Live Nude Poems

Consider this a collection of links, I guess, like the whole interwebs. I find myself periodically fascinated by John Wieners, enough so that I've tracked down a number of his books, most of them long out of print, but well worth the minor searching you'll have to do to find them. He died in 2002, and I much regret that I wasn't 'on the scene' back then because I would have loved to meet and talk with the man for just a few moments. He seems to have had very little regard for his poems toward the end of his life, furiously scribbling on paper bags, receipts, or anything else that came to hand, but his poetic legacy is relatively large--cult figure--and deserves all the attention and prominence it can get and more. Here are a few links to help you get a sense of the man and his work. From Jacket , a biographical and historical piece by Pamela Petro. his Wikipedia entry , which needs updating and deepening, certainly, given how little anyone but his friends knows ...

Down Dirty Word . Check out Corey Mesler's poems for sure, read the others, and if you get time, hit my poems up. They'd appreciate it.

Imtiaz Dharker My wife hipped me to this poet a couple days ago. I've been mulling over the BBC program and her poetry, and feeling parochial. I've reached the point where what I like is what I like, and while I'm pretty open, especially when it comes to poetry, there's nothing like getting a blast of perspective from another culture entirely to make you feel small and wan against the big body that is world poetry. The poet, artist and film-maker Imtiaz Dharker was born a Muslim in Lahore, Pakistan and educated at a school with a strict Protestant ethic in Glasgow where her family moved to when she was a child. When growing up she began to question and challenge the restrictions of her religion, particularly on women, and poetry was a place where she could do this. The titles of some of her poetry collections reflect the issues she grapples with: Postcards from God, I Speak for the Devil, and The Terrorist at my Table. In her recent collection Leaving Fingerprints...

Copyright Mark Mahaney If you don't know his work--and you should-- this article from Wyatt Mason is a good place to begin: One night after Christmas last year, in a dark, well-upholstered restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the American poet Frederick Seidel, an elegant man of 73 with an uncommonly courtly manner, told me a story about poetry’s power to disturb. “It was years ago,” Seidel explained in his measured voice, “in the days when I had an answering machine. I’d left my apartment, briefly, to go outside to get something, and when I came back there was a message. When I played it, there was a woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice sounding deeply aroused, saying: ‘Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going to live. But you’re not. You’re not going to live. You’re not going to live. . . .’ All this extraordinary, suggestive heavy breathing, getting, in the tone of it, more and more intensely sexual, more gru...

I'd like to say the last three weeks of non-posting have been in service to great new ideas and a rush of writing great big hairy poems and other good things. Sadly, not the case. I am reading a lot, and will likely post some reading-related material here in the next week or so. In the meantime, it's not too early to look forward to NaPoWriMo. Check out the new website Maureen Thorson put up for the annual event she began. NaPoWriMo For those of you who don't know, participants in NaPo agree to write a poem every day during April. That's it. Many of us post our drafts to our blogs or other writing communities, just for the heck of it, but many do not. Some of us-- cough --often fall three to four days behind schedule and end up writing a frenzied 5-6 poems in a day or two to catch up. It's fun, is the bottom line, and it's collegial and it's humbling, to see what other poets can come up with in the wee hours. Try it. I'll be posting my drafts to this...