Live Nude Poems

I heard about this on a poetry listserv from one his close friends.  It doesn't seem to have hit the mainstream media yet. This is a fairly recent article  by John Penner celebrating the collected poems. It's a sad damned day for me. BERKELEY — In a spacious, humane skilled- nursing  home, a man sits with his elderly neighbors arrayed in their wheelchairs as  Louis Armstrong  and  Ella Fitzgerald  sing. Several guests arrive to see the man, and after the last note of "Cheek to Cheek," one of them takes up a microphone and reads a poem. The reader, startled by a resident's pained moans of distress, stumbles over a word or two of "Looking at Pittsburgh From Paris." He finishes, and the man brightens in his chair and points at his heart, mouthing to a visitor holding his arm, "Me?" Yes, Jack Gilbert. That's yours. The poet is 87 and small in his wheelchair, mostly unable to talk, his brain diminished by disease. He is dying. But as...

Eggs from Anywhere The codicil to my third will (the official one) reads: One, don't give nothing to anybody. Take the money in cash and throw it under the mud-packed wheels of your car in the bumfuckingest place you can find. If you can find a place that was on reality TV, cool. Two, don't eat the nachos from Chili's or the eggs from anywhere; they are related in that ingestion might kill a weak woman or a tweaker man. I wish the birds would not twitter in my ear when I make decisions. It's fucked up enough in here. I wish for you, number three, the magic number, that all the days of your life you will find roses in the tassels of your horse's mane billowing out into better metaphor and a landslide of clean fill that temblors down the back roads of the choked creeks that yield orange rocks, no fish but the pretty stones stained with runoff and the greasy pizza pieces left over by a million students who sit on the banks ...

Will disappear in a few days: *poof*

This is what's going to occupy some of my time for the next couple months. Over 30K people are enrolled in this free class. Check it out. https://class.coursera.org/modernpoetry/class/index

Thanks to Anny Ballardini , for bringing this to my attention. Dead-tree publishing has been in a quiet, lumbering crisis for many years now. Publishers are understandably confused over their role in a world that exchanges information freely and is stocked with e-book readers and high-tech print-on-demand services provided by some of the largest book sellers in the world. Writers are beginning to challenge the notion that a traditional publishing house is some beneficent entity that must be courted and deferred to. Even the idea of the publishing house, a disjointed amalgam of money lender, talent scout, editor, manager, publicist, ad company and printer, seems challengeable now in a way that would have seemed inconceivable twenty years ago. But nowhere is the entrenched hold the traditional publisher deeper and more enduring than the field of poetry. While ersatz fan-fiction tops the best-seller lists for mass-market paperbacks, poetry, even in a crass or bastardized form, is l...

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...

via Ron Silliman and Tom Clark : I’ve heard people argue that there’s an awful kind of poem called an MFA poem, and usually these people who hate MFA poems have never earned an MFA, so the MFA poets argue vehemently in defense of their craft and their MFAs, and I, an MFA poet try to agree and say,  I’m on the MFA’s team. We’re right and they’re wrong. Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. But the truth is, well, there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree from a low-res program in the Northeast.  And I guess I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem, though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well (though this is one of them, or is trying to be), but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems, which I despise, not because the poems are bad but because I was taught how to write them by this asshole professor (he was such a creep) who was abusive to women, mostly,...