Live Nude Poems

I am intimidated by poetry criticism because I've spent most of my adult life reading fiction and sometimes writing about fiction. As I age, I've been reading much more poetry and much more poetry criticism, which, given my relative lack of experience with the forms, has left me formulating (what seem to me to be) dumb questions, and trying like mad to find answers that make sense. One of the things I've thought about consistently is the role gender and sex play in my reading and in the litworld at large. Nearly all of my favorite poets are women (my favorite fiction writers are almost exclusively male), usually somewhat combative as regards sexual and gender roles, and aggressively intellectual (and is that a complex idea?? that the women I reference would pillory me for as merely another example of sexism?? like, why can't women be aggressive in the same way that men seem so comfortable with without being labelled as shrill or dykey or, well, you get the point? at...

I haven't had a great deal of time lately to surf for new poetry 'stuff,' though it's one of my favorite websurfing pastimes, but I did find a new poetry press doing cool things recently. A group of friends got together and created a press for the purposes of both publishing and self-publishing, not uncommon these days, and probably the way the small press poetry ought to work, optimally. Besides being a great idea , Birds LLC  began with a near-nuclear bang, as far as I'm concerned, as their first two books are by folks I greatly admire: Chris Tonelli and Elisa Gabbert . I'll let the interview with Chris stand in for most of what I'd like to say on the topic. Or not. If you want to publish poems, fuck the contest circuit, stop slavering at the asses of the poets around, under, below and above you , and start a small press. There can never be too many. Your poems will find readers, though not without a lot of work on your part, but you'll end up w...

Oh no, the gargoyle sez, not dis too? Elisa Gabbert brought this to my attention first, with a list of tricks (many/some/all) poets use in writing their masterpieces. At first I thought it was funny, then I looked in my poems folder. Urgh. Most of these quoted gaffes are actually pretty usable, I think, if you know what you're doing, which is after all how it's done: if you can get away with it, it works. Full list at HTMLGiant . Be sure to check it out, but in case you don't, here's a few to strop your razor with. Mike Young is writing-- Well, I thought that sounded like a terrific idea. So here it is, our stab at cataloging 41 popular moves in “contemporary poetry,” an exercise that’s fraught with peril, what with the competing definitions, camps, roles, and processes of “contemporary poetry,” the nebulousness of calling something a “move,” the inevitable non-definitiveness of such a list, and so on, but hey: dancing is fraught with peril too, and no one’s mana...