I am falling in love with static; that terrible hiss and pop on the radio one hears in-between stations. If you examine the lives so many people who have, through sheer force of ego and alcohol alone, given us so much art that resembles static in shape and sound, it is a wonder why […]
“fear of the bullgod,” ZJC (2006)
So …
… you like new things, I like new things, let us make some new things, lettuce. But where to start? The French Decedent poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote in his letter to Georges Izambard, “je est un autre,” “I is another.” I is an/other, somebody else. […]
“the bullgod,” ZJC (2006)
So …
… yesterday I did something rather interesting. I wrote down bad information and gave a definition to an art movement as I hoped it would be rather than what it really was. When I wrote that Art Brute or “Raw Art” 1 sought to “seek for images and words […]
Since I started blogging in August of 2005 (so long ago) I have read countless posts arguing about what “the new” form of poetry shall be in the American art scene. This is where we apparently are putting our energies; not writing poetry but attempting to second-guess what will be new. We are […]
I took a wonderful Shakespeare course my last semester of graduate school and one of the text we examined was The Tempest. One direction of scholarship that proved extremely interesting was the re-examination of colonial literature not from the point of view of the colonizer but the colonized. In other words, what does […]
Let us look at an actual Baudelaire sonnet and see what makes it different from other sonnets? First, there is the rhyme pattern. ABAB ABAB CCD EED But form in itself is not enough to make this poem Modern. Let us look at the original French. What do you see […]
the new flowers of which I dream
Let us be honest; I do not have enough time in my amazingly short life to study every different type of sonnet ever crafted under the sun … and what a drab life that would be! Spring is here, the windows to this office are open, chirpy-birds are […]
Upon a day Apollo met the Muses and the Graces in sweet sport with earnest Memory, the grave and noble mother of the Muses, was present likewise. Each of the fourteen spoke a line in verse. Apollo began; then each of the nine Muses sang her part; then the three Graces warbled each […]
Pan took his hatchet, went to the forest
to cut a flute. A lewd flute. Mew Gulls mewed
near the shore. Spirits in the trees argued
about mildewed leaves, bedewed disgust. Lust,
for Pan, is the greenest of hewed green oak,
holiest wood. When he makes his flute sing
he calls all who’d be crude, rude […]
I am becoming interested in the Italian (also know as the Petrarch) sonnet lately. I have been writing sonnets, but not classical ones. By that, I am thinking of what Strand and Boland stated:
Few modern poets have been willing to commit themselves to the major, architectural sequences of a Petrarch […]
Some time ago I started a journal. I am a terrible journal writer since I make up large sections of what has happened to me to amuse my “readers” (whoever they might be, someone in the far future I suppose) but I am also well aware of this. In the first page of […]
“Kreyòl pale kreyòl knoprann.”
“Creole speaks Creole understands.”1
Is there a Creole sonnet? I ask this in all seriousness. Are there poets in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora writing sonnets in Creole? The little I know of the language I find fascinating; this mixture of French and West African Wolof relocated into the New […]
Disclaimer: Ekaterina Evseyeva is a friend of mine, a Yakuts scholar and poet from Siberia. I had written to her during my research for various forms of international sonnets. She translated an article written in Russian by T.N. Vasilyeva and sent it to me. Translation, discourse and copyrighting being what they […]
I love the word “dim.” As in: “Faintly outlined; indistinct: a dim figure in the distance.” Or: “Obscure to the mind or the senses: a dim recollection of the accident.” My dim, dim past. Do you ever re-read notes you leave for yourself, notes you lose and months later re-discover?1 […]
Many interesting things are happening with the folks over at The Mississippi Review. They have extended their $1000 Poetry Prize until November 1; with the only restrictions being: “Fee is $15 per entry … poetry entries should be three poems totaling 10 pages or less.” That is easy. I think I […]
I want to hollow myself out, empty myself; I want the ocean. You might live next to one or in one or under one, you might write to me and invite me to visit, pole about on your punt, paddle about with flippers and snorkel, you might; yet that is probably not the ocean […]
I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.
- Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”
(probably braining in some poor S.O.B. passing by Henry’s window … you […]
“I know you’re in there - I can smell your brain …” Return of the Living Dead (1985)
I suppose if I were forced by powers beyond my control to come back as a zombie, a flesh eating one might be of some interest. Yet it seems so stereotyped, commonplace, platitudinous. And why […]
Eduardo C. Corral talks today in his blog of feeling down and blue and putting Cyndi Lauper on his stereo. He recommends her live version of Joni Mitchell’s Carey. Cyndi Lauper (!) — good god, how these two words are sending my groggy head whirling back in memory. Was there a time1 […]
“In the story/ of every river, there’s a twist/ where it vanishes under ground.”
– Dean Young, from Periodicity of Clouds
“Did you ever/ stand and shiver/ just from lookin’/ at a river?”
– Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
Today feels like a day for a road-trip;a trip or transmogrification — one way or the other. Things are […]
Today seems the day of missed events, say, birthdays. Since I come from a tradition that does not celebrate ancestor worship, the two “life events” (for lack of a better term) we pay attention to in other people are their births and their deaths … and not much in-between. I thought about this […]
“What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God’s closet.”
– August Wilson (1945-2005)
By way of respect for […]
It was about a year ago I started my search for the Armenian Sonnet. It was a description of the work of Vahan Tekeyan (1879-45) by Diana Der-Hivanessian, poet and translator, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: “… his painstakingly honed sonnets have earned him a reputation as a visionary” (page […]
Self-portrait at 35. After many years of spiritual beggary and lackadaisical destitution I recently saw Akira Kurosawa’s Ran again. According to the DVD box the title translates into chaos. And why should chaos interest us? We value order, or at least the idea of order, and yet it is chaos, easygoing and […]
Perhaps Jazz Poetry might not be the way to go for a villanelle? It is hard to say, what with the need to hear a refrain half a dozen times. Isn’t that the soul of jazz, though? The mind-blowing refrain that is at once modern and classical, hep and primitive, old and […]
The world is full of bad villanelles but good dim sum. It seems a safe estimate to make from a simple glance at what we have available to us.1 Perhaps the trouble lies when poets who normally work in free-verse attempt a bombastic, mannered and flamboyant form? Ronald E. McFarland, in his […]
This morning it is raining. There is a smell in the air I associate with larger cities and their aging struts, domes, turrets and stones — terrible permanence? mellow decrepitude? unending yearning? — whatever it is, rain seems to release it. I smelled it last time I was in Chicago with Shelby. […]