly true: > that > meaningfulness is valuable. It may even be said to celebrate rationality > in reverse by > representing its opposite. I guess I would call it a conceptual poem. Of > course, it is a > joke, but a good joke needs to say something of value. This one says an > insufficiency of > data is troublesome. We can't get any information from the text because of > such an > insufficiency. I now think I would not call it a poem but a specimen of > informrature, or > words used to provide information. Satire does this by revealing error. > This reveals, > exemplifies, error. It is funny because in a prestigious magazine by > itself on a page, so to > be taken as a poem or aphorism of sorts. It is as the latter that I would > now take it. > > If we take it to be a poem, then it is a conceptual poem commenting on > poetry. But > perhaps also conveying an interesting sense of emptiness--loss, even. It > cuts one loose > from one's moorings. Adrift. Out of context. We're cut off from some > accumulation of > information that the text contributes to. We've gotten to the party too > late. So it's an > expression . . . no, a cause of perplexity, bewilderment. One can give it > a happy spin: it > frees its reader into intellectual irresponsiblilty, pure reasonlessness. > In that manner it may > be a poem. As a synecdoche for the ultimate irrationality of life, it may > give us pleasurable > relief from the anxiety of not knowing what's going on--why should we since > nothing can > ultimately make sense. Something importantly true for everyone in certain > moods. > Something else importantly true when we're feeling better is that existence > does make > sense. As this text reminds us, allows us to re-realize. > > (2) is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or something > that makes > its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but > eventually achieves Clarity; > > This text is certainly complicated by Thematic Misdirection--it is a non > sequitur, or a one- > element jump-cut poem, if we accept it as a poem. We don't easily know > what to make of > it, though we do quickly overcome our inital puzzlement to understand it as > a joke. > > (3) has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which > pulls its elements > reasonably close together; > It's too short not to be reasonably unified. > > (4) contains few or no superfluous words; > > I suppose a four-word sentence could have superfluous words, but this one > doesn't. > > (5) boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have > such as > uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual > art), and imagery; > > Its mocking disconnection from the implicit law of discourse that require a > text's > references to have referents is over the top. Other texts exist that are > like this but none, I > suspect do it exactly the same way or as well.. > > (6) avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or > thought; too overt > Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; > > It is all commonplace, but that is the point. We take it as a > matter-of-fact disclosure, then > find it subversive. > > Conclusion: "Bananas are an example" is an excellent text which may be a > poem. > > Bob Grumman > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/420bf68e/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 15 11:23:38 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <4998331C.1010001@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <4998331C.1010001@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902150823see8b07ci54866db15b53ae42@mail.gmail.com> What you pose is thought-provoking, Bob. I have a slightly different view for the following reasons. As a student, at all levels, I hadn't the knowledge of resources nor the motivation, because of my ignorance, to take advantage of independent or semi-independent study such as you suggest. Further, and important to me, most of my English Literature teachers at all levels were wise, informed, enthusiastic, and personable. These people were 'models' for me in many significant ways which my parents and friends could not be. There were limitations, of course, as one might expect. The pre-university instructors [ie, K-12] showed and commented on, primarily, as they contractually were obliged to do, those works that had been chosen by all the higher authorities and sanctioned at city and state government levels. Those teachers also augmented the anthologies with their own preferences, and I surmise that as long as these preferences did not alarm students and their parents, all was fine. Obviously, at the uni level, professors selected their own preferences amongst the accepted classics for the course, and they, too, added those that were not amongst the accepted ones. Again, from my own experience and obviously my own temperament and motivations, I was educated in literature as much as I allowed myself to be educated. Believe me, I had many more important things on my mind than poetry or literature; I worked throughout high school and university which left less time for extracurriculars, and I tried to have as much of a social life as I could. It would've been fantastic to find, on my own, all the resources you've suggested, but that didn't happen, for reasons I've just explained. Others' backgrounds and experiences may differ drastically from mine, much to their great good fortune. As I wrote in the previous email, I believe that students would benefit wonderfully if they were exposed to a more comprehensive group of poets----and they'd be more fully engaged with poetry if they did such analysing as we're doing with your WEPD. Our WEPD heated debates strike me as proof that many of us count poetry as important enough to debate heatedly about; that consensus is rather beside the point and silly; that minority opinions can be blessings as well as pains in the ass; and that more information is ALWAYS better. Best, Judy 2009/2/15 Bob Grumman > You know what, as a poet I don't care what's taught in our indoctrination > centers. I think it would be nice if teachers made children aware that > poetry exists, but I think teaching it a waste of time. The few genetically > capable of appreciating it will find it on their own, as I pretty much > did--despite the mostly, to me, unappealing poetry forced on me in school. > N one will ever take my advice on the matter, but I would like to see kids > given electives which motivated kids could take to find out about things > like classical music, pure math, poetry, ancient history, > abstract-expressionism, and the like. No grades. No students allowed in > who are in any way disruptive. No textbook but a list of books and websites > having to do with poetry, with descriptions of what's in or at each. > Coverage of all kinds of poetry--and *poetry criticism*. No teacher, just > a trustworthy upperclassman with a phone he can call security with if > necessary. > > --Bob > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/5821b804/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 15 11:43:27 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902150823see8b07ci54866db15b53ae42@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4998331C.1010001@nut-n-but .net> <7db1d01b0902150823see8b07ci54866db15b53ae42@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4998462F.7070006@nut-n-but.net> I just dipped in with my viewpoint. No time for amplification. But I would add that my scheme would certainly allow dedicated teachers to drop in on elective courses and add input. Remember, too, that I would want a good list of resources available--both hard copy and CD would be good. --Bob From barry.spacks at verizon.net Sun Feb 15 12:46:45 2009 From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (Barry Spacks) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: second babana In-Reply-To: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> References: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <19D0F679-D1AE-412E-A5F2-4C5D085ACE03@verizon.net> On Feb 15, 2009, at 5:32 AM, Judy wrote: > It was printed like a full sentence, i.e., with the first word first- > letter > capitalised, and the phrase ending with a full stop. I think that the > number 87 underneath it is especially significant. My bad, I quoted from memory. Can't find it in the Pinsky (not indexed) and will be broken hearted if the first "b" must indeed come capitalized. Certain, however, that there's no period at the end of the poem. Certain! And this number "87"? What, the poet's taking recourse in some kinda mystery? hopefully, Barry > From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 15 13:10:09 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: second babana In-Reply-To: <19D0F679-D1AE-412E-A5F2-4C5D085ACE03@verizon.net> References: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <19D0F679-D1AE-412E-A5F2-4C5D085ACE03@verizon.net> Message-ID: <49985A81.3030303@nut-n-but.net> Barry Spacks wrote: > > On Feb 15, 2009, at 5:32 AM, Judy wrote: > >> It was printed like a full sentence, i.e., with the first word >> first-letter >> capitalised, and the phrase ending with a full stop. I think that the >> number 87 underneath it is especially significant. > > My bad, I quoted from memory. Can't find it in the Pinsky (not indexed) > and will be broken hearted if the first "b" must indeed come > capitalized. Certain, > however, that there's no period at the end of the poem. Certain! > And this number "87"? What, the poet's taking recourse in some kinda > mystery? > > hopefully, > > Barry I await data on exact appearance of the poem. As for the "87," it's only the page number of Pinsky's book, or whatever his text is in--if you continue with what he wrote, you'll soon see an "88" at the bottom. From barry.spacks at verizon.net Sun Feb 15 13:32:08 2009 From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (Barry Spacks) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: second babana REVISTED In-Reply-To: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> References: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: On Feb 15, 2009, at 5:32 AM, I wrote: > Can't find it in the Pinsky (not indexed) Shucks, dumb again! I was searching in the similar-looking Pinsky book THE SOUNDS OF POETRY and now can't find THE SITUATION of the same -- what's with this mysterious "87," Judy? Could be the poem comes out of a larger context? Enquiring minds want to know. cheers and apologies, Barry > From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 15 13:53:54 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: second babana In-Reply-To: <49985A81.3030303@nut-n-but.net> References: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <19D0F679-D1AE-412E-A5F2-4C5D085ACE03@verizon.net> <49985A81.3030303@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902151053g2c71d3fbg5f68e6032f198fb8@mail.gmail.com> I was pulling your leg, Bob. Judy 2009/2/15 Bob Grumman > Barry Spacks wrote: > >> >> On Feb 15, 2009, at 5:32 AM, Judy wrote: >> >> It was printed like a full sentence, i.e., with the first word >>> first-letter >>> capitalised, and the phrase ending with a full stop. I think that the >>> number 87 underneath it is especially significant. >>> >> >> My bad, I quoted from memory. Can't find it in the Pinsky (not indexed) >> and will be broken hearted if the first "b" must indeed come capitalized. >> Certain, >> however, that there's no period at the end of the poem. Certain! >> And this number "87"? What, the poet's taking recourse in some kinda >> mystery? >> >> hopefully, >> >> Barry >> > I await data on exact appearance of the poem. As for the "87," it's only > the page number of Pinsky's book, or whatever his text is in--if you > continue with what he wrote, you'll soon see an "88" at the bottom. > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/9711ccfd/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 15 13:56:17 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: second babana REVISTED In-Reply-To: References: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902151056o612d818ch5d31b06e736394ae@mail.gmail.com> I guess I should've used a little smiley emoticon, Barry; alas, the unsubtleties of email. Here're a coupla smilies for you and Bob: ;-) ;-) and a grin for good measure Judy 2009/2/15 Barry Spacks > > On Feb 15, 2009, at 5:32 AM, I wrote: > > Can't find it in the Pinsky (not indexed) >> > > Shucks, dumb again! I was searching in the similar-looking Pinsky book > THE SOUNDS OF POETRY and now can't find THE SITUATION of the > same -- what's with this mysterious "87," Judy? Could be the poem > comes out of a larger context? Enquiring minds want to know. > > cheers and apologies, > > Barry > >> >> _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/34a12c9c/attachment.html From barry.spacks at verizon.net Sun Feb 15 14:36:49 2009 From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (Barry Spacks) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: fourth banana In-Reply-To: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> References: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: > I have the following from Pinsky, which still leaves me desiring (for the purity of the look of it if nothing else): banana are an example "Well, in The Situation of Poetry, I see, I have the capital B and a period. "And I can remember getting an earnest, on the whole appreciative letter from Bruce Andrews, and since he did not as I recall note any inaccuracy let's assume I have it right. "Such as its minimal charms are, I think it's perhaps more droll with the conventional capitalization and period." ever onward, Barry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/0c066a69/attachment.html From halvard at gmail.com Sun Feb 15 14:53:07 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:14 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hamilton Stone Review, Issue 17, Winter 2009, Now Online! Message-ID: *Hamilton Stone Review*, Issue 17, Winter 2009, Now Online! Featuring poetry by P?ters Br?veris, Alan Baker, Andrew Burke, Camille Martin, Ashok Niyogi, Dan Raphael, Karla Linn Merrifield, Dion Farquhar, Scott Hammer, Philip Byron Oakes, and Stephen Vincent; fiction by Jay Baruch, Summer Block, James Cervantes, Andrew J. Madigan, Michael Shannon, Dot DeLuitzo, Diane Simmons, and Robert Wexelblatt. http://www.hamiltonstone.org/hsr17.html Submissions to the *Hamilton Stone Review * We publish three times a year: in June, October, and February. Please send 1-7 poems in the body of your message and in ONE attachment; one story or up to three short shorts per message and/or attachment, please. Send bios with submissions. No snailmail submissions will be read. For the June 2009 issue poetry submissions should go directly to Halvard Johnson at halvard@gmail.com. Send fiction to Lynda Schor at lyndaschor@gmail.com. PLEASE SEND THIS ALONG TO OTHERS -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/855db381/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 15 15:36:50 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: fourth banana In-Reply-To: References: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902151236p73437b65ha159b03f13108313@mail.gmail.com> barry are a nother example judy 2009/2/15 Barry Spacks > > I have the following from Pinsky, which still leaves me desiring > > (for the purity of the look of it if nothing else): > banana are an example > > "Well, in *The Situation of Poetry*, I see, I have the capital B and a > period. > "And I can remember getting an earnest, on the whole appreciative letter > from Bruce Andrews, and since he did not as I recall note any inaccuracy > let's assume I have it right. > > "Such as its minimal charms are, I think it's perhaps more droll with the > conventional capitalization and period." > > ever onward, > > Barry > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/fd9df07c/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 15 17:30:40 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <4998462F.7070006@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <7db1d01b0902150823see8b07ci54866db15b53ae42@mail.gmail.com> <4998462F.7070006@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902151430h3ad28626wa0a84165aa649883@mail.gmail.com> I second your idea of elective courses and the ways you've described them, as well as what you add here, Bob. Time to propose it to your schoolboard, nah? Good luck, Judy the top babana 2009/2/15 Bob Grumman > I just dipped in with my viewpoint. No time for amplification. But I > would add that my scheme would certainly allow dedicated teachers to drop in > on elective courses and add input. Remember, too, that I would want a good > list of resources available--both hard copy and CD would be good. > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/5ae80a06/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 15 18:13:13 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: second babana In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902151053g2c71d3fbg5f68e6032f198fb8@mail.gmail.com> References: <200902151332.n1FDWWmK028013@wiz.cath.vt.edu><19D0F679-D1AE-412E-A5F2-4C5D085ACE03@verizon.net><49985A81.3030303@nut- n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902151053g2c71d3fbg5f68e6032f198fb8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4998A189.6050901@nut-n-but.net> Judy Prince wrote: > I was pulling your leg, Bob. > > Judy I know YOU were joking about it, Judy, but from my experience with these kinds of poems, I needed to see where the "87" fit in. --Bob From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Feb 15 18:18:45 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902151430h3ad28626wa0a84165aa649883@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><7db1d01b0902150823see8b07c i54866db15b53ae42@mail.gmail.com><4998462F.7070006@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902151430h3ad28626wa0a84165aa649883@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4998A2D5.9030202@nut-n-but.net> Judy Prince wrote: > I second your idea of elective courses and the ways you've described > them, as well as what you add here, Bob. > > Time to propose it to your schoolboard, nah? > Haw, maybe I should RUN for the school board using them as my platform (and leaving out my ideas about shooting certain students). --Bob From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Sun Feb 15 19:46:54 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <4998A2D5.9030202@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <4998462F.7070006@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902151430h3ad28626wa0a84165aa649883@mail.gmail.com> <4998A2D5.9030202@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902151646p76cdf87esd9fdc4a6cf005c1a@mail.gmail.com> Well, of course you should run for the school board! And save your ammunition for the board members. [a smiley so that I'm not implicated in your scheme] ;-) Did you evaluate the nabana poem, and I missed it? Judy 2009/2/15 Bob Grumman > Judy Prince wrote: > >> I second your idea of elective courses and the ways you've described them, >> as well as what you add here, Bob. >> >> Time to propose it to your schoolboard, nah? >> >> Haw, maybe I should RUN for the school board using them as my platform > (and leaving out my ideas about shooting certain students). > > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/3ecbfea7/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Sun Feb 15 20:19:23 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] 'The Irish Times' Poetry Now shortlist announced Message-ID: <8CB5DEBBC2D01D2-FA4-58B5@WEBMAIL-DZ40.sysops.aol.com> http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/0214/1233867936210.html?via=mr -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/96554287/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Sun Feb 15 20:24:25 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Remembering Michael Hartnett Message-ID: <8CB5DEC70161E62-FA4-58DC@WEBMAIL-DZ40.sysops.aol.com> http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2009/0216/1233867938004.html Monday, February 16, 2009 Remembering Michael Hartnett Michael Hartnett: no other ambition than to be a poet. Michael Hartnett was an esteemed poet from a young age, but his assurance about his creative destiny had its dangers.? MICHAEL SMITH? recalls a significant artist whose early death 10 years ago can be viewed as an accident of time and place -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/75ccbcc5/attachment.html From grahamd at ripon.edu Sun Feb 15 22:45:21 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference Message-ID: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words by many poets at the AWP annual conference. Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever attended. It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have featured the inventor of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several others. None of the promised panelists showed up. I don't know why, though I heard a number of rumors later. The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into the nonexistent event. Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood up and asked if anyone wanted to read a poem. As it happens, several did. Pretty soon there was an absolutely unplanned poetry slam occurring. Mr. Laity performed as M.C., ushered readers up and led the applause after they read, etc. He began calling it the Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. Things got more and more riotous. Almost nobody left the room, and there were many readers, in a wide range of styles. At one point someone from the next room came over and complained that our room was too raucous, which it was. As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances varied, but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average sponsored event I've attended over many years. It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I walked out feeling just great. No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me when I tell the story. I just relished it. Read more about this event and see some photos here: http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php? op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090215/d20c67e4/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Mon Feb 16 04:01:57 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference In-Reply-To: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> References: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902160101q56d85f00u69c561dd3340a1b8@mail.gmail.com> Thanks for this. And send over more news if you have some time! On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 4:45 AM, David Graham wrote: > I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words by many > poets at the AWP annual conference. > Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever attended. > It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have featured the inventor > of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several others. > > None of the promised panelists showed up. I don't know why, though I heard > a number of rumors later. > > The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into the > nonexistent event. Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood up and asked > if anyone wanted to read a poem. As it happens, several did. Pretty soon > there was an absolutely unplanned poetry slam occurring. Mr. Laity > performed as M.C., ushered readers up and led the applause after they read, > etc. He began calling it the Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. Things got > more and more riotous. Almost nobody left the room, and there were many > readers, in a wide range of styles. > > At one point someone from the next room came over and complained that our > room was too raucous, which it was. > > As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances varied, > but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average sponsored event I've > attended over many years. > > It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I walked > out feeling just great. > > No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me when I > tell the story. I just relished it. > > Read more about this event and see some photos here: > > > http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 > > > > > > ======================================== > David Graham > grahamd@ripon.edu > > Home Page: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz > > Poetry Library: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html > ========================================== > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/fbb439c1/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Feb 16 06:32:45 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902151646p76cdf87esd9fdc4a6cf005c1a@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4998462F.7070006@nut-n-but .net><7db1d01b0902151430h3ad28626wa0a84165aa649883@mail.gmail.com><4998A2D5.9030202@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902151646p76cdf87esd9fdc4a6cf005c1a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49994EDD.9090606@nut-n-but.net> Judy Prince wrote: > Well, of course you should run for the school board! And save your > ammunition for the board members. [a smiley so that I'm not > implicated in your scheme] ;-) > > Did you evaluate the nabana poem, and I missed it? > > Judy Yes, I posted on it. Will re-post if you can't find a copy. And I can. --Bob From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Mon Feb 16 08:17:34 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference In-Reply-To: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> References: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902160517w7964b33exe1912021ad5c1b68@mail.gmail.com> What fun, great news! So when are you going back to read your poems? Ah yes, David. That's the Chicago I remember! No wonder it's thought to have the best theatre folk in the nation, the best Shaksper productions [Chicago Shakespeare Theater], best improv [Second City], best and most innovative small theatres, and sharp-eyed critics. Further, despite its history of tearing down old landmark buildings [truly maddening], Chicago's first in the nation for the scope, importance, and variety of its modern architecture. It is also easily the most beautiful major urban city in the USA, its Loop [downtown] a stunning flower and sculpture/architecture garden along the 10-mile lakefront. Reason I'm here in Norfolk [VA] instead of still in Chicago: it's buried in snow and below-freezing temps for 5 months every year. P'raps that's what forces such zesty creativity from its residents. Thanks, David, for this and for the memories, Judy 2009/2/15 David Graham > I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words by many > poets at the AWP annual conference. > Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever attended. > It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have featured the inventor > of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several others. > > None of the promised panelists showed up. I don't know why, though I heard > a number of rumors later. > > The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into the > nonexistent event. Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood up and asked > if anyone wanted to read a poem. As it happens, several did. Pretty soon > there was an absolutely unplanned poetry slam occurring. Mr. Laity > performed as M.C., ushered readers up and led the applause after they read, > etc. He began calling it the Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. Things got > more and more riotous. Almost nobody left the room, and there were many > readers, in a wide range of styles. > > At one point someone from the next room came over and complained that our > room was too raucous, which it was. > > As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances varied, > but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average sponsored event I've > attended over many years. > > It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I walked > out feeling just great. > > No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me when I > tell the story. I just relished it. > > Read more about this event and see some photos here: > > > http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 > > > > > > ======================================== > David Graham > grahamd@ripon.edu > > Home Page: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz > > Poetry Library: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html > ========================================== > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/abd4488f/attachment.html From GrahamD at ripon.edu Mon Feb 16 09:56:26 2009 From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] What did Albert do? Message-ID: A query for anyone who attended the Albert Goldbarth tribute at the Chicago AWP this past weekend: what was the title of the poem he read? David Graham Grahamd@Ripon.edu From AlMaginnes at aol.com Mon Feb 16 09:58:02 2009 From: AlMaginnes at aol.com (AlMaginnes@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] What did Albert do? Message-ID: Can't recall. But it was a wonderful poem I thought. And rather short (for him). **************Need a job? Find an employment agency near you. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000003) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/36587aa1/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Mon Feb 16 11:51:14 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:15 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference In-Reply-To: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> References: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> Message-ID: <8CB5E6DE9BFEC3C-A58-1447@WEBMAIL-DC10.sysops.aol.com> Spontaneous acts of poetry save the day. Great story, David. I've never been to an?AWP Conference. Sometime I'll get to one... maybe when they have it it warmer place. Don't get me wrong... Chicago's a great place...I like to?browse?Myopic Books on N Milwaukee Ave. when I blow through town (and it's easy to blow through town in the Windy City). Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: David Graham To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu & Views Sent: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 10:45 pm Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words by many poets at the AWP annual conference. ? Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever attended. ?It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have featured the inventor of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several others. ? None of the promised panelists showed up. ?I don't know why, though I heard a number of rumors later. The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into the nonexistent event. ?Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood up and asked if anyone wanted to read a poem. ?As it happens, several did. ?Pretty soon there was an absolutely unplanned poetry slam occurring. ?Mr. Laity performed as M.C., ushered readers up and led the applause after they read, etc. ?He began calling it the Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. ?Things got more and more riotous. ?Almost nobody left the room, and there were many readers, in a wide range of styles. ?? At one point someone from the next room came over and complained that our room was too raucous, which it was. As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances varied, but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average sponsored event I've attended over many years. ? It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I walked out feeling just great. No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me when I tell the story. ?I just relished it. ? ?Read more about this event and see some photos here: http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== = _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/aa001c02/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Mon Feb 16 11:59:24 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] WorldPo: Viet Nam, Nat'l Poetry Day Message-ID: <8CB5E6F0DE21AFC-A58-14C4@WEBMAIL-DC10.sysops.aol.com> http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=03SUN150209 National Poetry Day unites lovers of verse (15-02-2009) Poetry has been an integral part of Vietnamese culture for thousands of years and now the art form is moving back into the spotlight thanks to National Poetry Day. Minh Thu and Ngoc Le report. Poetry lovers gather for their greatest festival of the year: National Poetry Day, held at Van Mieu (Temple of Literature). I still remember the first time I attended the festival two years ago. That first morning, I was impressed most by the tha tho ceremony. Fifty of the most interesting verses in the history of Vietnamese poetry, chosen by the organising board, were attached to red balloons and released into the sky from the hands of 50 beautiful girls. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/b21ce7a6/attachment.html From AlMaginnes at aol.com Mon Feb 16 12:09:05 2009 From: AlMaginnes at aol.com (AlMaginnes@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference Message-ID: David, you are one of the many I saw from afar at AWP and kept trying to get over and introduce myself to. But it was hard to move very far without getting pulled into yet another conversation with yet another person I hadn't seen in years. **************Need a job? Find an employment agency near you. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000003) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/bcb8af04/attachment.html From millb at aol.com Mon Feb 16 12:12:27 2009 From: millb at aol.com (Millicent Accardi) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference In-Reply-To: <8CB5E6DE9BFEC3C-A58-1447@WEBMAIL-DC10.sysops.aol.com> References: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> <8CB5E6DE9BFEC3C-A58-1447@WEBMAIL-DC10.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CB5E70E0A71696-1474-397@WEBMAIL-MY10.sysops.aol.com> It's been a long time, but AWP WAS in Miami once. . .and a few years ago it was in Palm Springs (maybe 2001?) Cheers, Millicent -----Original Message----- From: jforjames@aol.com To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 8:51 am Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference Spontaneous acts of poetry save the day. Great story, David. I've never been to an?AWP Conference. Sometime I'll get to one... maybe when they have it it warmer place. Don't get me wrong... Chicago's a great place...I like to?browse?Myopic Books on N Milwaukee Ave. when I blow through town (and it's easy to blow through town in the Windy City). Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: David Graham To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu & Views Sent: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 10:45 pm Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words by many poets at the AWP annual conference. ? Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever attended. ?It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have featured the inventor of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several others. ? None of the promised panelists showed up. ?I don't know why, though I heard a number of rumors later. The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into the nonexistent event. ?Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood up and asked if anyone wanted to read a poem. ?As it happens, several did. ?Pretty soon there was an absolutely unplanned poetry slam occurring. ?Mr. Laity performed as M.C., ushered readers up and led the applause after they read, etc. ?He began calling it the Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. ?Things got more and more riotous. ?Almost nobody left the room, and there were many readers, in a wide range of styles. ?? At one point someone from the next room came over and complained that our room was too raucous, which it was. As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances varied, but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average sponsored event I've attended over many years. ? It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I walked out feeling just great. No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me when I tell the story. ?I just relished it. ? ?Read more about this event and see some photos here: http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== = _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry Looking for work? Get job alerts, employment information, career advice and job-seeking tools at AOL Find a Job. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/8a4a7dfe/attachment.html From cervantes.james at gmail.com Mon Feb 16 12:28:03 2009 From: cervantes.james at gmail.com (James Cervantes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference In-Reply-To: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> References: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> Message-ID: <648208b60902160928p141e25b8j12e5fdf7e576efbf@mail.gmail.com> There's an article concerning this at http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 Several years ago at the AWP conference in Palm Springs, I was the only panelist to show up for a panel on poetry & dreams. The others had legitimate reasons or mishaps that prevented them from coming, though I had not been notified until the last minute. I went to the appointed room at the appointed time and discovered, to my horror, that the room was packed. Luckily, an official AWP person showed up at the same time and did the dirty work of informing the audience that the panel had been cancelled. Friends and wags commented that the whole thing had been a dream. - Jim On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 8:45 PM, David Graham wrote: > I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words by many > poets at the AWP annual conference. > Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever attended. > It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have featured the inventor > of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several others. > > None of the promised panelists showed up. I don't know why, though I heard > a number of rumors later. > > The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into the > nonexistent event. Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood up and asked > if anyone wanted to read a poem. As it happens, several did. Pretty soon > there was an absolutely unplanned poetry slam occurring. Mr. Laity > performed as M.C., ushered readers up and led the applause after they read, > etc. He began calling it the Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. Things got > more and more riotous. Almost nobody left the room, and there were many > readers, in a wide range of styles. > > At one point someone from the next room came over and complained that our > room was too raucous, which it was. > > As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances varied, > but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average sponsored event I've > attended over many years. > > It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I walked > out feeling just great. > > No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me when I > tell the story. I just relished it. > > Read more about this event and see some photos here: > > > http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 > > > > > > ======================================== > David Graham > grahamd@ripon.edu > > Home Page: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz > > Poetry Library: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html > ========================================== > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/446f7207/attachment.html From millb at aol.com Mon Feb 16 12:29:55 2009 From: millb at aol.com (Millicent Accardi) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference In-Reply-To: <648208b60902160928p141e25b8j12e5fdf7e576efbf@mail.gmail.com> References: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> <648208b60902160928p141e25b8j12e5fdf7e576efbf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8CB5E73515553A1-1474-4B7@WEBMAIL-MY10.sysops.aol.com> I remember that! I?was in the audience. The panel looked good-- Cheers, Millicent -----Original Message----- From: James Cervantes Sent: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 9:28 am Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference There's an article concerning this at http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 Several years ago at the AWP conference in Palm Springs, I was the only panelist to show up for a panel on poetry & dreams. ?The others had legitimate reasons or mishaps that prevented them from coming, though I had not been notified until the last minute. ?I went to the appointed room at the appointed time and discovered, to my horror, that the room was packed. ?Luckily, an official AWP person showed up at the same time and did the dirty work of informing the audience that the panel had been cancelled. ?Friends and wags commented that the whole thing had been a dream. - Jim On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 8:45 PM, David Graham wrote: I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words by many poets at the AWP annual conference. ? Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever attended. ?It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have featured the inventor of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several others. ? None of the promised panelists showed up. ?I don't know why, though I heard a number of rumors later. The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into the nonexistent event. ?Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood up and asked if anyone wanted to read a poem. ?As it happens, several did. ?Pretty soon there was an absolutely unplanned poetry slam occurring. ?Mr. Laity performed as M.C., ushered readers up and led the applause after they read, etc. ?He began calling it the Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. ?Things got more and more riotous. ?Almost nobody left the room, and there were many readers, in a wide range of styles. ?? At one point someone from the next room came over and complained that our room was too raucous, which it was. As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances varied, but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average sponsored event I've attended over many years. ? It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I walked out feeling just great. No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me when I tell the story. ?I just relished it. ? ?Read more about this event and see some photos here: http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/950d6f6f/attachment.html From GrahamD at ripon.edu Mon Feb 16 12:50:50 2009 From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference In-Reply-To: <648208b60902160928p141e25b8j12e5fdf7e576efbf@mail.gmail.com> References: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> <648208b60902160928p141e25b8j12e5fdf7e576efbf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <60E54F53-CFEE-466A-A686-46D3B31AD419@ripon.edu> Always a mistake not to read ALL of my posts, Jim! David Graham Grahamd@Ripon.edu On Feb 16, 2009, at 11:28 AM, "James Cervantes" wrote: > There's an article concerning this at > > http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 > > Several years ago at the AWP conference in Palm Springs, I was the > only panelist to show up for a panel on poetry & dreams. The others > had legitimate reasons or mishaps that prevented them from coming, > though I had not been notified until the last minute. I went to the > appointed room at the appointed time and discovered, to my horror, > that the room was packed. Luckily, an official AWP person showed up > at the same time and did the dirty work of informing the audience > that the panel had been cancelled. Friends and wags commented that > the whole thing had been a dream. > > - Jim > > > On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 8:45 PM, David Graham > wrote: > I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words > by many poets at the AWP annual conference. > > Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever > attended. It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have > featured the inventor of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several > others. > > None of the promised panelists showed up. I don't know why, though > I heard a number of rumors later. > > The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into > the nonexistent event. Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood > up and asked if anyone wanted to read a poem. As it happens, > several did. Pretty soon there was an absolutely unplanned poetry > slam occurring. Mr. Laity performed as M.C., ushered readers up and > led the applause after they read, etc. He began calling it the > Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. Things got more and more > riotous. Almost nobody left the room, and there were many readers, > in a wide range of styles. > > At one point someone from the next room came over and complained > that our room was too raucous, which it was. > > As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances > varied, but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average > sponsored event I've attended over many years. > > It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I > walked out feeling just great. > > No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me > when I tell the story. I just relished it. > > Read more about this event and see some photos here: > > http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 > > > > > > ======================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/6b4a2e68/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Mon Feb 16 12:50:48 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Annie Finch on love poetry Message-ID: <8CB5E763BF4E2F2-88C-B70@WEBMAIL-DY15.sysops.aol.com> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/13/annie-michaels-poetry-workshop-love -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/66dcbf77/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Mon Feb 16 15:51:29 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Remembering Michael Hartnett In-Reply-To: <8CB5DEC70161E62-FA4-58DC@WEBMAIL-DZ40.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB5DEC70161E62-FA4-58DC@WEBMAIL-DZ40.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902161251h54026e93u72acaf6f297d1573@mail.gmail.com> Thank you, Finnegan, for the Irish Times article in which Michael Smith reminiscences about his friend Michael Hartnett. I do so love Hartnett's poem about his father, "That Actor Kiss", which is given below the article. Here, from 'Irish Culture and Customs' are three more of his poems, beginning with "The Death of An Irishwoman": http://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/Poetry/Hartnett.html Best, Judy 2009/2/15 > http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2009/0216/1233867938004.html > Monday, February 16, 2009 > Remembering Michael Hartnett > Michael Hartnett: no other ambition than to be a poet. > > Michael Hartnett was an esteemed poet from a young age, but his assurance > about his creative destiny had its dangers. > > MICHAEL SMITH recalls a significant artist whose early death 10 years ago > can be viewed as an accident of time and place > > > ------------------------------ > Looking for work? Get job alerts, employment information, career advice > and job-seeking tools at AOL Find a Job > . > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/4ec08b6b/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Mon Feb 16 16:08:20 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] sign o' the times: apostrophe banned in Birmin'ham Message-ID: <8CB5E91D4488119-E70-801@WEBMAIL-DZ40.sysops.aol.com> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090131/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_no_apostrophe -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/b40f6796/attachment.html From cervantes.james at gmail.com Mon Feb 16 16:34:00 2009 From: cervantes.james at gmail.com (James Cervantes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:16 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference In-Reply-To: <60E54F53-CFEE-466A-A686-46D3B31AD419@ripon.edu> References: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> <648208b60902160928p141e25b8j12e5fdf7e576efbf@mail.gmail.com> <60E54F53-CFEE-466A-A686-46D3B31AD419@ripon.edu> Message-ID: <648208b60902161334o2e1374bdr52ed92db3f7563f0@mail.gmail.com> Ah, David. I KNEW it looked familiar! - Jim On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Graham, David wrote: > Always a mistake not to read ALL of my posts, Jim! > > David GrahamGrahamd@Ripon.edu > > > On Feb 16, 2009, at 11:28 AM, "James Cervantes" > wrote: > > There's an article concerning this at > > > http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 > > Several years ago at the AWP conference in Palm Springs, I was the only > panelist to show up for a panel on poetry & dreams. The others had > legitimate reasons or mishaps that prevented them from coming, though I had > not been notified until the last minute. I went to the appointed room at > the appointed time and discovered, to my horror, that the room was packed. > Luckily, an official AWP person showed up at the same time and did the > dirty work of informing the audience that the panel had been cancelled. > Friends and wags commented that the whole thing had been a dream. > > - Jim > > > On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 8:45 PM, David Graham < > grahamd@ripon.edu> wrote: > >> I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words by >> many poets at the AWP annual conference. >> Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever attended. >> It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have featured the inventor >> of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several others. >> >> None of the promised panelists showed up. I don't know why, though I >> heard a number of rumors later. >> >> The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into the >> nonexistent event. Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood up and asked >> if anyone wanted to read a poem. As it happens, several did. Pretty soon >> there was an absolutely unplanned poetry slam occurring. Mr. Laity >> performed as M.C., ushered readers up and led the applause after they read, >> etc. He began calling it the Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. Things got >> more and more riotous. Almost nobody left the room, and there were many >> readers, in a wide range of styles. >> >> At one point someone from the next room came over and complained that our >> room was too raucous, which it was. >> >> As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances varied, >> but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average sponsored event I've >> attended over many years. >> >> It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I walked >> out feeling just great. >> >> No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me when I >> tell the story. I just relished it. >> >> Read more about this event and see some photos here: >> >> >> >> http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 >> >> >> >> >> >> ======================== >> > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- "Polish doesn't change quartz into a diamond." -Wilma Askinas ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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://www.flickr.com/photos/jamescervantes/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/33133b8a/attachment.html From cervantes.james at gmail.com Mon Feb 16 16:36:11 2009 From: cervantes.james at gmail.com (James Cervantes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference In-Reply-To: <8CB5E73515553A1-1474-4B7@WEBMAIL-MY10.sysops.aol.com> References: <9295F8D3-8DB2-43CE-9035-EDA343C010AF@ripon.edu> <648208b60902160928p141e25b8j12e5fdf7e576efbf@mail.gmail.com> <8CB5E73515553A1-1474-4B7@WEBMAIL-MY10.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <648208b60902161336j6abeae63leb2aa454cccd53f4@mail.gmail.com> Yeah, and we tried a couple of times afterward to get the same panel accepted at other AWPs. No go. I guess they keep a scorecard. - Jim On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:29 AM, Millicent Accardi wrote: > I remember that! I was in the audience. The panel looked good-- > > Cheers, > > Millicent > > -----Original Message----- > From: James Cervantes > Sent: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 9:28 am > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Rogue panel at AWP conference > > There's an article concerning this at > > http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 > > Several years ago at the AWP conference in Palm Springs, I was the only > panelist to show up for a panel on poetry & dreams. The others had > legitimate reasons or mishaps that prevented them from coming, though I had > not been notified until the last minute. I went to the appointed room at > the appointed time and discovered, to my horror, that the room was packed. > Luckily, an official AWP person showed up at the same time and did the > dirty work of informing the audience that the panel had been cancelled. > Friends and wags commented that the whole thing had been a dream. > > - Jim > > > On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 8:45 PM, David Graham wrote: > >> I am just back from Chicago, where I ingested millions of new words by >> many poets at the AWP annual conference. >> Thought I would report on the most interesting panel I've ever attended. >> It was billed as Chicago Poetry Slam, and was to have featured the inventor >> of the slam, Marc Smith, along with several others. >> >> None of the promised panelists showed up. I don't know why, though I >> heard a number of rumors later. >> >> The room was packed, and everyone stayed for 10, 15, 20 minutes into the >> nonexistent event. Finally a gentleman named C. J. Laity stood up and asked >> if anyone wanted to read a poem. As it happens, several did. Pretty soon >> there was an absolutely unplanned poetry slam occurring. Mr. Laity >> performed as M.C., ushered readers up and led the applause after they read, >> etc. He began calling it the Illegal Panel, the Anti-Slam, etc. Things got >> more and more riotous. Almost nobody left the room, and there were many >> readers, in a wide range of styles. >> >> At one point someone from the next room came over and complained that >> our room was too raucous, which it was. >> >> As at any open mic, the quality of the offerings and performances >> varied, but I can't say it was any more uneven than the average sponsored >> event I've attended over many years. >> >> It was easily the most interesting AWP event I've ever seen, and I >> walked out feeling just great. >> >> No, I did not read anything myself--which is what everyone asks me when >> I tell the story. I just relished it. >> >> Read more about this event and see some photos here: >> >> >> http://chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1221 >> >> >> >> >> >> ======================================== >> David Graham >> grahamd@ripon.edu >> >> Home Page: >> http://web.mac.com/drjazz >> >> Poetry Library: >> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html >> ========================================== >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing listNew-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.eduhttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > ------------------------------ > Access 350+ FREE radio stations anytime from anywhere on the web. Get the > Radio Toolbar > ! > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/6fb68afd/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Mon Feb 16 18:27:02 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <49983417.6010104@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <49983417.6010104@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902161527l5f2fe4b0kbe087fa225e54822@mail.gmail.com> Beginning with "If we take it to be a poem, . . ." [longest paragraph] and the rest except for these words in your last sentence: "text which may be a", your evaluation analysis is well reasoned and well written, and I agree with your points. I disagree with your reasoning in one small part of the evaluation that has the banana poem not being a poem because you say it's not lineated. My thought is that since the poem consists of one line, that means it's lineated. Best, Judy 2009/2/15 Bob Grumman > I've used my check-list on Bruce Andrews's text. My analysis is > stream-of-consciousness first-draft confusion. I'm not up to anything more > at the moment. The gist of where I'm going should come through, though. > > > Bananas are an example. > > This text gives me all kinds of trouble as a taxonomist. It's too short > for one to be able to > tell whether it's lineated or not. Lineation is a form of what I call the > flow-break; that, in > turn, is in my taxonomy the defining feature of poetry. But it could be a > saying, which is > another form of literature--or of what I call informrature, words used to > convey > information. > > It has made me expand the first requirement of An Excellent Poem according > to my > check-list to: > > (1) expresses something importantly true or represents something centrally > beautiful-- > > or gets us to something importantly true or centrally beautiful > > assuming it doesn't do two or more of these things. > > On the surface, this text neither expresses anything importantly true nor > represents any > sort of beauty. However, one can infer from it something importantly true: > that > meaningfulness is valuable. It may even be said to celebrate rationality > in reverse by > representing its opposite. I guess I would call it a conceptual poem. Of > course, it is a > joke, but a good joke needs to say something of value. This one says an > insufficiency of > data is troublesome. We can't get any information from the text because of > such an > insufficiency. I now think I would not call it a poem but a specimen of > informrature, or > words used to provide information. Satire does this by revealing error. > This reveals, > exemplifies, error. It is funny because in a prestigious magazine by > itself on a page, so to > be taken as a poem or aphorism of sorts. It is as the latter that I would > now take it. > > If we take it to be a poem, then it is a conceptual poem commenting on > poetry. But > perhaps also conveying an interesting sense of emptiness--loss, even. It > cuts one loose > from one's moorings. Adrift. Out of context. We're cut off from some > accumulation of > information that the text contributes to. We've gotten to the party too > late. So it's an > expression . . . no, a cause of perplexity, bewilderment. One can give it > a happy spin: it > frees its reader into intellectual irresponsiblilty, pure reasonlessness. > In that manner it may > be a poem. As a synecdoche for the ultimate irrationality of life, it may > give us pleasurable > relief from the anxiety of not knowing what's going on--why should we since > nothing can > ultimately make sense. Something importantly true for everyone in certain > moods. > Something else importantly true when we're feeling better is that existence > does make > sense. As this text reminds us, allows us to re-realize. > > (2) is at least somewhat complicated by Thematic Misdirection, or something > that makes > its ultimate meaning or effect difficult quickly to ascertain, but > eventually achieves Clarity; > > This text is certainly complicated by Thematic Misdirection--it is a non > sequitur, or a one- > element jump-cut poem, if we accept it as a poem. We don't easily know > what to make of > it, though we do quickly overcome our inital puzzlement to understand it as > a joke. > > (3) has a Unifying Principal, or some meaning or image or the like which > pulls its elements > reasonably close together; > It's too short not to be reasonably unified. > > (4) contains few or no superfluous words; > > I suppose a four-word sentence could have superfluous words, but this one > doesn't. > > (5) boasts some constituent of substance that few or no other poems have > such as > uncommon diction, grammar, expressive modality (e.g., mathematics, visual > art), and imagery; > > Its mocking disconnection from the implicit law of discourse that require a > text's > references to have referents is over the top. Other texts exist that are > like this but none, I > suspect do it exactly the same way or as well.. > > (6) avoids excessive use of inappropriate Cliches of diction, imagery or > thought; too overt > Sentimentality and hackneyed use of some technique or form; > > It is all commonplace, but that is the point. We take it as a > matter-of-fact disclosure, then > find it subversive. > > Conclusion: "Bananas are an example" is an excellent text which may be a > poem. > > Bob Grumman > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090216/ebb18c38/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Feb 16 18:40:19 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902161527l5f2fe4b0kbe087fa225e54822@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><49983417.6010104@nut-n-but .net> <7db1d01b0902161527l5f2fe4b0kbe087fa225e54822@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net> Judy Prince wrote: > Beginning with "If we take it to be a poem, . . ." [longest paragraph] > and the rest except for these words in your last sentence: "text > which may be a", your evaluation analysis is well reasoned and well > written, and I agree with your points. Phooey. > > I disagree with your reasoning in one small part of the evaluation > that has the banana poem not being a poem because you say it's not > lineated. My thought is that since the poem consists of one line, > that means it's lineated. > Well, I'm being very fussy. But, surely, this is lineated but not poetry? If the Andrews text started with a small letter and had no period, I'd call it a poem. If presented in a book of poems (called a book of poems), I'd accept it as a poem. If labeled in a table of contents a poem, I'd accept it as a poem. But just quoted from a page of a magazine, I can't call it a poem--though I would not say it was definitely prose, either. Could be an aphorism, as I said. Glad we could disagree on SOMEthing. Thanks for responding. --Bob From amyhappens at yahoo.com Wed Feb 18 15:29:21 2009 From: amyhappens at yahoo.com (amy king) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] If you're this way ... Message-ID: <475833.65554.qm@web83305.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> The Stain of Poetry:? A Reading Series presents ? February 27th @ 7 p.m. - Stain Bar - Williamsburg, Brooklyn ? *Jason Gray, Tony Mancus, Deborah Poe, Ric Royer, Mario Susko and Jessica Reed* ? ~~~ ? Jason Gray is the author of Photographing Eden (Ohio Univ. Press, 2008), winner of the Hollis Summers Prize, and two chapbooks, How to Paint the Savior Dead (Kent State Univ. Press, 2007) and Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo (Dream Horse, 2003). His poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. He coedits the online magazine, Unsplendid (www.unsplendid.com). Web site: jason-gray.net. ? ~~~ ? Tony Mancus? poems have appeared or will be appearing in cream city review, Handsome, Forklift, Ohio, Memorious and elsewhere. He teaches writing at Montclair State University and Hunter College. He co-founded Flying Guillotine Press (flyingguillotinepress.blogspot.com) and makes books in Brooklyn and Queens. ? ~~~ ? Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collection Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008) as well as chapbooks from Furniture_Press and Stockport Flats Press. Poe has received several literary awards including the Thayer Fellowship of the Arts (2008) and three Pushcart Prize nominations. Her writing is forthcoming or has appeared in journals such as Coconut, Diode, Ploughshares, Filter Literary Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Copper Nickel, and FOURSQUARE Editions as well as in the anthologies In Our Own Words (MW Enterprises 2009), Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS From the Black Diaspora (Third World Press 2007) and A Sing Economy (Flim Forum 2008). Her current projects include ?Elements? (her poetry collection based on the periodic table), a short fiction collection entitled ?Event Landmarks,? and an anthology of short fiction. Assistant Professor of English at Pace University, Pleasantville, Poe teaches creative writing, contemporary fiction and theory. Visit her Web site, www.deborahpoe.com, for more. ? ~~~ ? Ric Royer is a writer, performer, writer of performances and performer of writings. Other works of literature include Hystery of Heat (Publishing Genius), There Were One and It Was Two (Narrow House Records), and Anthesteria (Bark Art Press). The Weather Not The Weather is forthcoming from Outside Voices Press. He is also a founding editor of Ferrum Wheel. ? An imprint of Bootstrap Productions (Cambridge, Mass.), Buffalo N.Y.-based Outside Voices publishes poetry & experimental text-based art. ? http://www.ricroyer.com http://www.looktouch.com/press ? ~~~ ? A witness and survivor of the war in Bosnia, Mario Susko moved to the US in 1993 where he lived in the 70s and got his M.A. and Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook. He has published 77 books, 28 of which are his poetry collections. His most recent work includes an integral edition/translation of Walt Whitman?s Leaves of Grass, as well as an anthology of modern Jewish-American short stories A Declaration of Being which he co-edited with M. Schwartzman and translated into Croatian. His 6th poetry collection in English, Closing Time, was released in 2008 by Harbor Mountain Press. This January his Croatian publisher Meandarmedia put out a Croatian edition of Closing Time and the erbacce-press from Liverpool, UK, released his chapbook Rules of Engagement. ? ~~~ ? Jessica Reed?s poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, LIT, The Huffington Post, Zeek: A Journal of Jewish Thought and Culture, as well as various online journals, and has been anthologized in Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House. She is the 2007 recipient of the Marie Ponsot Poetry Prize and the Jerome Lowell Dejur Award. Originally from Asheville, North Carolina, she lives in New York City, where she works as a technical editor and where she received her MFA from the the City College of the City University of New York. ? ~~~ ? ? Hosted by Amy King and Ana Bo?i?evi? ? stain bar 766 grand street brooklyn, ny 11211 (L train to Grand Street, 1 block west) ? SITE:? http://www.stainofpoetry.com/ ? VIDEO:? http://stainofpoetry.wordpress.com/video/ ? _______ Amy's Alias http://amyking.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090218/0226e9a3/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Wed Feb 18 17:00:35 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] maths and poetry have a special relationship Message-ID: <8CB602B75D9D026-14C4-1042@WEBMAIL-MZ27.sysops.aol.com> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/feb/04/maths-poetry-pi-fibonacci Final proof that maths and poetry have a special relationship >From pi to the Fibonacci sequence, poets' imaginations have been fired by the elegance of numbers ? and mathematicians have returned the compliment -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090218/a1ed9d72/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Wed Feb 18 19:09:40 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Another Poetry Editor Done Gone Message-ID: <499CA344.4050709@opus40.org> http://www.pw.org/content/editor_remembered_postcard_new_york_city -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From jforjames at aol.com Wed Feb 18 21:58:43 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] another AWP report Message-ID: <8CB60551BECDF6C-364-13CE@WEBMAIL-MC04.sysops.aol.com> http://writetoright.blogspot.com/2009/02/awp-or-zombie-fest.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090218/210cf000/attachment.html From chris.lott at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 11:55:28 2009 From: chris.lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Another Poetry Editor Done Gone In-Reply-To: <499CA344.4050709@opus40.org> References: <499CA344.4050709@opus40.org> Message-ID: <9b1b9dab0902190855q7539820aj10300588a144e5ad@mail.gmail.com> Sad-- I didn't realize Carol Houck-Smith had died. I had a painfully funny incident years as as a college frosh, attending a dinner party and lecturing Carol about regional poetry with no idea who she was much less that she was the guest of honor. Typically, I still think I was right... c From chris.lott at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 11:58:01 2009 From: chris.lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <4998462F.7070006@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <7db1d01b0902150823see8b07ci54866db15b53ae42@mail.gmail.com> <4998462F.7070006@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <9b1b9dab0902190858j6eafca2dpb7d970a324dd0cbd@mail.gmail.com> There are a lot of us in education who dream of an environment much like what you propose, Bob! c On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 7:43 AM, Bob Grumman wrote: > I just dipped in with my viewpoint. No time for amplification. But I would > add that my scheme would certainly allow dedicated teachers to drop in on > elective courses and add input. Remember, too, that I would want a good > list of resources available--both hard copy and CD would be good. > --Bob From chris.lott at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 12:02:10 2009 From: chris.lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <7db1d01b0902161527l5f2fe4b0kbe087fa225e54822@mail.gmail.com> <4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com> What the banana poem really is? "Ridicurous." Perhaps it has some value as a historical artifact. Otherwise it's a joke which, evidently, continues to exact its feeble punchline on those who should know better. c On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Judy Prince wrote: >> >> Beginning with "If we take it to be a poem, . . ." [longest paragraph] and >> the rest except for these words in your last sentence: "text which may be >> a", your evaluation analysis is well reasoned and well written, and I agree >> with your points. > > Phooey. > >> >> I disagree with your reasoning in one small part of the evaluation that >> has the banana poem not being a poem because you say it's not lineated. My >> thought is that since the poem consists of one line, that means it's >> lineated. > > > Well, I'm being very fussy. But, surely, this is lineated but not poetry? > > > > > If the Andrews text started with a small letter and had no period, I'd call > it a poem. If presented in a book of poems (called a book of poems), I'd > accept it as a poem. If labeled in a table of contents a poem, I'd accept > it as a poem. But just quoted from a page of a magazine, I can't call it a > poem--though I would not say it was definitely prose, either. Could be an > aphorism, as I said. > > Glad we could disagree on SOMEthing. Thanks for responding. > > --Bob > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Chris Lott From chris.lott at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 12:06:59 2009 From: chris.lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild In-Reply-To: <49900EDB.7050003@nut-n-but.net> References: <49900EDB.7050003@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <9b1b9dab0902190906u318a9cp7c826ce5fdc72dd6@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:09 AM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Hey, surprise--I approve this poem. > You should have a logotype made into a stamp or seal that lucky recipients could affix to their work. Ideally the stamp of approval itself would be a piece of visual poetry. Think about it. c From cervantes.james at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 12:42:00 2009 From: cervantes.james at gmail.com (James Cervantes) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild In-Reply-To: <9b1b9dab0902190906u318a9cp7c826ce5fdc72dd6@mail.gmail.com> References: <49900EDB.7050003@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0902190906u318a9cp7c826ce5fdc72dd6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <648208b60902190942x7dd07507ybb54efff507ebfe3@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:06 AM, Chris Lott wrote: > On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:09 AM, Bob Grumman > wrote: > > Hey, surprise--I approve this poem. > > > > You should have a logotype made into a stamp or seal that lucky > recipients could affix to their work. Ideally the stamp of approval > itself would be a piece of visual poetry. Think about it. > > c Chris, I approve your approval of Bob's approval. -- Jim "Polish doesn't change quartz into a diamond." -Wilma Askinas ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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://www.flickr.com/photos/jamescervantes/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/c300492d/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 12:44:20 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] maths and poetry have a special relationship In-Reply-To: <8CB602B75D9D026-14C4-1042@WEBMAIL-MZ27.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB602B75D9D026-14C4-1042@WEBMAIL-MZ27.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902190944y568f117eua942d3a3ec1b1c17@mail.gmail.com> Patricia Valdata sent a Fib poem for the SPRING Anthology: http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=2900 the anthology: http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=333 On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:00 PM, wrote: > > http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/feb/04/maths-poetry-pi-fibonacci > > Final proof that maths and poetry have a special relationship > > >From pi to the Fibonacci sequence, poets' imaginations have been fired by > the elegance of numbers ? and mathematicians have returned the compliment > > ------------------------------ > Looking for work? Get job alerts, employment information, career advice > and job-seeking tools at AOL Find a Job > . > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/fe6771e0/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 12:48:18 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:17 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Way of all Flesh In-Reply-To: <9b1b9dab0902190858j6eafca2dpb7d970a324dd0cbd@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <7db1d01b0902150823see8b07ci54866db15b53ae42@mail.gmail.com> <4998462F.7070006@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0902190858j6eafca2dpb7d970a324dd0cbd@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902190948i7c261eb4rde671c945021e20b@mail.gmail.com> I agree, since when I was way back behind the tiny desk, not only from behind the big one. On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Chris Lott wrote: > There are a lot of us in education who dream of an environment much > like what you propose, Bob! > > c > > On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 7:43 AM, Bob Grumman > wrote: > > I just dipped in with my viewpoint. No time for amplification. But I > would > > add that my scheme would certainly allow dedicated teachers to drop in on > > elective courses and add input. Remember, too, that I would want a good > > list of resources available--both hard copy and CD would be good. > > --Bob > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/85041d70/attachment.html From david.weinstock at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 12:55:21 2009 From: david.weinstock at gmail.com (David Weinstock) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] maths and poetry have a special relationship In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902190944y568f117eua942d3a3ec1b1c17@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB602B75D9D026-14C4-1042@WEBMAIL-MZ27.sysops.aol.com> <4b65c2d70902190944y568f117eua942d3a3ec1b1c17@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <437b1e3a0902190955r7b632c83w4702bd3275d18e53@mail.gmail.com> I have played with the Fib form as it was explained to me and generally had no luck with it, but I very much like that one by Patricia Valdata, and the symmetrical shape of it. On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Anny Ballardini wrote: > Patricia Valdata sent a Fib poem for the SPRING Anthology: > http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=2900 > > the anthology: > > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=333 > > > > On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:00 PM, wrote: > >> >> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/feb/04/maths-poetry-pi-fibonacci >> >> Final proof that maths and poetry have a special relationship >> >> >From pi to the Fibonacci sequence, poets' imaginations have been fired by >> the elegance of numbers ? and mathematicians have returned the compliment >> >> ------------------------------ >> Looking for work? Get job alerts, employment information, career advice >> and job-seeking tools at AOL Find a Job >> . >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > > -- > Anny Ballardini > http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome > http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html > I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing > star! > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- .......................................................... DAVID WEINSTOCK 240 Woodland Park, Middlebury, VT 05753 Home: 802-388-6939 Cell: 802-989-4314 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/8ee3cf7d/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 13:20:40 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] maths and poetry have a special relationship In-Reply-To: <437b1e3a0902190955r7b632c83w4702bd3275d18e53@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB602B75D9D026-14C4-1042@WEBMAIL-MZ27.sysops.aol.com> <4b65c2d70902190944y568f117eua942d3a3ec1b1c17@mail.gmail.com> <437b1e3a0902190955r7b632c83w4702bd3275d18e53@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902191020p5ac7e71dja910249d00137e86@mail.gmail.com> Thank you, I do agree. And Spring is just it with her, crystalline! On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 6:55 PM, David Weinstock wrote: > I have played with the Fib form as it was explained to me and generally had > no luck with it, but I very much like that one by Patricia Valdata, and the > symmetrical shape of it. > > > On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Anny Ballardini < > anny.ballardini@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Patricia Valdata sent a Fib poem for the SPRING Anthology: >> http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=2900 >> >> the anthology: >> >> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=333 >> >> >> >> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:00 PM, wrote: >> >>> >>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/feb/04/maths-poetry-pi-fibonacci >>> >>> Final proof that maths and poetry have a special relationship >>> >>> >From pi to the Fibonacci sequence, poets' imaginations have been fired >>> by the elegance of numbers ? and mathematicians have returned the compliment >>> >>> ------------------------------ >>> Looking for work? Get job alerts, employment information, career advice >>> and job-seeking tools at AOL Find a Job >>> . >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> New-Poetry mailing list >>> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Anny Ballardini >> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ >> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome >> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html >> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing >> star! >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > > -- > .......................................................... > > DAVID WEINSTOCK > 240 Woodland Park, Middlebury, VT 05753 > > Home: 802-388-6939 > Cell: 802-989-4314 > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/ffc6cce2/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 19 14:31:27 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><7db1d01b0902161527l5f2fe4b 0kbe087fa225e54822@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> Chris Lott wrote: > What the banana poem really is? "Ridicurous." Perhaps it has some > value as a historical artifact. Otherwise it's a joke which, > evidently, continues to exact its feeble punchline on those who should > know better. > > c Glad to get opposition from you so quickly after getting (ugh) agreement from you on another matter, Chris! I think you do have a problem with minimalism. Here, you don't connect the same way you don't connect to the van den Heuvel poem, tundra. We who like this kind of stuff find the nothingness it jumps out of important; you don't. I can't say who's "right," but I do think we come out ahead, because it gives us one thing to enjoy you can't enjoy. So there! I can't remember: what's your opinion of haiku? --Bob From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 19 14:40:26 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- B. H. Fairchild In-Reply-To: <9b1b9dab0902190906u318a9cp7c826ce5fdc72dd6@mail.gmail.com> References: <49900EDB.7050003@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0902190906u318a9cp7c826ce5fdc72dd6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <499DB5AA.1080108@nut-n-but.net> Chris Lott wrote: > On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:09 AM, Bob Grumman wrote: > >> Hey, surprise--I approve this poem. >> >> > > You should have a logotype made into a stamp or seal that lucky > recipients could affix to their work. Ideally the stamp of approval > itself would be a piece of visual poetry. Think about it. > > c > __ I dunno, Chris. I'm afraid poets sent the seal might sue me for committing a hate crime against them. Even visual poets, most of whom deplore my insistence that visual poetry have words. On the other hand, the idea of an actual seal expressing approval for a poem strikes me as . . . well let me say, I approve it! I will let the idea soak through my Creative Under-Consciousness for a while. Will let you know if anything comes of it. (All I've thought of so far is a a text: "This poem/ will show 'em." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/3e10b523/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 19 14:48:33 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] maths and poetry have a special relationship In-Reply-To: <437b1e3a0902190955r7b632c83w4702bd3275d18e53@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB602B75D9D026-14C4-1042@WEBMAIL-MZ27.sysops.aol.com><4b65c2d70902190944y568f117eua942d3a3ec1b1c17@mail.gmail.com> <437b1e3a0902190955r7b632c83w4702bd3275d18e53@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <499DB791.8010701@nut-n-but.net> David Weinstock wrote: > I have played with the Fib form as it was explained to me and > generally had no luck with it, but I very much like that one by > Patricia Valdata, and the symmetrical shape of it. I like the form, but it has no more to do with mathematics than making a poem whose lines are, say, one syllable, two, three, five, seven, eleven syllables and so on in length. Or, for that matter, 14 lines each ten syllables in length. --Bob G. From david.weinstock at gmail.com Thu Feb 19 17:56:23 2009 From: david.weinstock at gmail.com (David Weinstock) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] maths and poetry have a special relationship In-Reply-To: <499DB791.8010701@nut-n-but.net> References: <8CB602B75D9D026-14C4-1042@WEBMAIL-MZ27.sysops.aol.com> <4b65c2d70902190944y568f117eua942d3a3ec1b1c17@mail.gmail.com> <437b1e3a0902190955r7b632c83w4702bd3275d18e53@mail.gmail.com> <499DB791.8010701@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <437b1e3a0902191456x17011f24nf60c8e849e85ae85@mail.gmail.com> You're right of course, Bob. But the conviction that the Fibonacci sequence confers some sort of naturally occurring aesthetically pleasing proportions to a poem is what has made the form a fad. Haiku were a fad once, and sonnets before them, and have survived that to become useful. The Fib discussion reminds me (abstractly) of GM Hopkins' "curtal sonnet" Pied Beauty, which is shorter than a sonnet but, as he explained, retains the same 8:6 proportions of a full 14-line sonnet. On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > David Weinstock wrote: > >> I have played with the Fib form as it was explained to me and generally >> had no luck with it, but I very much like that one by Patricia Valdata, and >> the symmetrical shape of it. >> > I like the form, but it has no more to do with mathematics than making a > poem whose lines are, say, one syllable, two, three, five, seven, eleven > syllables and so on in length. Or, for that matter, 14 lines each ten > syllables in length. > > --Bob G. > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- .......................................................... DAVID WEINSTOCK 240 Woodland Park, Middlebury, VT 05753 Home: 802-388-6939 Cell: 802-989-4314 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/0e190d5e/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 19 19:54:16 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><7db1d01b0902161527l5f2fe4b0kbe087fa225e54822@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com> <499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com> When the Andrews 'poem' was first suggested I said there was no point in trying to explain/justify it. It's an endpoint. As a?kind of poetic fillip,?there's no where to go from there. Thus it becomes an oddity, something for museum of poetry to?display behind glass. "Look, kids, some poet made this...and said it was a poem. Isn't that cool."? The haiku (or the epigram, for that matter) is an inexhaustable poetic model. Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Bob Grumman Sent: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 2:31 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text Chris Lott wrote:? > What the banana poem really is? "Ridicurous." Perhaps it has some? > value as a historical artifact. Otherwise it's a joke which,? > evidently, continues to exact its feeble punchline on those who should? > know better.? >? > c? Glad to get opposition from you so quickly after getting (ugh) agreement from you on another matter, Chris! I think you do have a problem with minimalism. Here, you don't connect the same way you don't connect to the van den Heuvel poem, tundra. We who like this kind of stuff find the nothingness it jumps out of important; you don't. I can't say who's "right," but I do think we come out ahead, because it gives us one thing to enjoy you can't enjoy. So there!? ? I can't remember: what's your opinion of haiku?? ? --Bob? ? _______________________________________________? New-Poetry mailing list? New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu? http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/99682f63/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 19 20:12:20 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] maths and poetry have a special relationship In-Reply-To: <437b1e3a0902191456x17011f24nf60c8e849e85ae85@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB602B75D9D026-14C4-1042@WEBMAIL-MZ27.sysops.aol.com><4b65c2d70902190944y568f117eua942d3a3ec1b1c17@mail.gmail.com>< 437b1e3a0902190955r7b632c83w4702bd3275d18e53@mail.gmail.com><499DB791.8010701@nut-n-but.net> <437b1e3a0902191456x17011f24nf60c8e849e85ae85@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <499E0374.7000508@nut-n-but.net> David Weinstock wrote: > You're right of course, Bob. But the conviction that the Fibonacci > sequence confers some sort of naturally occurring aesthetically > pleasing proportions to a poem is what has made the form a fad. Haiku > were a fad once, and sonnets before them, and have survived that to > become useful. Yes, and I think this one will, too. I just get irritated at the silly "healing" of the 2 Cultures by people finding mathematics integral to some art. > > The Fib discussion reminds me (abstractly) of GM Hopkins' "curtal > sonnet" Pied Beauty, which is shorter than a sonnet but, as he > explained, retains the same 8:6 proportions of a full 14-line sonnet. > Haw, yes, Hopkins was another mathematician. --Bob > > > > > On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Bob Grumman > wrote: > > David Weinstock wrote: > > I have played with the Fib form as it was explained to me and > generally had no luck with it, but I very much like that one > by Patricia Valdata, and the symmetrical shape of it. > > I like the form, but it has no more to do with mathematics than > making a poem whose lines are, say, one syllable, two, three, > five, seven, eleven syllables and so on in length. Or, for that > matter, 14 lines each ten syllables in length. > > --Bob G. > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > -- > .......................................................... > > DAVID WEINSTOCK > 240 Woodland Park, Middlebury, VT 05753 > > Home: 802-388-6939 > Cell: 802-989-4314 > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/1f88133f/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Thu Feb 19 21:14:32 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Another view of the AWP Conference Message-ID: <8CB61181A473CAF-14E0-78C@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com> http://irasciblepoet.blogspot.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090219/a1e30a7e/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Feb 19 22:41:36 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><7db1d01b0902161527l5f2fe4b 0kbe087fa225e54822@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com> <499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> <8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> jforjames@aol.com wrote: > When the Andrews 'poem' was first suggested I said there was no point > in trying to explain/justify it. > It's an endpoint. As a kind of poetic fillip, there's no where to go > from there. Thus it becomes an oddity, > something for museum of poetry to display behind glass. "Look, kids, > some poet made this...and said > it was a poem. Isn't that cool." > > The haiku (or the epigram, for that matter) is an inexhaustable poetic > model. > > Finnegan Cabbages aren't. --Bob From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Fri Feb 20 00:56:12 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com> <499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> <8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> It seems to me at once an anti-poem and a most fundamental or pure poem. I tend to agree and disagree with all the opinions offered so far. But my latest thought is that it's not a one-timer oddity, rather that it sets a different mark for poems than has been set. As with other well known poems and poem-forms, it can be imitated with varying effects. Judy 2009/2/19 Bob Grumman > jforjames@aol.com wrote: > >> When the Andrews 'poem' was first suggested I said there was no point in >> trying to explain/justify it. >> It's an endpoint. As a kind of poetic fillip, there's no where to go from >> there. Thus it becomes an oddity, >> something for museum of poetry to display behind glass. "Look, kids, some >> poet made this...and said >> it was a poem. Isn't that cool." >> The haiku (or the epigram, for that matter) is an inexhaustable poetic >> model. >> >> Finnegan >> > Cabbages aren't. > > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/2d4b936e/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 20 06:11:15 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but .net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEB MAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com><499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> Judy Prince wrote: > It seems to me at once an anti-poem and a most fundamental or pure > poem. I tend to agree and disagree with all the opinions offered so > far. But my latest thought is that it's not a one-timer oddity, > rather that it sets a different mark for poems than has been set. As > with other well known poems and poem-forms, it can be imitated with > varying effects. > > Judy I agree. As an expression of one very specific point of view, sure, it's sui generis. But I think there are other texts similar to it, and will be. I also wonder why it could not be considered simply a particularly wry epigram. Aside from all that, I have to say (as I often have) that I don't mind anyone else's not caring about understanding poetry, but am annoyed by the idea that because one person doesn't care about it, I ought to consider it a waste of time, too. --Bob From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 20 09:38:24 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com><499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8CB61800421147E-E44-23F2@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> Judy, since Andrews' poem has been around for while, wouldn't we have a?good number of poems based on its model that we could admire. Maybe?they're out there and I don't know about them. By my guess is most attempts to?use the Andrews?poem as a model would be too derivative and thus critically dismissed. (Been there, done that.) How often has Andrews repeated himself with poems like "Bananas..."? If even the ur-poet of this novelty hasn't seen fit to revisit the form, it makes me wonder about any claims for it as a watershed poem. In a certain way, I think one?Bob's other favorite poems, 'lighght', as an ultra-minimal neologistic?one-word poem, has more claim?to being a watershed poem, something that could be a model for other successful?poems along?its lines.?Even?so, there are limits to how many lighght-like poems could be made before they began to seem like ersatz knock-offs.?? Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Judy Prince Sent: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:56 am Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text It seems to me at once an anti-poem and a most fundamental or pure poem. ?I tend to agree and disagree with all the opinions offered so far. ?But my latest thought is that it's not a one-timer oddity, rather that it sets a different mark for poems than has been set. ?As with other well known poems and poem-forms, it can be imitated with varying effects. ? Judy 2009/2/19 Bob Grumman jforjames@aol.com wrote: When the Andrews 'poem' was first suggested I said there was no point in trying to explain/justify it. It's an endpoint. As a kind of poetic fillip, there's no where to go from there. Thus it becomes an oddity, something for museum of poetry to display behind glass. "Look, kids, some poet made this...and said it was a poem. Isn't that cool." The haiku (or the epigram, for that matter) is an inexhaustable poetic model. Finnegan Cabbages aren't. --Bob _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/53439247/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 20 09:43:57 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:18 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><7db1d01b0902161527l5f2fe4b0kbe087fa225e54822@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <8CB6180CB862BD0-E44-2446@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> Bob, I think you neatly proved that most attempts would too derivative to take seriously. Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: Bob Grumman Sent: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:41 pm Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text jforjames@aol.com wrote:? > When the Andrews 'poem' was first suggested I said there was no point > in trying to explain/justify it.? > It's an endpoint. As a kind of poetic fillip, there's no where to go > from there. Thus it becomes an oddity,? > something for museum of poetry to display behind glass. "Look, kids, > some poet made this...and said? > it was a poem. Isn't that cool." >? > The haiku (or the epigram, for that matter) is an inexhaustable poetic > model.? >? > Finnegan? Cabbages aren't.? ? --Bob? ? _______________________________________________? New-Poetry mailing list? New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu? http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/0a6b4564/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 20 09:46:00 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] New Laureate comes from the other university in Iowa Message-ID: <8CB6181150146D2-E44-2462@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> http://www.esthervilledailynews.com/page/content.detail/id/502784.html?nav=5003 Iowa?s poet laureate lauds Iowa?s land and people ISU professor to serve term as state?s symbolic leader of poetry By Michael Tidemann - Staff Writer POSTED: February 20, 2009 "Iowa is a good place to write. We actually, in our weird way, support writers. We've always had a writing tradition here. Lots of times, it's turned into writers in exile, and that's the tradition in the Midwest: that you start out here and then you move away, and you write about thinking back. But I saw that as an early writer, and wanted to make a different kind of commitment to staying here and seeing what the issues were. You never know what's going to happen to your life, but it's only when you're in a place long enough that you can do anything in terms of the folklore, knowing the character of the people, improving the environment. There are certain issues you can't address if you only live in a place a year and then you move, or five years, and that's basically what we do in our culture these days. I actually have a unique perspective having been here probably 40 of my 50 years." -Mary Swander on writing in Iowa It should come as no surprise that Gov. Chet Culver asked Mary Sander Tuesday night to become the state's new poet laureate. Swander, a professor in creating writing at Iowa State University, will serve a two-year term as the state's symbolic leader of poetry. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/066f7300/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 20 09:54:10 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but .net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEB MAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com><499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> Bob Grumman wrote: > Judy Prince wrote: >> It seems to me at once an anti-poem and a most fundamental or pure >> poem. I tend to agree and disagree with all the opinions offered so >> far. But my latest thought is that it's not a one-timer oddity, >> rather that it sets a different mark for poems than has been set. As >> with other well known poems and poem-forms, it can be imitated with >> varying effects. >> Judy I would claim that it is a specimen of meaningfully meaningless text, a category that's been around since Dada and continues. Or Zen? Automobiles continue the process. --Bob From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 20 10:01:35 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] minimals and the minimus as limit Message-ID: <8CB61834271CDC9-E44-256A@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> Since we're on the topic of minimal poetry, here's one by Kit Robinson from a sequence called "Thoughts." Discussed by Curt Faville on his blog: http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/02/kit-robinson-in-news.html - wind knocks paper cup off edge of ledge it bounces and rolls in a wide arc scudding against the concrete - It's got WC Williams written all over it. But it's a?well-seen image and unfolding word by word as it does the poem certainly mimics the motion of the cup in a way that gives?the poem some extra dynamism. Finnegan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/ceda101e/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 20 10:17:44 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <8CB61800421147E-E44-23F2@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but .net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEB MAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com><499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <8CB61800421147E-E44-23F2@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <499EC998.80505@nut-n-but.net> jforjames@aol.com wrote: > Judy, > since Andrews' poem has been around for while, wouldn't we have a good > number of poems based on its model that we could admire. Maybe they're > out there and I don't know about them. By my guess is most attempts > to use the Andrews poem as a model would be too derivative and thus > critically dismissed. (Been there, done that.) How often has Andrews > repeated himself with poems like "Bananas..."? If even the ur-poet of > this novelty hasn't seen fit to revisit the form, it makes me wonder > about any claims for it as a watershed poem. > > In a certain way, I think one Bob's other favorite poems, 'lighght', > as an ultra-minimal neologistic one-word poem, has more claim to being > a watershed poem, something that could be a model for other > successful poems along its lines. Even so, there are limits to how many > lighght-like poems could be made before they began to seem like ersatz > knock-offs. > Finnegan I'm not claiming the Andrews as a watershed poem (necessarily). But who imitated Cummings's typographical poems while he was alive? Very few. But his devices are now in wide use. It takes a while for something truly new in the arts to be widely assimilated, and imitated, then used maturely (i.e., not just copied). I would agree with James that the "ultra-minimalist" school of poetry can never attain the size of, say, the Iowa Plaintext Lyric school, but that's an unfair criticism because the ultra minimalists are a single small specialty of a much larger school, minimalist poetry, which would include the haiku; the Iowa poem is not so small a specialty, though you could call it a sub-species of conventional free verse. In any case, we can't tell what place in literary history to assign the Andrews text without figuring out what and how it is and does. Another passing thought about the Andrews text: that it is an imagist poem, but about a conceptual, rather than a sensual, image (non-sequiturity). Maybe it's more like "lighght" than is readily apparent. --Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/139fd28a/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 20 10:15:39 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com><499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com><499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <8CB618533900EFB-CFC-50@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> Bob, I know you know that?the?most famous example of a meaningfully meaningless text, was brought forth by a linguist cum political philosopher, Noam Chomsky: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" He beat the poets to it. Finnegan -- > Judy Prince wrote:? >> It seems to me at once an anti-poem and a most fundamental or pure >> poem. I tend to agree and disagree with all the opinions offered so >> far. But my latest thought is that it's not a one-timer oddity, >> rather that it sets a different mark for poems than has been set. As >> with other well known poems and poem-forms, it can be imitated with >> varying effects. >> Judy? I would claim that it is a specimen of meaningfully meaningless text, a category that's been around since Dada and continues. Or Zen?? ? Automobiles continue the process.? ? --Bob? - -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/c9d09652/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Fri Feb 20 10:41:53 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com> <499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <6768ac830902200741j281cb0a6qadcf05bf06f5de45@mail.gmail.com> I'm with Chris and Finnegan. If that's a poem, so is this: "so is my nose" And putting either in a poetry magazine helps neither. Minimalism isn't the problem (and haiku is minimalist only in syllable count). Rather than nothingness, this text jumps out its author's sense of entitlement: he's stuck his thumb up his butt and and expects us to lick it clean ? or at least not ignore him. I will ignore him from now on. On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 9:54 AM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Bob Grumman wrote: > >> Judy Prince wrote: >> >>> It seems to me at once an anti-poem and a most fundamental or pure poem. >>> I tend to agree and disagree with all the opinions offered so far. But my >>> latest thought is that it's not a one-timer oddity, rather that it sets a >>> different mark for poems than has been set. As with other well known poems >>> and poem-forms, it can be imitated with varying effects. Judy >>> >> I would claim that it is a specimen of meaningfully meaningless text, a > category that's been around since Dada and continues. Or Zen? > > Automobiles continue the process. > > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/f998a319/attachment.html From jbalizsprince at googlemail.com Fri Feb 20 10:45:43 2009 From: jbalizsprince at googlemail.com (Judy Prince) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <8CB61800421147E-E44-23F2@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com> <499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> <8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <8CB61800421147E-E44-23F2@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <7db1d01b0902200745o8b9a29dtefec4f4e4e053e7a@mail.gmail.com> Hi, Finnegan, Bob and I are inveterate gauntlet-thrown-down-challengers who gnaw folk like big dogs worrying big bones. He can defend himself against my characterisation [what fun!], if he likes. I love these WEPD-induced discussions about what makes an Excellent poem---and especially now---what makes a poem. Reminds me of a frosh course, "What Is Art?" that led to the answer: "Probably anything". Yes, as you might guess, the final examination was a regurge of the texts. But that didnae mean the issue had resolved in my brain----oh no, it's re-ignited here at NP [frightening thought that Bob's responsible for the flame-lighting]. As you suggest, we don't know whether Andrews' poem has bred his own or other poets' children---nor do we know if the children would be too much like his and thus critically ignored. We also seem not to know whether he has decided to conceive others like his ahem banana original. We don't know much, do we? Here's the real deal: whenever I hear 'been there, done that', my eyes narrow. A family member of mine typically says she's been there and done that----and she has. Her 'been there, done thats', as with most of ours, yield some fascinatingly unique, but mostly forgettable, offspring. Her saying 'been there, done that' has always struck me as an off-putting negative. It implies her having perfected the art form, so why would anyone else even try it? Imagine a teacher saying that to her students. I did an Andrews knockoff in the last line of my evaluation of his banana poem and rather think that it rivals his poem. Judy 2009/2/20 > Judy, > since Andrews' poem has been around for while, wouldn't we have a good > number of poems based on its model that we could admire. Maybe they're out > there and I don't know about them. By my guess is most attempts to use the > Andrews poem as a model would be too derivative and thus critically > dismissed. (Been there, done that.) How often has Andrews repeated himself > with poems like "Bananas..."? If even the ur-poet of this novelty hasn't > seen fit to revisit the form, it makes me wonder about any claims for it as > a watershed poem. > > In a certain way, I think one Bob's other favorite poems, 'lighght', as an > ultra-minimal neologistic one-word poem, has more claim to being a watershed > poem, something that could be a model for other successful poems along its > lines. Even so, there are limits to how many > lighght-like poems could be made before they began to seem like ersatz > knock-offs. > Finnegan > > -----Original Message----- > From: Judy Prince > Sent: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:56 am > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text > > It seems to me at once an anti-poem and a most fundamental or pure poem. I > tend to agree and disagree with all the opinions offered so far. But my > latest thought is that it's not a one-timer oddity, rather that it sets a > different mark for poems than has been set. As with other well known poems > and poem-forms, it can be imitated with varying effects. > Judy > > 2009/2/19 Bob Grumman > >> jforjames@aol.com wrote: >> >>> When the Andrews 'poem' was first suggested I said there was no point in >>> trying to explain/justify it. >>> It's an endpoint. As a kind of poetic fillip, there's no where to go from >>> there. Thus it becomes an oddity, >>> something for museum of poetry to display behind glass. "Look, kids, some >>> poet made this...and said >>> it was a poem. Isn't that cool." >>> The haiku (or the epigram, for that matter) is an inexhaustable poetic >>> model. >>> >>> Finnegan >>> >> Cabbages aren't. >> >> >> --Bob >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing listNew-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.eduhttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > ------------------------------ > Looking for work? Get job alerts, employment information, career advice > and job-seeking tools at AOL Find a Job > . > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/fdbe1385/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Fri Feb 20 10:58:20 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902200745o8b9a29dtefec4f4e4e053e7a@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net> <9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com> <499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> <8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <8CB61800421147E-E44-23F2@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902200745o8b9a29dtefec4f4e4e053e7a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <499ED31C.6040509@opus40.org> I missed the beginning of this thread. Could someone repost the banana poem? Judy Prince wrote: > Hi, Finnegan, > > Bob and I are inveterate gauntlet-thrown-down-challengers who gnaw > folk like big dogs worrying big bones. He can defend himself against > my characterisation [what fun!], if he likes. > > I love these WEPD-induced discussions about what makes an Excellent > poem---and especially now---what makes a poem. Reminds me of a frosh > course, "What Is Art?" that led to the answer: "Probably anything". > Yes, as you might guess, the final examination was a regurge of the > texts. But that didnae mean the issue had resolved in my > brain----oh no, it's re-ignited here at NP [frightening thought that > Bob's responsible for the flame-lighting]. > > As you suggest, we don't know whether Andrews' poem has bred his own > or other poets' children---nor do we know if the children would be too > much like his and thus critically ignored. We also seem not to know > whether he has decided to conceive others like his ahem banana > original. We don't know much, do we? > > Here's the real deal: whenever I hear 'been there, done that', my > eyes narrow. A family member of mine typically says she's been there > and done that----and she has. Her 'been there, done thats', as with > most of ours, yield some fascinatingly unique, but mostly forgettable, > offspring. Her saying 'been there, done that' has always struck me as > an off-putting negative. It implies her having perfected the art > form, so why would anyone else even try it? Imagine a teacher saying > that to her students. > > I did an Andrews knockoff in the last line of my evaluation of his > banana poem and rather think that it rivals his poem. > > Judy > > 2009/2/20 > > > Judy, > since Andrews' poem has been around for while, wouldn't we have > a good number of poems based on its model that we could admire. > Maybe they're out there and I don't know about them. By my guess > is most attempts to use the Andrews poem as a model would be too > derivative and thus critically dismissed. (Been there, done that.) > How often has Andrews repeated himself with poems like > "Bananas..."? If even the ur-poet of this novelty hasn't seen fit > to revisit the form, it makes me wonder about any claims for it as > a watershed poem. > > In a certain way, I think one Bob's other favorite poems, > 'lighght', as an ultra-minimal neologistic one-word poem, has more > claim to being a watershed poem, something that could be a model > for other successful poems along its lines. Even so, there are > limits to how many > lighght-like poems could be made before they began to seem like > ersatz knock-offs. > Finnegan > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Judy Prince > > Sent: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:56 am > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text > > It seems to me at once an anti-poem and a most fundamental or pure > poem. I tend to agree and disagree with all the opinions offered > so far. But my latest thought is that it's not a one-timer > oddity, rather that it sets a different mark for poems than has > been set. As with other well known poems and poem-forms, it can > be imitated with varying effects. > > Judy > > 2009/2/19 Bob Grumman > > > jforjames@aol.com wrote: > > When the Andrews 'poem' was first suggested I said there > was no point in trying to explain/justify it. > It's an endpoint. As a kind of poetic fillip, there's no > where to go from there. Thus it becomes an oddity, > something for museum of poetry to display behind glass. > "Look, kids, some poet made this...and said > it was a poem. Isn't that cool." > The haiku (or the epigram, for that matter) is an > inexhaustable poetic model. > > Finnegan > > Cabbages aren't. > > > --Bob > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Looking for work? Get job alerts, employment information, career > advice and job-seeking tools at AOL Find a Job > . > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 20 11:07:00 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499EC998.80505@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com><499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com><8CB61800421147E-E44-23F2@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> <499EC998.80505@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <8CB618C656EA0D3-13F4-7AE@WEBMAIL-DZ12.sysops.aol.com> Bob, I'm not sure you can say?Andrews' poem?has an aspect of 'non sequitur', because it follows nothing. Unless you mean non sequitur to the poems in book/journal,?his corpus, and the canon of poetry itself...but that's a stretch, I think. I said I wasn't going to parse or to explicate the poem, but I'll relent and say?a few things about it: 1) It's a fragment, of course.?The fragment being a literary form, in a certain sense, because?of all the texts that we have perserved and studied?from the?ancients (Heraklitas, Sappho, etc.) that are only fragments. And from these stray snippets of lit naturally?we infer much. It is in the?nature of language that the?mind tries to?fill out?a story/narrative around them. The fragment becomes a 'seed element' whose flowering is speculative thought. 2) It has that?aspect of nonsense verse; a childish quality, Bananas, of all the fruits & vegetables, are often used in humor. There's?a?phallic joke imbedded there perhaps.?And the implication of? 'monkey business'. Maybe?even the play of the pratfall of 'slipped on a banana?peel', though that's a step too far, since our exemplar Bananas appear to be fully dressed. 3)?Most important is the rhetorical piece of 'are an example'.?I see that phrase?as being a direct nod to William Carlos Williams' "So much depends...'??An inverse, ending on, instead of starting with?a rhetorical locution: So much / depends upon // a red wheel /?barrow Bananas are an example. -- For now, that is all I shall on the curious matter of "Bananas...". Finnegan From: Bob Grumman Sent: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:17 am In any case, we can't tell what place in literary history to assign the Andrews text without figuring out what and how it is and does.? Another passing thought about the Andrews text: that it is an imagist poem, but about a conceptual, rather than a sensual, image (non-sequiturity).? Maybe it's more like "lighght" than is readily apparent.? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/a10226d7/attachment.html From david.weinstock at gmail.com Fri Feb 20 11:13:47 2009 From: david.weinstock at gmail.com (David Weinstock) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] minimals and the minimus as limit In-Reply-To: <8CB61834271CDC9-E44-256A@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CB61834271CDC9-E44-256A@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <437b1e3a0902200813n2c1070f5xcbda866ccf6b41be@mail.gmail.com> A short story writer or a novelist who had just written "Wind knocks paper cup off edge of ledge. It bounces and rolls in a wide arc, scudding against the concrete." would know he had composed a good, scene-setting first sentence of a larger work, which if followed by hundreds or thousands of sentences of the same quality would really be something. A poet -- I include myself in this belief-- would think he was done for the day and go check his email. Is there a minimum below which we must not go? Aren't we starving our readers, or kidding ourselves, when we offer so vanishingly little at a time? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/5a3f5d76/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 20 11:24:05 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <7db1d01b0902200745o8b9a29dtefec4f4e4e053e7a@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but.net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEBMAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com><499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com><8CB61800421147E-E44-23F2@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> <7db1d01b0902200745o8b9a29dtefec4f4e4e053e7a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8CB618EC8D90445-13F4-913@WEBMAIL-DZ12.sysops.aol.com> That's what I was saying, Judy: Your poem?may in fact rival?or exceed?Andrews' poem. But you'll not get any credit for getting to the minimus point in second place. It's done; a?fait accompli, so to speak. Finnegan Here's the real deal: ?whenever I hear 'been there, done that', my eyes narrow. ?A family member of mine typically says she's been there and done that----and she has. ?Her 'been there, done thats', as with most of ours, yield some fascinatingly unique, but mostly forgettable, offspring. ?Her saying 'been there, done that' has always struck me as an off-putting negative. ?It implies her having perfected the art form, so why would anyone else even try it? ?Imagine a teacher saying that to her students. ? I did an Andrews knockoff in the last line of my evaluation of his banana poem and rather think that it rivals his poem. ? Judy ----- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/64b64742/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 20 11:38:29 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:19 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <8CB618533900EFB-CFC-50@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but .net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEB MAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com><499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com><499E8FD3 .3000306@nut-n-but.net><499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> <8CB618533900EFB-CFC-50@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <499EDC85.9070207@nut-n-but.net> jforjames@aol.com wrote: > Bob, I know you know that the most famous example of a meaningfully > meaningless text, was brought forth by a linguist cum political > philosopher, Noam Chomsky: > "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" > He beat the poets to it. > Finnegan I'm too tired right now to say why, but the Andrews text seems to me MUCH different. Well, maybe I'll try. The Chomsky won't be taken as anything but cleverly meaningless. It's surrealistic. The Andrews is completely meaningful made meaningless by being wrenched out of context. The Andrews is also intended as some kind of literary text. I think the effect on you of the Andrews is exactly the effect on me of the Chomsky whereas the Andrews acts like a haiku on me. Oh, and Chomsky is a political crank, not a political philosopher. But I'm with him all the way in linguistics. (Is he still a linguist? He may be the Ezra Pound of linguistics.) --Bob G. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/50290e47/attachment.html From grahamd at ripon.edu Fri Feb 20 11:45:32 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] minimals and the minimus as limit In-Reply-To: <437b1e3a0902200813n2c1070f5xcbda866ccf6b41be@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB61834271CDC9-E44-256A@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> <437b1e3a0902200813n2c1070f5xcbda866ccf6b41be@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: > > > On Feb 20, 2009, at 10:13 AM, David Weinstock wrote: >> Is there a minimum below which we must not go? Aren't we starving >> our readers, or kidding ourselves, when we offer so vanishingly >> little at a time? >> ======================================= My answer would be yes, even for "The Red Wheelbarrow," which is not a very satisfying poem to my mind precisely because he doesn't exemplify or otherwise explore exactly what that "so much" is. He simply makes a vague and wispy claim that "so much depends," to which the proper American response is, So What? Of course, we often forget that "The Red Wheelbarrow" originally appeared in the book *Spring and All*, which supplies much of the context which I miss in its anthologizing as a separate piece. About most minimal pieces I feel as I do when I encounter an entirely white canvas hanging on the museum wall, or a pile of dirt presented as an "installation." Yes, I understand how the artists are "challenging" the accepted definitions, posing tricky questions about aesthetics & the social parameters of art, and so forth. But ultimately my response is So What? If the work is recent I also reflect on how many decades' worth of such deliberately boring work I've already taken in. The problem, for me, is that intellectualizing about the minimal thang--however interesting--is in a fundamental way extrinsic to the artwork itself, which is not interesting in any way except as a springboard for such philosophizing. The difference between that and a canvas by Rembrandt or Richard Diebenkorn is that such works satisfy in themselves *as well* as allowing all the aesthetic contemplation one wishes to apply. Way back in college I coined my personal definition of conceptual art: that which is more interesting to talk about than view. We can have quite a lively and stimulating discussion of the bananas poem without much need to examine the text, in fact. The same is not true of Ashbery or Frost. ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/6d161c27/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Fri Feb 20 11:46:40 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] minimals and the minimus as limit In-Reply-To: <437b1e3a0902200813n2c1070f5xcbda866ccf6b41be@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB61834271CDC9-E44-256A@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> <437b1e3a0902200813n2c1070f5xcbda866ccf6b41be@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8CB6191EB4BEED1-6E8-B1@WEBMAIL-DZ12.sysops.aol.com> David, that Kit Robinson?poem was part part of larger sequence.?So it might not be right foil for your question. Since you bring up novels remember Hemingway's novel in 6 words, given as an answer to a challenge: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." Poignant want ad that it is, it's spawned a recent anthology, I believe, where other contemporary authors tried their hand at the collapsed roman ? clef. But it's ultimately the playing out of joke. Finnegan -----Original Message----- From: David Weinstock Sent: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:13 am Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] minimals and the minimus as limit A short story writer or a novelist who had just written "Wind knocks paper cup off edge of ledge. It bounces and rolls in a wide arc, scudding against the concrete." would know he had composed a good, scene-setting first sentence of a larger work, which if followed by hundreds or thousands of sentences of the same quality would really be something. A poet -- I include myself in this belief-- would think he was done for the day and go check his email. Is there a minimum below which we must not go? Aren't we starving our readers, or kidding ourselves, when we offer so vanishingly little at a time? _______________________________________________ ew-Poetry mailing list ew-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu ttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/75ecd672/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 20 11:51:55 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <8CB618C656EA0D3-13F4-7AE@WEBMAIL-DZ12.sysops.aol.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><4999F963.5070401@nut-n-but .net><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb762h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net><8CB610CE3B0921D-14E0-3C2@WEB MAIL-MA11.sysops.aol.com><499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com><8CB61800 421147E-E44-23F2@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com><499EC998.80505@nut-n-but.net> <8CB618C656EA0D3-13F4-7AE@WEBMAIL-DZ12.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <499EDFAB.50404@nut-n-but.net> jforjames@aol.com wrote: > Bob, I'm not sure you can say Andrews' poem has an aspect of 'non > sequitur', because it follows nothing. Unless you mean non sequitur to > the poems in book/journal, his corpus, and the canon of poetry > itself...but that's a stretch, I think. Call it, as you do, a "fragment," then. But the text strongly implies that it continues a discussion about something that bananas are an example of. And I now remember that quite a bit of whatevers are currently being made that collage just these kinds of fragments. I think, too, of Bern Porter's work: often some cut-out from a magazine advertisement as short and non sequitured as the Andrews. --Bob From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 20 11:56:17 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902200741j281cb0a6qadcf05bf06f5de45@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><9b1b9dab0902190902i1feeb76 2h58bea04c4e8eb930@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com><499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200741j281cb0a6qadcf05bf06f5de45@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <499EE0B1.8090903@nut-n-but.net> Michael Snider wrote: > I'm with Chris and Finnegan. If that's a poem, so is this: "so is my > nose" And putting either in a poetry magazine helps neither. > > Minimalism isn't the problem (and haiku is minimalist only in syllable > count). Rather than nothingness, this text jumps out its author's > sense of entitlement: he's stuck his thumb up his butt and and expects > us to lick it clean ? or at least not ignore him. I will ignore him > from now on. Yikes, Michael, why so hostile? And what in the world does this text have to do with a sense of entitlement? --Bob G. From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 20 12:14:12 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] minimals and the minimus as limit In-Reply-To: References: <8CB61834271CDC9-E44-256A@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com><437b1e3a0902200813n2c1070f5xcbda866ccf6b41be@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <499EE4E4.6010705@nut-n-but.net> I'm reminded of one of my boilerplate observations about once thinking that the best artwork would have to be a Wagnerian combination of all the arts; eventually I realized that intensification is as valuable as broadness. Similarly: ornamentation can valuably go two opposite ways: toward greater elaboration or toward elimination. Another long-held belief of mine is that the much that depends on the farm scene in Williams's poem is the value of existence--because that's near-zero if not for the moments of final beauty ordinary objects in ordinary places like the ones he describes can yield. --Bob G. From mandolin at mikesnider.org Fri Feb 20 12:27:20 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499EE0B1.8090903@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but.net> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200741j281cb0a6qadcf05bf06f5de45@mail.gmail.com> <499EE0B1.8090903@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <6768ac830902200927j36828f95n25ddae60faa5cea0@mail.gmail.com> Not hostile to you, Bob, but to the kind of "artist" who thinks other people must reach out to them ? who feel entitled to the time and money of other people simply because they think themselves creative, or worse, think they can successfully pose as creative. On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Michael Snider wrote: > >> I'm with Chris and Finnegan. If that's a poem, so is this: "so is my nose" >> And putting either in a poetry magazine helps neither. >> >> Minimalism isn't the problem (and haiku is minimalist only in syllable >> count). Rather than nothingness, this text jumps out its author's sense of >> entitlement: he's stuck his thumb up his butt and and expects us to lick it >> clean ? or at least not ignore him. I will ignore him from now on. >> > Yikes, Michael, why so hostile? And what in the world does this text have > to do with a sense of entitlement? > > --Bob G. > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/2a0942d9/attachment.html From halvard at gmail.com Fri Feb 20 12:34:12 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] minimals and the minimus as limit In-Reply-To: <437b1e3a0902200813n2c1070f5xcbda866ccf6b41be@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CB61834271CDC9-E44-256A@mblk-d43.sysops.aol.com> <437b1e3a0902200813n2c1070f5xcbda866ccf6b41be@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: My dos centavos in answer to both questions: No. No limits at either extreme. Hal On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:13 AM, David Weinstock wrote: > A short story writer or a novelist who had just written "Wind knocks paper > cup off edge of ledge. It bounces and rolls in a wide arc, scudding against > the concrete." would know he had composed a good, scene-setting first > sentence of a larger work, which if followed by hundreds or thousands of > sentences of the same quality would really be something. > > > A poet -- I include myself in this belief-- would think he was done for the > day and go check his email. > > > Is there a minimum below which we must not go? Aren't we starving our > readers, or kidding ourselves, when we offer so vanishingly little at a > time? > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/1f99b837/attachment.html From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Feb 20 13:07:51 2009 From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902200927j36828f95n25ddae60faa5cea0@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org><4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com><499DB38F.8070406@nut-n-but .net> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net><7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com><499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net><6768ac830902200741j281cb0a6qadcf05bf06f5de45@mail.gmail.com><499EE0B1.8090903@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200927j36828f95n25ddae60faa5cea0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <499EF177.5050503@nut-n-but.net> Michael Snider wrote: > Not hostile to you, Bob, but to the kind of "artist" who thinks other > people must reach out to them ? who feel entitled to the time and > money of other people simply because they think themselves creative, > or worse, think they can successfully pose as creative. Didn't take it personally, Michael, just wondering why you think Andrews is that sort of "artist?" He's part of the language poetry crew that I've been antagonistic to, on and off, for years. because I think they've not helped their brother and sister otherstreamersperimentalists in visual poetry as much as I feel they ought to have (from positions of much greater influence than any of my crew have gotten). But I like some of the things he's done, and met him a few years ago--attending one of my crew's exhibitions--and he seemed affable and supportive. I didn't immediately take to this text of his--because it indeed doesn't seem like much, and because it appeared in the Paris Review, for me another Enemy of Poetry. And I still have a bias against anything a language poet does. But I have to say the thing now appeals to me quite a lot. --Bob From grahamd at ripon.edu Fri Feb 20 13:16:48 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] "54 Poets Walk Into a Bar" Message-ID: Including yours truly. The Humor Issue of Poemeleon, just appeared: http://www.poemeleon.org/david-graham2 Also including Charles Harper Webb, Martha Silano, Roy Jacobstein, Marilyn Taylor, Jessy Randall, and Sherman Alexie, among the 54. . . . ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/f1db1f49/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Fri Feb 20 13:33:34 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499EF177.5050503@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200741j281cb0a6qadcf05bf06f5de45@mail.gmail.com> <499EE0B1.8090903@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200927j36828f95n25ddae60faa5cea0@mail.gmail.com> <499EF177.5050503@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <6768ac830902201033j976948ducd3483015dded1b5@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Michael Snider wrote: > >> Not hostile to you, Bob, but to the kind of "artist" who thinks other >> people must reach out to them ? who feel entitled to the time and money of >> other people simply because they think themselves creative, or worse, think >> they can successfully pose as creative. >> > Didn't take it personally, Michael, just wondering why you think Andrews is > that sort of "artist?" He's part of the language poetry crew that I've been > antagonistic to, on and off, for years. because I think they've not helped > their brother and sister otherstreamersperimentalists in visual poetry as > much as I feel they ought to have (from positions of much greater influence > than any of my crew have gotten). But I like some of the things he's done, > and met him a few years ago--attending one of my crew's exhibitions--and he > seemed affable and supportive. I didn't immediately take to this text of > his--because it indeed doesn't seem like much, and because it appeared in > the Paris Review, for me another Enemy of Poetry. And I still have a bias > against anything a language poet does. But I have to say the thing now > appeals to me quite a lot. > > > --Bob > > I don't take it personally, Bob, not at all. But the langpo bunch may be even worse than the creative posers ? they think other people should pay attention because they think they have an idea. Silliman uses the "School of Quietude" as a club, and when I can be bothered with them I call them the "School of Phlogiston": a lot of hot air about nothing. Mike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/685a4ad8/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Fri Feb 20 13:54:57 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] "54 Poets Walk Into a Bar" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6768ac830902201054x31f91d25n35588d737d90641b@mail.gmail.com> Congratulations, David, and nice work, especially your address to Uncle Walt. On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:16 PM, David Graham wrote: > Including yours truly. The Humor Issue of Poemeleon, just appeared: > http://www.poemeleon.org/david-graham2 > > Also including Charles Harper Webb, Martha Silano, Roy Jacobstein, Marilyn > Taylor, Jessy Randall, and Sherman Alexie, among the 54. . . . > > > > ======================================== > David Graham > grahamd@ripon.edu > > Home Page: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz > > Poetry Library: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html > ========================================== > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/2c092aeb/attachment.html From halvard at gmail.com Fri Feb 20 14:15:25 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <499EF177.5050503@nut-n-but.net> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <4b65c2d70902150702l6e7b3d9aqd5b725d35b2dd61e@mail.gmail.com> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200741j281cb0a6qadcf05bf06f5de45@mail.gmail.com> <499EE0B1.8090903@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200927j36828f95n25ddae60faa5cea0@mail.gmail.com> <499EF177.5050503@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: Lynda and I heard Andrews "read" at the Ear Inn in NYC a few years back, and I must say the "reading" was remarkable. He stood before a small group of listeners "reading" from a sheaf of papers he held in his hand. The language flow was strongly rhythmical (though not necessarily metrical) and it was really quite amazing to hear bits and pieces of the chatter in the bar behind him working their way into the reading. Hal On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:07 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > Michael Snider wrote: > >> Not hostile to you, Bob, but to the kind of "artist" who thinks other >> people must reach out to them ? who feel entitled to the time and money of >> other people simply because they think themselves creative, or worse, think >> they can successfully pose as creative. >> > Didn't take it personally, Michael, just wondering why you think Andrews is > that sort of "artist?" He's part of the language poetry crew that I've been > antagonistic to, on and off, for years. because I think they've not helped > their brother and sister otherstreamersperimentalists in visual poetry as > much as I feel they ought to have (from positions of much greater influence > than any of my crew have gotten). But I like some of the things he's done, > and met him a few years ago--attending one of my crew's exhibitions--and he > seemed affable and supportive. I didn't immediately take to this text of > his--because it indeed doesn't seem like much, and because it appeared in > the Paris Review, for me another Enemy of Poetry. And I still have a bias > against anything a language poet does. But I have to say the thing now > appeals to me quite a lot. > > > --Bob > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/96ef41cc/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Fri Feb 20 16:30:27 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:20 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <499E2670.2040206@nut-n-but.net> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200741j281cb0a6qadcf05bf06f5de45@mail.gmail.com> <499EE0B1.8090903@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200927j36828f95n25ddae60faa5cea0@mail.gmail.com> <499EF177.5050503@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902201330p1085a830o5a1fe2b776006670@mail.gmail.com> >From what you write, and from what we read, Andrews has to be considered an artist rather than a poet, like Philip Corner of the Fluxus team. The discussion on whether his (Andrew's) is a poem, also by Robert Pinsky, is highly valuable. Many times at the Venice Biennale I had to face and understand sets of words that were put there in a frame or without frame and I was compelled to try to create philosophical, artistic, poetic interpretations to justify the presence of such an 'object' at a Biennale. They probably convey more than other poetic or philosophical or artistic 'objects' because they force the spectator to invent something intelligent. See for example pages of a dictionary glued to the wall or on canvas, to have an idea. Or like Andrew's, a simple, but not too logical, statement. On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 8:15 PM, Halvard Johnson wrote: > Lynda and I heard Andrews "read" at the Ear Inn in NYC a few years back, > and I must say > the "reading" was remarkable. He stood before a small group of listeners > "reading" from a sheaf > of papers he held in his hand. The language flow was strongly rhythmical > (though not > necessarily metrical) and it was really quite amazing to hear bits and > pieces of the chatter > in the bar behind him working their way into the reading. > > Hal > > > On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:07 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: > >> Michael Snider wrote: >> >>> Not hostile to you, Bob, but to the kind of "artist" who thinks other >>> people must reach out to them ? who feel entitled to the time and money of >>> other people simply because they think themselves creative, or worse, think >>> they can successfully pose as creative. >>> >> Didn't take it personally, Michael, just wondering why you think Andrews >> is that sort of "artist?" He's part of the language poetry crew that I've >> been antagonistic to, on and off, for years. because I think they've not >> helped their brother and sister otherstreamersperimentalists in visual >> poetry as much as I feel they ought to have (from positions of much greater >> influence than any of my crew have gotten). But I like some of the things >> he's done, and met him a few years ago--attending one of my crew's >> exhibitions--and he seemed affable and supportive. I didn't immediately >> take to this text of his--because it indeed doesn't seem like much, and >> because it appeared in the Paris Review, for me another Enemy of Poetry. >> And I still have a bias against anything a language poet does. But I have >> to say the thing now appeals to me quite a lot. >> >> >> --Bob >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> > > > > -- > > Halvard Johnson > ================ > halvard@gmail.com > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html > http://entropyandme.blogspot.com > http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com > http://www.hamiltonstone.org > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/51ef1f64/attachment.html From halvard at gmail.com Fri Feb 20 20:21:04 2009 From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Excellence in Poetry, the Andrews Text In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902201330p1085a830o5a1fe2b776006670@mail.gmail.com> References: <49977EC7.8050706@opus40.org> <7db1d01b0902192156s5ea60179o2beea22bbe74fce1@mail.gmail.com> <499E8FD3.3000306@nut-n-but.net> <499EC412.3070009@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200741j281cb0a6qadcf05bf06f5de45@mail.gmail.com> <499EE0B1.8090903@nut-n-but.net> <6768ac830902200927j36828f95n25ddae60faa5cea0@mail.gmail.com> <499EF177.5050503@nut-n-but.net> <4b65c2d70902201330p1085a830o5a1fe2b776006670@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Well, while I'm not big on categories and nomenclature (Bob's known that for some years now), I wouldn't see artist and poet as being mutually exclusive categories (the former, I'd say, includes the latter). I also don't expend much effort on deciding whether or not texts at the rather porous border between poetry and prose fall into one category or the other. I can live with both prosey poetry and poetic prose without much difficult. Btw, one of John Ashbery's many recent books included a whole raft of one-line poems, but I'm not finding it here, so it must still be in NYC. Maybe some of those might be fun for the hunters of excellence hereabouts to consider. Hal On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Anny Ballardini wrote: > From what you write, and from what we read, Andrews has to be considered an > artist rather than a poet, like Philip Corner of the Fluxus team. The > discussion on whether his (Andrew's) is a poem, also by Robert Pinsky, is > highly valuable. Many times at the Venice Biennale I had to face and > understand sets of words that were put there in a frame or without frame and > I was compelled to try to create philosophical, artistic, poetic > interpretations to justify the presence of such an 'object' at a Biennale. > They probably convey more than other poetic or philosophical or artistic > 'objects' because they force the spectator to invent something intelligent. > See for example pages of a dictionary glued to the wall or on canvas, to > have an idea. Or like Andrew's, a simple, but not too logical, statement. > > > On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 8:15 PM, Halvard Johnson wrote: > >> Lynda and I heard Andrews "read" at the Ear Inn in NYC a few years back, >> and I must say >> the "reading" was remarkable. He stood before a small group of listeners >> "reading" from a sheaf >> of papers he held in his hand. The language flow was strongly rhythmical >> (though not >> necessarily metrical) and it was really quite amazing to hear bits and >> pieces of the chatter >> in the bar behind him working their way into the reading. >> >> Hal >> >> >> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:07 PM, Bob Grumman wrote: >> >>> Michael Snider wrote: >>> >>>> Not hostile to you, Bob, but to the kind of "artist" who thinks other >>>> people must reach out to them ? who feel entitled to the time and money of >>>> other people simply because they think themselves creative, or worse, think >>>> they can successfully pose as creative. >>>> >>> Didn't take it personally, Michael, just wondering why you think Andrews >>> is that sort of "artist?" He's part of the language poetry crew that I've >>> been antagonistic to, on and off, for years. because I think they've not >>> helped their brother and sister otherstreamersperimentalists in visual >>> poetry as much as I feel they ought to have (from positions of much greater >>> influence than any of my crew have gotten). But I like some of the things >>> he's done, and met him a few years ago--attending one of my crew's >>> exhibitions--and he seemed affable and supportive. I didn't immediately >>> take to this text of his--because it indeed doesn't seem like much, and >>> because it appeared in the Paris Review, for me another Enemy of Poetry. >>> And I still have a bias against anything a language poet does. But I have >>> to say the thing now appeals to me quite a lot. >>> >>> >>> --Bob >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> New-Poetry mailing list >>> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> >> Halvard Johnson >> ================ >> halvard@gmail.com >> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html >> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com >> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com >> http://www.hamiltonstone.org >> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > > -- > Anny Ballardini > http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome > http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html > I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing > star! > > -- Halvard Johnson ================ halvard@gmail.com http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090220/748e72f7/attachment.html From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 21 06:51:07 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hal Sirowitz on the Writer's Almanac Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902210351x58ba50dcqa853e7dcfaa18dae@mail.gmail.com> Doesn't Matter What It Looks Like by Hal Sirowitz "When you have blown your nose, you should not open your handkerchief and inspect it, as though pearls or rubies had dropped out of your skull." *The Book of Manners* (1958) After you have blown your nose, Father said, it's not polite to look inside your handkerchief to see what it looks like. You're not a doctor. What's more important is getting the handkerchief back into your pocket without staining your pants. There are some things it's better not to look at. It should be left to your imagination, but if you have a strong desire to look you can always find pictures of it in a medical book. "Doesn't Matter What It Looks Like" by Hal Sirowitz, from *Father Said*. (c) Soft Skull Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090221/30a87424/attachment.html From Opus40-01 at opus40.org Sat Feb 21 10:01:48 2009 From: Opus40-01 at opus40.org (TheOldMole) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] "54 Poets Walk Into a Bar" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <49A0175C.202@opus40.org> Funny stuff, David. David Graham wrote: > Including yours truly. The Humor Issue of Poemeleon, just appeared: > > http://www.poemeleon.org/david-graham2 > > Also including Charles Harper Webb, Martha Silano, Roy Jacobstein, > Marilyn Taylor, Jessy Randall, and Sherman Alexie, among the 54. . . . > > > > ======================================== > David Graham > grahamd@ripon.edu > > Home Page: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz > > Poetry Library: > http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html > ========================================== > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to order your copy of FILM NOIR! http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2712239 From anny.ballardini at gmail.com Sat Feb 21 11:49:26 2009 From: anny.ballardini at gmail.com (Anny Ballardini) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] "54 Poets Walk Into a Bar" In-Reply-To: <6768ac830902201054x31f91d25n35588d737d90641b@mail.gmail.com> References: <6768ac830902201054x31f91d25n35588d737d90641b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4b65c2d70902210849y1571b9e5m2b22bcf4b6b21ffd@mail.gmail.com> The same from here and Happy Birthday to Michael Snider!!! Cheers, Anny On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 7:54 PM, Michael Snider wrote: > Congratulations, David, and nice work, especially your address to Uncle > Walt. > > On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:16 PM, David Graham wrote: > >> Including yours truly. The Humor Issue of Poemeleon, just appeared: >> http://www.poemeleon.org/david-graham2 >> >> Also including Charles Harper Webb, Martha Silano, Roy Jacobstein, Marilyn >> Taylor, Jessy Randall, and Sherman Alexie, among the 54. . . . >> >> >> >> ======================================== >> David Graham >> grahamd@ripon.edu >> >> Home Page: >> http://web.mac.com/drjazz >> >> Poetry Library: >> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html >> ========================================== >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> New-Poetry mailing list >> New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu >> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- Anny Ballardini http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/ http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090221/38ae81e3/attachment.html From mandolin at mikesnider.org Sat Feb 21 14:24:56 2009 From: mandolin at mikesnider.org (Michael Snider) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] "54 Poets Walk Into a Bar" In-Reply-To: <4b65c2d70902210849y1571b9e5m2b22bcf4b6b21ffd@mail.gmail.com> References: <6768ac830902201054x31f91d25n35588d737d90641b@mail.gmail.com> <4b65c2d70902210849y1571b9e5m2b22bcf4b6b21ffd@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6768ac830902211124w32617017jc8afa8fef1265346@mail.gmail.com> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Anny Ballardini wrote: > The same from here and Happy Birthday to Michael Snider!!! > Cheers, > > Anny Why, thank you, Any! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090221/c5fad597/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Sat Feb 21 16:46:22 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] very short poems Message-ID: <8CB6284F8CE7379-1550-B0C@FWM-M30.sysops.aol.com> Posted this short one to my blog today...because it's a humble ars poetica... Winter View ? If this were a rooftop covered with snow, these words would be bird tracks instead of a poem. ? ? ?William Michaelian, Winter Poems (Cosmopsis Books, 2007) Here's his blog... http://recently-banned-literature.blogspot.com/ -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090221/2a26ee64/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Sat Feb 21 18:54:44 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] O'Hara and the Mad Men Message-ID: <8CB6296E7770091-FDC-6B9@WEBMAIL-MZ10.sysops.aol.com> http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article5765938.ece At the conclusion of the opening episode of Mad Men?s second season, the show?s protagonist, Don Draper, buys a book of poetry after being told by a hipster in a Greenwich Village bar that he is incapable of appreciating the writer?s work. The book is Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O?Hara. Draper reads it later that night in his suburban home, and he is captivated by a haunting stanza from the poem Mayakovsky: Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. After inscribing the book with the simple message ?Made me think of you?, the ad man slips out of the house to post it to a mystery recipient, adding yet another layer to this most complicated of television heroes. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090221/879696ed/attachment.html From jforjames at aol.com Sat Feb 21 18:59:52 2009 From: jforjames at aol.com (jforjames@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Back When I Was Normal Message-ID: <8CB62979F357B8B-FDC-6E3@WEBMAIL-MZ10.sysops.aol.com> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/02/20/ST2009022003192.html Back When I Was Normal Mental illness robbed Roger Fogelman of a bright future as a poet. Was it too late to redeem his legacy? By Marla Brown Fogelman Sunday, February 22, 2009; Page W16 In 1961, a University of Virginia graduate student named Roger Fogelman, who had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, was awarded an Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize. His work appeared in the Academy's 1960-1966 anthology along with that of Louise Gl?ck , who would go on to become the 2003-2004 U.S. poet laureate. Roger did not become a poet laureate, but he did become my brother-in-law. As his caregiver Maureen opens the apartment door on this late summer day in 2008, I see that my brother-in-law, Roger, former award-winning poet and current shut-in, is planted on a couch by a wall. Wearing a gray T-shirt and plaid pajama-like pants, he looks heavier than I've ever seen him, but his gray hair looks freshly washed and combed. "I'm doomed," he says in greeting. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090221/c6e0e5ef/attachment.html From grahamd at ripon.edu Sat Feb 21 19:45:49 2009 From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Few remember Elizabeth Alexander... Message-ID: Remember the inaugural poem? Few apparently do By HILLEL ITALIE ? 1 day ago NEW YORK (AP) ? Millions watched Elizabeth Alexander read a poem last month at President Barack Obama's inauguration. But few, so far, have wanted to buy it. Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 75 percent of sales, says Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration" has sold just 6,000 copies so far. The poem was published Feb. 6 as a paperback by Graywolf Press with an announced first printing of 100,000 copies. The inaugural reading by Alexander, a highly regarded poet, apparently lacked the spark of predecessor Maya Angelou, whose "On the Pulse of the Morning" ? read at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inaugural ? became a million seller. Alexander was just the fourth inaugural poet, following Robert Frost, Angelou and Miller Williams. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jz4U- PUaFDsQcxNy_q8WmyujGrhgD96FCNI00 ======================================== David Graham grahamd@ripon.edu Home Page: http://web.mac.com/drjazz Poetry Library: http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html ========================================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090221/3425262e/attachment.html From AlMaginnes at aol.com Sat Feb 21 20:09:53 2009 From: AlMaginnes at aol.com (AlMaginnes@aol.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Few remember Elizabeth Alexander... Message-ID: Too bad. Alexander's poem was a hell of a lot better than Angelou's And Miller WIlliams' poem was better than either of theirs. **************Need a job? Find an employment agency near you. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000003) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090221/270a0ae2/attachment.html From jeff.newberry at gmail.com Sat Feb 21 22:06:02 2009 From: jeff.newberry at gmail.com (Jeff Newberry) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Few remember Elizabeth Alexander... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <731bb17a0902211906q34536f1fr809e61bc8d14f731@mail.gmail.com> Hear, hear! (Or is that "Here, here?" I never can remember. . . ) Whatever the case, I agree. Best, Jeff Newberry On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 8:09 PM, wrote: > Too bad. Alexander's poem was a hell of a lot better than Angelou's And > Miller WIlliams' poem was better than either of theirs. > > ------------------------------ > Need a job? Find an employment agency near you > . > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > -- You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experience, from which each according to his own immediate and peculiar needs may drawn his own conclusion. --W.H. Auden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090221/8152c4ea/attachment.html From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Feb 22 00:57:36 2009 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1@cs.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:21 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] Few remember Elizabeth Alexander... Message-ID: In a message dated 2/21/2009 7:10:20 PM Central Standard Time, AlMaginnes@aol.com writes: > > > Too bad. Alexander's poem was a hell of a lot better than Angelou's And > Miller WIlliams' poem was better than either of theirs. > I agree, but none of them was really very good. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090222/c2cb54e3/attachment.html From locriansky at yahoo.com Sun Feb 22 04:25:03 2009 From: locriansky at yahoo.com (locriansky@yahoo.com) Date: Mon Aug 3 14:50:22 2009 Subject: [New-Poetry] maths and poetry have a special relationship References: <8CB602B75D9D026-14C4-1042@WEBMAIL-MZ27.sysops.aol.com><4b65c2d70902190944y568f117eua942d3a3ec1b1c17@mail.gmail.com>< 437b1e3a0902190955r7b632c83w4702bd3275d18e53@mail.gmail.com><499DB791.8010701@nut-n-but.ne