In a compilation of his personal journals, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice,1 Allen Ginsberg recalled a particular event, which had a strong impact on his career and on his spiritual approach to life. In July 1948, that is to say eight years before the … [Read more...]
Notes on the Uses of the New Lyric “You”
“It is helpful to change one’s habits to address a root cause” — S. Brook Corman1 Over the last few years, I have been noticing an increasing use of the pronoun “you” in lyric poems, when grammatically the pronoun of use should be “I.” When I first … [Read more...]
Now What’s Wrong? Reflections on Allen Ginsberg’s Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992
After the accomplishments of late nineteenth and early twentieth century experimentalists Whitman, Dickinson, Rimbaud, and the Modernist poets Apollinaire, Cendrars, Mayakovsky, Stevens, Williams, H.D., Lorca, Vallejo and Neruda---every poet runs the … [Read more...]
Visionary Markings: Em Dashes and Ellipses in Walt Whitman’s “Talbot Wilson” Notebook
Before the appearance of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman kept notebooks in which he wrote sketches for lines of poetry. As Andrew Higgins points out in Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman’s Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855, Whitman used these notebooks … [Read more...]
In Xochitl In Cuicatl: poets Nezahualcoyotl and Humberto Ak’abal
Intrigue & Scope There’s an old story of the amate tree bark (i.e. amoxtli or codices/scrolls with pictographs whose texts resemble an accordion). These were first elaborated as “most likely in the present day totonaca region of Veracruz, in the Peten … [Read more...]
“Only the Lull I Like”: Walt Whitman’s Image of Silence
Introduction In his chapter on “Language” in Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that “We know more from nature than we can at will communicate” (23). It is a strange sentence. It suggests a nonverbal transference, an epistemologically freighted … [Read more...]
Lemon Calls to Lemon: The Visual Poetics of D. H. Lawrence, Jack Spicer, and Robert Kroetsch
I’m intrigued by images that recur in an individual poet’s work or across several poets’ works. Rocks, for instance, have a fascinating poetic pedigree in the English language, from Wordsworth’s “Rocks and stones and trees” to Gary Snyder’s “Lay down … [Read more...]
A Consideration of Borges’ Poetics
I read Jorge Luis Borges' This Craft of Verse in one sitting. It is a collection of six essays originally given as lectures at Harvard University in 1967-1968. The tone is easy and conversational. Borges speaks about the reader's interaction with a poem, … [Read more...]
Revenge of the Imagist Socialist Poetry
We are the revenge of all oppressed, despised, ignored, exploited, beaten, insulted, neglected, abused, molested humans in the world as being fighters for their rights with our poems and essays. We are the revenge of the Poetry Art and we are fighting … [Read more...]