Category Archives: Poetry

Poet John Ashbery Gives Interesting Answers

by Editor

Poet John Ashbery sat down to answer questions on a program called Open Book. He’s fascinating. I’m not sure why he is not running away from the questions, but whatever his infirmity might be, he is interesting in spite of the interviewers.

One thing in particular caught my attention: I don’t have any hidden meanings in my poems.

I think that’s an astounding thing to hear from one of the most difficult and impenetrable poets I have ever read.

Vetiver
by John Ashbery

Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay,
As the flowers recited their lines
And pike stirred at the bottom of the pond.
The pen was cool to the touch.

Read the rest of the poem…

Bob Dylan Walks with Ghosts

by Editor

Bill Flanagan at Times Online has an interview with Bob Dylan.  They talk about Dylan’s impressions of Barack Obama’s writing in Dreams of My Father.  It seems that Dylan considers the president to be a pretty good writer, capable of making readers think and feel at the same time.  He thinks Obama says some ‘profoundly outrageous things.’  I always enjoy the slightly argumentative way Bob Dylan answers questions.  So often, when an interviewer thinks something is obvious, Dylan says, ‘not exactly,’ and goes on to carefully explain how the interviewer is wrong.

Dylan talks about ghosts in the American South:

It must be the Southern air. It’s filled with rambling ghosts and disturbed spirits. They’re all screaming and forlorning. It’s like they are caught in some weird web – some purgatory between heaven and hell and they can’t rest.

Then this:

BF: Are you a mystical person?

BD: Absolutely.

BF: Any thoughts about why?

BD: I think it’s the land. The streams, the forests, the vast emptiness. The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I‘m more at home in the vacant lots. But I have a love for humankind, a love of truth, and a love of justice. I think I have a dualistic nature. I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

BF: But the album is all about love – love found, love lost, love remembered, love denied.

BD: Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

Anyone who talks that way is definitely going to be able to sell me some music.  I will be all ears and I will walk around for months trying to find those ghosts.  If he says they’re there, then they are.

Is Poetry Dead Just In Time for National Poetry Month?

by Editor

Well goodness!  Newsweek as seen fit, just as National Poetry Month was about to begin, to announce the possibility that poetry has completely and totally kicked the proverbial country bucket.  Could this really be?  If no one is reading poetry, can it still be a living thing? Apparently, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled Reading on the Rise.  Sounds optimistic.  But they mean fiction.  Not poetry.  Readership for poetry has declined to its lowest point in 16 years.  Everybody is worried.  Nobody knows what to do.  I suggest doing nothing.  Enjoy National Poetry Month because it’s kind of fun to see unpopular poets stand up and try to be famous.  Read some popular poems if you haven’t already and just remember that poetry really is very hard to understand.  I think that’s the key to the whole thing.  It’s a huge pain to read.  There’s all these words sometimes rhyming, sometimes not.  I can never tell what the poet is talking about and I get annoyed.  It’s not like Twilight at all.  Although some really good poems do have vampires in them.

But then, perhaps a week later – maybe a year.  I’ll be walking along looking for a good plate of hotwings, and I’ll stop and think to myself, ‘Oh right!  That’s what that lady meant by that weird line in her poem.  Very cool.’

That’s why I like poetry.  It hits you when it hits you and that’s all that matters.

The painting is by poet/painter, Carl Spitzweg. It’s called The Poor Poet.  It’s from 1835 and appears to show one of these poets taking the easy way out as he concocts a nearly indecipherable verse.  That umbrella is either magically floating or it’s caught in some serious cobwebs.

It is Repose in the Light: A Film by Jennifer MacMillan

by Editor | 2 Comments

It is repose in the light, neither fever nor languor,
on a bed or on a meadow.

It is the friend neither violent nor weak. The friend.

It is the beloved neither tormenting nor tormented. The beloved.

Air and the world not sought. Life.

— Rimbaud, “Vigils”

This film is by Jennifer MacMillan who runs the Invisible Cinema blog where she posts about experimental film and her own poetic interests and observations. She makes many wonderful short films that are the highlight of her blog. She made this one to accompany a poem by Arthur Rimbaud.  Beautiful and thought-provoking.

National Poetry Month has Begun

by Editor

It’s National Poetry Month!  That means that bookstores, publishers and bloggers all over the U.S. and elsewhere are celebrating poetry in all its forms.  There’s a poem-a-day series that will email you one poem each day for the entire month.  Poets.org has instructions for teachers trying to motivate students to enjoy poetry in the classroom and tips for bookstores trying to sell poetry.

The video is from W. W. Norton publishers who decided to ask eleven of their published poets what poetry is for.  Their answers are incredibly bad, but it’s a good try.  It should be abundantly clear from these poets’ answers that there is very little actual thought going on about what poetry is for.

Here’s my answer:  Poetry is for bread.

But here’s a guy named Charles Bernstein who says that National Poetry Month is a bad thing.  He says it encourages the most bland of easy-reading poetry available to make people think poetry is safe to read.  He’s right.  And so what?  So people read some bland crappy poems.  That is what most poetry is.  That’s realistic.  Perhaps a few of those people will have the energy to go out and find the real, hard, evolving, beautiful and terrifying poetry that would never even stoop to asking, ‘What is poetry for?’