thought of each other, it seems--on superficial reading--that [Philip] Larkin had no doubt about what eternal truth their effigies represented. "What will survive of us is love." But read the verse again. "Time has transfigured them into untruth." What will survive of us will not be love.
[Charles] Bernstein demonstrates how a poem that claims to be "purely emotional" is not, how conventional poems written in the mode of the confessional lyric may purport to "fully [express] / the feelings of the / author," but may in fact conceal the writer's emotions just as effectively as an irreverent avant-garde poet steeped in poststructural theories of authorial effacement.
but I don't think the powerful go to Barnes and Noble and ask for my book. . . . 
who used "I" like a scalpel. With it he cut the outer dermis of each poem, then wiped the tool clean and put it away after every incision. 
is shared by Richard M. Berlin in his poem "First Night on Call, Coronary Care Unit." He likens the experience to ". . . driving a knife-edge/mountain ridge at midnight,/no lines, no guard rails,// . . . I don't know who will die tonight, / . . . but I grip the wheel tight,//knuckles lit white by high beams,/my own heart pounding . . ."
I can't fathom it, and that ecstasy so unearthly that I can't answer it with the ordinary answers. I know I am involved utterly and entirely in what is happening, and I know that more depends on it than just life . . . Because it's hard to breathe, Freda, and there is nothing that can save today, darling, you not being here." [--Alun Lewis to Freda Aykroyd]
also serves another function: by demonstrating his education and familiarity with poetic traditions, the poet is validating his cause; he is not an automaton to be worked until he drops, but a thinking, feeling man.
to people who would not normally read poetry," [Julia] Tilley says. "I look for ways to get the words off the page and out into the general population. The Treasure Trove Project dispenses a poem for a quarter out of a bubble gum machine."
is titled "Solitude" from which come the oft-quoted lines, "Laugh, and the world laughs with you;/Weep, and you weep alone." The poem consists of three rimed eight-line stanzas. The poem continues to dramatize that same theme: that the positive attracts while the negative repels: "For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,/But has trouble enough of its own."
her original bite mark, it is an intensely intimate moment; the food is shared--tramp's saliva meets poet's saliva by buffalo mozzarella proxy. It is a union of sorts, and this idea is emphasised by the use of the words "nuzzle" and "caress" as the tramp eats what the poet has dropped.
by Ann Hudson, from The Armillary Sphere. © Ohio University Press.
from his or her experience is through the use of unique, specific and particular detail. This poem by Rick Snyder thrives on such details. It's not just baseball caps, it's Tasmanian Devil caps; it's not just music on the intercom, it's James Taylor. And Snyder's poem also caught my interest with the humor of its flat, sardonic tone.
A Working Girl Can't Win (1998), won readers by approaching the material indicated by its title with directness, modesty and unshowy wit. Those qualities also mark her new collection, The Second Child. This time the material includes parenthood and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 with their aftermath.
the award seems especially fitting for a Cuban poet. It comes, however, at a somber time for [Fina] García [Marruz], who at age 84, is dealing with sickness among much of her family, including her husband. She said that her husband, a poet himself, has been so happy since hearing about the award that his pain has abated.
with rust crumble as far
selections from Tired Parties
Poetry by
in 2003, the first prize of £2,000 was won by "The Long Way Home" by Stephen Knight, of Swansea.
who lived in a room by herself, fell out of a 10th-floor window in Sanford Hall, Bland said.
has died of cancer at the age of 62.
known to many as the poet priest, lived his life in faith, devoted to God and to humanity.
two young artists--blind musician and painter Remigijus Audiejaitis and poet Mantas Gimzauskas. Both died after jumping from the sixth floor in an attempt to escape the blaze.
and former English Department Chairman M. Enamul Karim died recently at age 72.
and loved poetry. 
three years wondering when his son [Robert Clayton "R.C." Pruett], who loved white tigers and writing poems, would ever come home.
in building the Arnold Center, also helped build more than 100 homes in Midland, and owned and operated the Executive House Motel, the Pickle Barrel Restaurant and Camelot Dinner Theater. 
a poem titled "Where I'm From" last year while working on his writing skills in a program at the southwest Detroit agency.
a Lutheran church leader best known as the president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, died Tuesday following a long illness. 
It is a week of headlining news, and connections. Last week, the poetry world was stunned by the bombing on Mutanabi Street. This week the mourning settles in. Our second story covers the aftermath. Robert Pinsky in Great Regulars, in his Poet's Choice column in The Washington Post, covers this through poetry. Nicely done. And Poetic Obituaries links to news of just one of the deaths: Mohammed Hayawi, a bookseller, himself with a Post connection.
Another headliner could be the opening tomorrow of the StAnza Poetry Festival in Scotland surely. I selected the story on George Szirtes from The Scotsman for News at Eleven, but they have more if you click around their online articles. In fact, their Poem of the Week, linked from Great Regulars, is by Jenny Joseph who will be there.
A couple more connections made within Great Regulars. Our friend David Kirby writes for the New York Times about Brad Leithauser, himself a Great Regular of ours. And, one more to add, Garrison Keillor brings us a Ted Kooser poem, who also has a link this week out of that section.
And she looked out of the window and she said, "but it can't be. Sylvia Plath committed suicide and your mother is walking across the forecourt with your father." [My father and stepmother] had just dropped me off. And I remember sitting on the bed, so shocked. I didn't really believe her.
mounting the wreckage of what was once the popular Al-Shabanda cafe to recite a poem entitled "Words, words, words."
with an economy of language, concealing a dense terrain of imagery and meaning. In this universe, the dead are not ghosts, but fully fleshed--staving off the soldiers, marching in the battlefield, struggling in the streets, and inspiring new generations. Read these and you'll see what I mean: 
the negation that lives beneath the yes; the fierce chilly gust of silence that lies at the core of music, the hard precision of the skull beneath the lover's face. The cold little metallic bit of winter in the mouth. One is not complete, it seems, without a taste of that darkness; the self lacks gravity without the downward pull of the void, the barren ground, the empty field from which being springs." [Mark Doty]
the way I wrote, it changed my life. I think very early on in our development we form a notion of reality: what is a street, what is a house, what is a city, and these very early maps are laid down in our minds. When I went back to Budapest for the first time I could feel the old map rising through the new map. It was disorientating, almost hallucinatory." [--George Szirtes]
is asked, "Had a good nap?" He answers, "Better than that:/I sprang a tale of mystery and imagination." That use of the word "sprang" is very Morganesque--an unexpected word but one that gives you a slight jolt and question--and, typically, not negative.
who is allowed to visit him: "All political prisoners must be freed and the democratic parliament must meet. We must not abandon these demands."
of the significance of the work when he was in college. It was then that he read [William Carlos] Williams, and it dawned on him the work hanging in the hallway of his parent's house was by Williams.
owes him a huge debt; I certainly do. The bardic caste of poetry that existed, especially at the end of the [Celtic revival of the late 19th century], would have made it very difficult for you to go into your kitchen and think "This can be the site for a poem." If you were to think that, it would be Kavanagh who let you think that. [--Eavan Boland]
however, it is a Pear Belle-Hélène arriving at your table for dessert. Each ingredient is a delight--crème, poached fruit, ice cream and a small pot of melted chocolate. Each mouthful is a velvety zig of heat lightning moving from tongue to brain. The whole is so much more than the dribblingly delicious sum of its parts, your jaw just has to drop.
If the young man answers: "I have important things I want to say," then he is not a poet. If he answers: "I like hanging around words listening to what they say," then maybe he is going to be a poet.
is the "bottomless mud" that [Siegfried] Sassoon defines, endless war brought on by pompous and incompetent leaders, for whom poetry does well to give one particular sort of salute: satiric condemnation. 
