Prose that encourages us to engage with books of poetry, individual poets, and issues of craft or poetics.
One person’s “Documentary Poetics” may overlap, to a large degree, with another person’s “Poetry of Witness.” Does it matter why? Does it matter how they differ?
May 16 is Denise Levertov Day in Seattle. For a listing of related events, including a choral setting of Levertov’s poem “Making Peace,” visit St. John’s Parish. I’m waiting for the kettle to boil in Denise’s kitchen. It’s mid-November and raining. Out the window, the branches of her unruly pear are outlined against the gray sky. At three-thirty it’s already dusk. I look across neighboring roofs and down to Lake Washington where I can barely distinguish lake water from the black forest rising behind it. I pour boiling water into Denise’s serviceable yellow tea pot wide enough to hold four cups, swirl it around the sides, and dump it into the sink. I put three tablespoons of English Breakfast tea into the pot, refill it with water, and steep until it is black and strong. I set it on a tray next to a sugar bowl, pitcher of milk and a plate of cookies, and carry it all into the living room where Denise is sitting on the couch. Brewing a perfect pot of tea was our …
There will come a time when I fall out of favor with the American marketing machine. My “likes” will have stabilized, even calcified, and my opinions will slump into the armchair of middle age. I will become unswayable and thus unsellable, and would—were I plied with the latest cellular doo-dad—shoo the damn thing from my front lawn. But the ad men will know of my disinterest before I do. One day their targeted commercials will dissolve into white noise, retuned for the young couple who bought the house down the street. I look forward to that moment more than I ought to and practice a Ludditism that will speed it along. Today, however, is a day like any other. Today is the day I hear the late Robin Williams read Walt Whitman while some iPad users chase tornadoes, photograph waterfalls, and make art. It is the latest and slickest ad from Apple, their pitch for the new iPad Air (retail: $499), and I can’t turn away.
On the chair next to my packed suitcase the books are teetering in their tower. I know they cannot all go along, but at the moment I cannot choose between them because each one is my favorite child. In the days before departure, their spines stack up, swap out, rearrange themselves like parakeets startling off a branch and settling back down.
A photo essay after the annual AWP conference (2015).
By Jack Chelgren | Special Projects Intern and Contributing Writer As a word is mostly connotation,  matter is mostly aura?  Halo? (The same loneliness that separates me  from what I call “the world.”) — Rae Armantrout, “A Resemblance” I. It’s afternoon not long ago. I’m listening to music in my apartment, and “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” the closer from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, comes on. The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68 And he told me, “All romantics meet the same fate someday: Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café.”
In June 2014, poet Mathias Svalina promises to operate a Dream Delivery Service. “I will write the dreams, without consultation with the dreamer, & deliver them daily,” Svalina writes. “Each dream is unique to the dreamer/subscriber.” Subscriptions cost $40 if you live within three miles of Svalina’s house, $55 for everyone else. Dream Delivery Service as social media. * Svalina is an editor with Octopus Books. A while ago, another Octopus editor, Zachary Schomburg, started posting portraits of his friends on his blog, The Lovely Arc. He’d honor each as “Person of the Week” and write a brief profile. “Jesse got Clyde Drexler’s autograph three times between fifth and seventh grade,” Schomburg wrote. “He went to a Waldorf school from kindergarten through third grade, so he learned to knit, crochet, paint with watercolor, sculpt beeswax, play the recorder, and count in German before he learned arithmetic.” “Person of the Week” as social media. * Discussions of social media and poetry often focus on poetry’s absorption of—or reduction to—familiar virtual modes.
These days, it’s all big data all the time. Over the past few months, I’ve seen headlines ranging from “Big Data or Big Brother?” to “Big Data’s Little Brother” to “Big Data at the Oscars.” Just today, I was solicited for a webinar entitled “Big Data is a Big Deal!”(exclamation point theirs). As Duke psychologist and behavioral economist Don Ariely recently quipped on his Facebook page: “Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.” But the big data debate is not entirely made up of cutesy wordplay. Ever since Edward Snowden first started leaking information about the massive U.S. government spying operation, Americans—for the first time in over a decade—started kicking up some real, honest-to-goodness dust about whether the government can do whatever it pleases if it claims to be protecting us from terrorists. And then there’s the “creepy” index that seems to be the new—if somewhat ephemeral—standard for just how far the …
Her work is agile and present, never miserable, lonely, oracular, or visionary, but even in her essay-precise oratory she acknowledges the counter-poetry, listens to it (albeit with a coldness, a Chekhovian coldness that brings me closer as a reader).
By Scott Condon | Contributing Writer The title of Rae Armantrout’s poem “Thrown” immediately brings to mind philosopher Martin Heidegger’s notion that human life is thrown into the world. This concept plays a key role in his book Being and Time, and I’ll return to Heidegger a little later. But I’d like to begin by looking at the poem through the lens of James Longenbach’s essay “Poetry Thinking,” focusing in particular on a couple of passages that address the way Shakespeare’s characters speak their thoughts.
