Curative Activity

My whole intellectual life as I've started to emerge from the misty darkness of autism has been an adventure in beauty housed in form and structure. My most favorite curative activity was listening to my father read Shakespeare and ask me to describe the symbols, poetic devices and structures which make the plays work, so I came to ModPo comfortable with close reading. I get my parents to take me to the Uffizi so I can study Botticelli, my music theory teacher shows me how Mozart is structured, so it is not surprising that until I took your class I thought poetry was words stuffed into forms. 

-from Jacket2

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The language of absence, privation, nothingness has scientific, moral and emotional force. As dark is an absence of light energy, not an entity in itself, death too is an absence rather than a force or a being. That conviction underlies the statement that Love's alchemical limbec turned the leaden soul, with its “dull privations and lean emptiness” into the golden sense of being. The theology and science, the terms of nothing and being, absence and presence—it's all a way for the poet to sharpen the understanding of what he lacks, and what he loves. The poem's athletic feats of wit may entertain readers, or disconcert them, but it has a purpose beyond rhetoric: it is an act of mourning ... and, maybe, an act of self-heartening, too.

-Robert Pinsky on John Donne at Slate

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Who has not fantasized about the books they would write if only the right conditions could be found! I have carried around just such a dream, sparked by a weekend alone in an austere mountain cabin in the Austrian Alps when I was a boy. Rumination was unstoppable, and poetry just poured out.

-David Wood in the New York Times

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Anthemic.

This Is You

Hey, I think I finished my second manuscript. In this context, "I think" means that there are enough pages of poetry for a book, but that aforementioned pages aren't yet good enough. Ya dig?

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These “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) have exploded on the American educational scene. The Washington Post dubbed them “elite education for the masses,” with universities like Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton offering free classes. Coursera, the for-profit company that offered Filreis’s poetry class among many others, is less than a year old and counts more than 1.7 million as students. Many of the courses offer certificates of completion, so while a degree from these schools may still cost upward of $100,000, you can theoretically—and that’s a big “theoretically”—get the education for nothing.

--Elliot Holt at The Poetry Foundation


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This is you. You want to own something that means something to you. The pleasure of an original thing is that, like anything you truly love, it attaches itself to the original part of you and builds it like a muscle, makes you feel more like you. It also connects you to someone else, the artist—but you don't have to tend that relationship, it's just there, simple, pure. You never have to meet the artist if you don't want to, but if you want to, you can ask the artist all about this thing you now have, and you will find that the artist also wants to hear what you see in it, and eventually you will both agree that neither of you really penetrates what the thing fully is, which is maybe why both of you love it so much. Let's say you have a couple more criteria: Maybe you would prefer art by someone local, someone who does not have a leg up in the 1 percent game of the international art world. And: You do not have money to burn.

-Jen Graves at The Stranger

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The people who fret over the Future of the Book talk about the loss of the tactile, of the physical act of holding the book. Me, the only thing I worry about is no longer having used books.

-Michelle Dean at The Rumpus

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Marjorie Perloff’s essay “Poetry on the Brink” in the May/June 2012 issue rekindled conversation about innovation and canonization in contemporary poetry. To continue and extend the discussion, we cast a wide net and invited 18 poets to address the following question: what is the most significant, troubling, relevant, recalcitrant, misunderstood, or egregious set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today, and, by extension, what are the limits of binary thinking about poetry? Their responses range from whimsy to diatribe, with meditation, appraisal, tangent, touchstone, anecdote, drollery, confection, wit, and argument in between.

-Opposing Terms: A Symposium on the Poetic Limits of Binary Thinking at Boston Review (featuring Ange Mlinko, Samuel Amadon, Matthew Zapruder, Annie Finch, Noah Eli Gordon, and many other excellent voices).

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Music for a rainy Thursday here in the American Northwest.

Thanksgiving Prayer

Thanksgiving Prayer, 2012

It is the day we give thanks

to be at a full table, and outside

the Olympics teeth the dusking

horizon. Here we’re surrounded

by certainty in the midst of the uncertain:

for mountains will not move even

for superstorms or homelands

in upheaval: the incontrovertible danger

of stepping outside: the losses we have

or haven’t named to one another.

But here: there is a richness.

There is a feeling of something complete:

meats waiting to loose the juices

that have been simmering in smoke,

lasagna and stuffings and casseroles

that are each a small history

of ourselves. Let us be grateful in our faith

that what is unseen is not unheard:

that families, ours and others,

extend beyond bloodlines, that we have arrived

here, where recipes steam

from memory at a place beyond

our griefs. Let us remember

that while we may be hundreds

of miles from the places we were born,

we are not far from home.

Serious Romantic

Jack Gilbert, a poet whose frank, forthright, emotionally fraught works observed the grand universal realities of love and death from a perspective off the literary grid, died on Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 87.

-obit. from the New York Times

Gilbert’s work embraces what most poets have been trying for decades to subvert. A self-proclaimed “serious romantic,” Gilbert writes poems full of feeling, working to cultivate “something that matters to the heart,” a romantic notion approached these days with a strong inoculation of irony, if at all. While many poets working with such hot materials might seek a mitigating factor when casting them into verse — fragmentation and abstraction are two modes currently in fashion — Gilbert courts danger by pursuing a far more traditional approach. Crystalline imagery, direct speech, the language of place and the self are hallmarks of Gilbert’s style from his first poem to his final book.

-Jeremy Bass at Los Angeles Review of Books 

Later, I was living in the East Village and this one night there was pounding on the door and there was Cleve standing in the hall. He was agitated and said, They’re looking all over for you. I asked who, and he explained that somebody wanted to give me the Yale prize. I didn’t know what to do, how to express it. I took him out with my two friends and we had milkshakes. 

-Jack Gilbert's "Art of Poetry" interview with The Paris Review

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Two poems:

"Pachyderm" by Sherman Alexie

"My Father's Soul Departing" by David Wojahn


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Life in the Internet age has undoubtedly helped a certain ironic sensibility to flourish. An ethos can be disseminated quickly and widely through this medium. Our incapacity to deal with the things at hand is evident in our use of, and increasing reliance on, digital technology. Prioritizing what is remote over what is immediate, the virtual over the actual, we are absorbed in the public and private sphere by the little devices that take us elsewhere.

-Op-Ed by Christy Wampole in the New York Times


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This flattened me:

However Falteringly

The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves.

-The Editors of The New Yorker endorse Barack Obama. It's worth reading the whole essay as it, to my eye, makes a compelling case.

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I want to ask if you will join me in a small, inexpensive, but possibly life-altering experiment. Over the next thirty days, let’s all buy a favorite book of poems and send it to someone who doesn’t usually read poems. This could be a family member, friend, your local representative, whomever! I believe poetry enriches our lives and our hearts. I believe that by sharing poetry with others we are taking part in humanizing our culture.

So that we may all share in the experience, you can tweet the book title you mail and whom you are sending it to with the #shareapoem hashtag.


-Matthew Dickman has good ideas.


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We no longer have the luxury of disbelief, of being able to believe some ideas or practices are too strange to be true. We no longer have the luxury of curiosity, of wondering what life might be like for someone different. We no longer have the luxury of not being able to ever truly know.

I miss such luxuries.

I miss the quiet longing of considering everything I cannot possibly know.

-Roxane Gay at The Rumpus

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Red-Handed Babbling

Johnson doesn’t give us a blow by blow account of the end of that marriage or of the end of his mother’s life; rather he invites us into the emotional landscape of a family’s collapse. The result of this technique is that we are moved along with the poet. He doesn’t dictate to us what he felt; he invites us along for the emotional ride.


-Benjamin Myers discusses four of his favorite titles from NYQ Books. 

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The author of some of the spookiest, darkest songs in the American folk canon seemed jolly on this late-August day. Even if he was accompanied by a reporter, generally not his favorite species of human, the motion soothed him. “I’ve always been better moving than I am standing still,” he said.

-Wonderful feature on Neil Young in New York Times Magazine


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Here’s what happened. In 2005 my copyeditor at Harcourt, David Hough, had to subcontract out Workshirts for Madmen to an eighty-five year old woman who lived in New York City. She kept changing sentences like “I only want to dig a hole and sit down in it” to “I want only to dig a hole…” I wrote “Stet” in the margin. She kept changing these sentences, and I kept writing “Stet.” Somewhere along the line she wrote “Do you people in the South not know this rule of grammar?” When she changed it the next time, I wrote “I want only to kill you.”

-George Singleton interviewed by Steve Almond at The Rumpus

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Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music. Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Don’t allow ‘influence’ to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of ‘dove-gray’ hills, or else it was ‘pearl-pale,’ I can not remember. Use either no ornament or good ornament.

-'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste' by Ezra Pound

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Sort of obsessed with this right now.

Ignorance and Wonder

The One Pause Poetry mp3 Project is a national digital resource for teachers, students, readers, and listeners. Each poet is asked to record and submit three mp3 files to the site: one poem of his or her own, one by another poet, and one poem for kids.

If you're not familiar with One Pause Poetry, you should check out the website. You'll find excellent recordings of Charles Jensen, Malena Morling, Alfred Corn, Mark Cox, Keetje Kuipers, and many others. They're spreading and celebrating poetry in some truly wonderful ways. The link above takes you to my recording, which includes my poem "After the Ark," A.R. Ammons' wild and whirling "Coon Song," and Shel Silverstein's extra-sticky "Peanut Butter Sandwich."

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What I was getting at was the most important thing: originality, which might also be construed as character. We can't judge Rilke by the standards of Neruda. The greatest poets write from a necessity that forms style and carries from book to book, but their new poems fail to be the old poems. The poems that I'm writing now are to a large degree fictive and in third person, so I am working out of ignorance and wonder, and I hope to always do that.

-An interview with Rodney Jones at Poetry Daily

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In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and reread the authors I most loved. I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue. And as I wrote, I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls “putting every word on trial for its life”: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma and putting the comma back in.

-Francince Prose at The Atlantic

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Sometimes, when I am feeling high-strung or cross-eyed about something, I call Jess Walter. Forget, for a moment, that he drives a sports car and shops at the GAP: I like to think of him as a literary Gandalf, holed up in a cave in Spokane, wearing ragged gray robes and leaning on a warped staff. I trust him. Because he’s good-hearted. Because he works hard and writes enviously well. Because we grew up in similar circumstances. Because he has carved out a life for himself as a full-time writer. And because, over the past few years, he’s become a pal who knows how to share a whiskey and tell filthy stories and give good wizardly advice. On almost every occasion I have asked Jess what he thinks, his response has been, “Don’t be in such a rush.”

-Benjamin Percy at The Rumpus

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