BLOG POSTS

I, too, love poetry…

During one of my sessions at Murray for my MFA, I had the pleasure of taking a genre seminar over Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. I love Bishop. I loved her from the moment I read “At the Fishhouses,” and this seminar reaffirmed my admiration for her. However, I also walked away from this seminar with a new found respect for Marianne Moore. I think that Moore is overlooked or over simplified because of the poems that editors choose to anthologize. Moore was brilliant, sharp, and wonderfully creative. She was also diverse. This afternoon my colleague mentioned how Moore translated La Fontaine, which she is teaching in her World Lit class. We discussed Moore for a bit, the conversation ending when we both mentioned the poem shown below:

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
     all this fiddle.
  Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
     discovers in
  it after all, a place for the genuine.
     Hands that can grasp, eyes
     that can dilate, hair that can rise
        if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
     they are
  useful. When they become so derivative as to become
     unintelligible,
  the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
     do not admire what
     we cannot understand: the bat
        holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
     wolf under
  a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
     that feels a flea, the base-
  ball fan, the statistician--
     nor is it valid
        to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
     a distinction
  however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
     result is not poetry,
  nor till the poets among us can be
    "literalists of
     the imagination"--above
        insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
     shall we have
  it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
  the raw material of poetry in
     all its rawness and
     that which is on the other hand
        genuine, you are interested in poetry.


The part about the toads is my favorite. I even managed to work it into my preface for my MA.

Thursday Musings

Read this on Poets and Writers this morning and it made me laugh. Here’s a tidbit:

Penguin U.K. has teamed up with Match.com to introduce a dating Web site for book lovers, or for anyone, according to the publisher, who has “ever wished real life could be as romantic as a novel.” The PenguinDating site, available only to residents in the United Kingdom, hopes to offer readers “a place to meet and indulge in the age-old art of writing love letters.”

How come the Brits get to have all the fun?
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This strikes me as very odd…

Thoughts?
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Here are some links to some new poetry books. I’ve added them to my list. My list is threatening to eat me alive but I continue to feed it. Some people never learn…

The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks, Charles Simic (Ausable Press)

The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, ed. Edward Hirsch and Eavan

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Brenda Wineapple (Alfred A. Knopf)

100 Essential Modern Poems by Women, ed. Joseph Parisi and Kathleen Welton (Ivan R. Dee, Publisher)
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Poetry Daily posts a poem a day. I try to look at a few a week but this mornings choice struck me. I have yet to really put my finger on it but I think I like it so much because it is full of abstractions.

Food For Thought

This excerpt is taken from Collin Kelley’s blog and is a response to a post by Barbra Jane Reeves who is in turn responding to post on Stacy Lynn Brown’s blog regarding her ill treatment after winning a poetry contest sponsored by Cider Press:

Poets need to stop buying into the contest cycle of abuse, let go of the notion that self-publishing makes you less of a poet and that working with a small or micro-press won’t bring you any “prestige.”

I think this is an interesting idea to consider. While I understand the shortcomings of MFA programs in that they sometimes breed this type of behavior, I would like to say that this past July at my low residency program I was encouraged to seek out small presses for my first manuscript. Not only were students encouraged, but the program directors brought in a small publisher and two other creators of online journals to sit on a panel and talk to students about alternate publishing methods. It is important for poets to expand and evolve with the changing market and I hope that MFA programs, agents, and publishers will do the same.

Wednesday Musings

Paul Auster’s new book, Man in the Dark, received a review in the New York Times.

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This article was also posted on the New York Times website. This brief excerpt allows some food for thought:

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

The New York Times is going to continue this series of articles about how technology is changing our reading and writing culture as Americans. It’s worth a look.
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A new Emily Dickinson book with a sexy name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/books/review/Seymour-t.html?ref=books
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I now have a desk and bookcase in my office!

Welcome

This is my first official post on the new blog. My inspiration for this project began with an assignment I was given this past spring while working on my MFA. I instructed to follow two literary blogs (of my choosing) for the entire semester. I followed Avoiding the Muse and Elegant Variation and enjoyed both blogs immensely. I’m starting small and hoping to increase the content gradually.

Here goes!

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The fall semester began this week, so I’m back to teaching composition. When school starts back up again, I start to think about fall (my favorite season). When I begin to think about fall, I start thinking about all the wonderful poems that are associated with the season in some way or another. To commemorate my love of all things autumn, I’ve decided to post a poem a week that is some way associated with fall. This weeks poem is “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, OH” by James Wright.

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, OH

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

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I recently took on a full time teaching position at the school where I’ve been adjuncting over the past two years. I’ll probably be posting about the different experiences that come with this new position. So far, my first week is moving along relatively smoothly. The biggest glitch is that I am currently without any furniture in my office. I’m afraid that if any students stop by during office hours, they’re going to think I’m squatting. Updates to follow.

I took this picture about a month ago. Poetry is everywhere.