Recent Fiction
"All the Summers Ahead" | Five Chapters
"Barnegat Bay" | The Good Men Project
"Light at New Latitude" | PANK
"Social Utility" | Keyhole
"Where the Dust Went" | Atticus Review
Christopher Hitchens, in the April 2005 issue of Poetry magazine, on the Poetry Foundation website:
…the first true poet I ever met was James Fenton, who was my contemporary at Oxford. He had won early fame and a prize for a sonnet sequence, but he was forever composing bits of blues, along with parodies and what he sometimes called “rude songs.” This proved to be equally true, as I got older and got to know them, of Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis. A preferred form was the limerick, of which I still have a hundred or so hard-wired into my cortex in case of need (or opportunity). Not all these need be filthy—I have a special reserve of clean ones, some without even a double entendre—but all of them do need to follow a certain simple but exacting scheme. It depresses me beyond measure that most people I meet cannot even recite, much less compose, this gem-like form. Nor can any student in any of my English classes produce a single sonnet of Shakespeare: not even to get themselves laid (the original purpose of the project).
I worry that by phrasing things in this way I may myself be adding to the general coarsening and deafness. Of course my test isn’t the one true test: who can safely say that they have memorized Don Juan, for instance? But then who could you count as reliable who could not manage a stave or two of The Waste Land? The word “Koran” means “the recitation,” and it seems that in Arabic its incantation can induce trance by sheer power and beauty. (Auden was wrong, in his valediction for Yeats, to say that “poetry makes nothing happen.”) At least this restores the idea of a relationship to the theoretically divine, and to the audience. (Auden also wrote of Yeats that “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” which at any rate implies the possibility of a reciprocal relationship between poetry and the reality of which Eliot believed that “human kind” could not bear too much.)
Yet very often, late at night, when I am not tired enough for sleep but too tired to carry on with absorbing or apprehending anything “serious” or new, I will walk over to the appropriate shelf and pull out the tried and the true: the ones that never fail me. And then I will always stay up even later than I had intended. And sometimes, in the morning, I really can “do” the whole of “Spain 1937” or “The Road to Mandalay,” and can appreciate that writing is not just done by hand.
via Boston Review’s Facebook
From the sand cliffs where the math
confronting us takes on the blue
of distance, you can watch for days
and not know what is rolling in.
Something has to be done—here is
a blackberry if you need it—
we have seen between tides so long
that we can time our footprints
to the kelp heaving when the sharp
fins near behind the wave. It’s
everyone I want to lift,
and it’s my feet that are slipping.
via Verabatim Poetry, a paragraph of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights quoted in a LRB review, made into a poem by @BetaRish:
Once she was born
I was never not afraid:
afraid of swimming pools,
high-tension wires,
lye under the sink,
aspirin in the medicine cabinet…
rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides,
strangers who appeared at the door,
unexplained fevers, elevators without
operators and empty hotel corridors.
For the oralists [school of Homeric scholarship], the text of the Iliad is like a wiki: it’s the thing as a whole that matters, not only the kernel of text that someone first put up but also the additions, corrections, and deletions made by others over time. You could say that for these people, “Homer” is the process itself.
- Daniel Mendelsohn, in The New Yorker
Vote for Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees for the 2011 Goodreads Choice Award. It was nominated along with 15 other poetry books.
By happy coincidence, I’d assigned this to my creative writing students this weekend.
in number have contributed
nothing they’re parasites
they’re pure genuine parasites
many of them are bored
trust fund
kids obsessed
with being
something being
somebody meaningless
lives they want to matter
*It struck me reading this [via] that there were rhythms and landings counter to Limbaugh’s intent. I altered only punctuation, line breaks, and spacing.
