Bob Holman Shows Us the Poetry Sights in the New York Post
Learn about New York’s poetic past from Coffee House author Bob Holman here.
Coding Poetry
Jacket2’s Kristen Gallagher on Alejandro Crawford’s electronic literature:
Just like perspective painting once changed seeing, digital computing is changing what we know about things like reading, attention, and the construction of meaning — and it’s also changing how those things happen, including the writing of poetry. I wonder, if we can see how the crossing with theory participated in the creation of a new strain of poetry in the 70s and 80s, can we not imagine that the current crossing with technology and programming is doing the same?
Read more from the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet poetry blog.
CHP Poet Patricia Smith Ranked #4 in Coldfront’s Top 40 Poetry Books of 2012
“In Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, Patricia Smith focuses on the mid-century migration of African-Americans from south to north while skillfully touching on issues of family, race, sexuality, and music. The book exhibits a poet not only talented in her craft, but passionate about subjects that push the personal beyond the self and into the realm of the social and political. In the title poem, even the young poet in Chicago can’t escape the influence of her mother’s Alabama. Though her father would secretly call her “Jimi Savannah,” her mother “scraped the name Patricia Ann from the ruins / of her discarded Delta, thinking it would offer me shield / and shelter, that leering men would skulk away at the slap / of it.” In this first section, by focusing on her parents (especially her mother) and the family’s connection to the South, Smith sets up the tension between north and south, mother and daughter, youth and age, that accumulate to an eventual breaking point. The experience of music becomes central to the poet’s experience of a complicated world, reflected on from a matured perspective; she remembers The Supremes, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, seeing them as flawed heroes (“Little did we know that they’d condemn / us to live so tethered to the ground / while every song they sang told us to wait”) whose contributions could make all the difference: “The Temps, all swerve and pivot, conjured schemes / that had us skipping school, made us forget / how mamas schooled us hard against the threat / of five-part harmony and sharkskin seams.” The result is a whole-cloth remembrance, lament, and celebration that is not to be missed.” Read the whole review here.
I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard
“Matt Wolf, a Brooklyn–based documentary filmmaker recently completed a short filmic portrait I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard. Brainard was a visual artist and poet whose collages and drawings often engaged with popular culture and emphemerality. Among poets, he is best known for I Remember (1975), a long, lyric prose-poem.”
in 2004, Coffee House Press published Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard by Ron Padgett.
The Poetry Foundation Honors Anselm Hollo
Robert Archambeau offers a brief remembrance at his blog Samizdat:
I am very sad to have heard from Mark Johnson that Anselm Hollo died this morning.
give up your ampersands & lowercase ‘i’s
they still won’t like you
the bosses of official verse culture
(U.S. branch) but kidding aside
I motored off that map a long time agoThose lines come from one of two poems from Anselm Hollo’s “Where if Not Here” we published in Samizdat back in the 1990s, and they capture so,e of my favorite things about Hollo’s viewpoint: his lack of pretense, and his complete disregard for the laurels, prizes, and jockeying-for-position that had already become endemic in the little demimonde of American poetry.
Hollo’s grasp of the gulf between the sublimity of which poetry is capable, and the absurdities into which poets fall in pursuit of that chimera, a “career in poetry,” made him the ideal person to hold the title of United States Anti-Laureate, to which he was elected by the Buffalo POETICS list back at the turn of the century.
Allan Kornblum of Coffee House Press honors Anselm on our blog.
CHP Author Amanda Nadelberg Featured in Coldfront’s Top 40 Poetry Books of 2012
Amanda Nadelberg came in at #11 of Coldfront’s Top 40 Poetry Books of 2012 for her book Bright Brave Phenomena.
“Bright Brave Phenomena is a system of 44 resilient, big-hearted machines, the warm chaos of the light in the grass, or the grass in the light, a field of slightly glitched musics tending to the terrible loveliness that makes us human: “Of all the perfect gestures, be good at naked. / In the morning, be pinecones.” Built around direct statements illuminated by a fair amount of semantic wobble, these poems, often very funny, take in and redefine the world, at times turning those definitions over until the poem discovers some little piece of joy or sadness it allows the reader to dance with, feeling complicated and hugged: “Come on, I’m exciting to be with you.” Propelled by a tender attention that resists anything being inconsequential, these poems delight in buoyant movements, establishing a logic based on wonder and emotional truth that asks, as desperately as it does joyfully, how is it we can touch the world knowing we cannot hold on to anything. “I had an angry period,” she confides, “for / the trees to fall down on the / floor, the room of vantaged / things, however long you can / keep this hold you can stay.””-Nick Sturm
“What simple dishes reveal about the complexities of poetry as a creative act of constant transformation.” (Brain Pickings)
… courtesy of Google Autocomplete. Further proof that Google can see deep into our souls.
Read them all at www.googlepoetics.com
The Los Angeles artist, ETMCA, created a wild scavenger hunt out of a 20-line poem called “The Ones”. ETMCA then hid cut up and hid the painted poems in bookstores across the city. Want to know what lines are coded in this painting? Watch the YouTube video to find out!
(The New York Times Magazine)
A great podcast interview with CHP author Joseph Lease! (from Silliman’s Blog)
Did you know that Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive? (from the National Poetry Foundation)
Fiction writer and literary organizer Rochelle Spencer blogs for Poets & Writers about readings in unconventional venues - like a hair salon and a church!
Coffee House Press poet Anne Boyer has written a fantastic blog post about liars, lying, and poetry. She says, “To be a poet is to lie all the time and to lie none of it.” Should we believe her? (From Harriet)
Dipping a bit into the way-back machine (as in way back in mid-July). Harriet has a link to a story about a cool new project Canadian poet Christian Bök is doing with poetic bacteria. And no, that’s not a typo.
