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Showing posts from April, 2010

John Berryman's Dream Song 131

This is one of my favorites from Berryman--I re-read him regularly--and now that NaPo is over (well, I'm giving up, anyway) I'll be back to posting regularly with ephemera and poems. During NaPo I read Berryman and Kim Addonizio and Maurice Manning and Rae Armantrout and Robin Blaser . Blaser's the only one I didn't really get into, but that may be a factor of my dipping into and out of his Collected at random instead of reading through conscientiously as I usually do. Dream Song 131: Come Touch Me Baby In His Waking Dream by John Berryman Come touch me baby in his waking dream disordered Henry murmured. I’ll read you Hegel and that will hurt your mind I can’t remember when you were unkind but I will clear that block, I’ll set you on fire along with our babies to save them up the high & ruined stairs, my growing daughters. I am insane, I think, they say & act so. But then they let me out, and I must save them, High fires will help, at this time, in my a

Poet Audio for People Not At AWP

Self-Portrait: Lynn Behrendt Enjoy the silence. Or break it with some poetry audio. Via Geof Huth , here is Lynn Behrendt reading ' I am an Asshole ' and 'Luminous Flux,' the former of which is very funny and savage and altogether worth your time. Luminous Flux was published in an edition of 20, and so is impossible to find, sadly for you and me. You can find more audio from the Segue Series here .

Daisy Fried on How a Poem Happens: Interesting Uncertainty

I have not found better words than hers to explain how I go about writing a poem. This Q/A is from Brian Brodeur's wonderful blog, How a Poem Happens . Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two? All of my poems are fiction, regardless of whether what “I” says happened really happened.  Ron Silliman  wrote at his blog something like that my poems are in the persona of myself. Which seems right, though I had never thought of it that way explicitly before. I am aware that the appearance of autobiography makes people want to know if it’s true. Obviously I’m willing to exploit that desire in my poems. I think I may be more involved than many poets in using fictional techniques—the kinds of things that novel and short-story writers think about. But fact or fiction, telling what happened is not the point of my poems. I use story, and the word “I,” as strategies toward getting the poems to a place of what I hope is interesting uncertainty. I write poems