Note: Chapter three was previously published in Beatdom. ∘∘∘ Pre-emptive of 1960s counter-culture, in which exploded artistic self-expression and a freer way of relating to community and relationships, Ginsberg’s poetry deals with life at its bleakest and harshest: feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy; the pain of romantic rejection; fear of ageing … [Read more...]
Robin Coste Lewis and A New Kind of New York
As a young girl I hated Girl Scouts. It was yet another popularity contest that I was on the losing end of, with little payoff beyond the ability to say I’d “hiked” through another bitter Syracuse winter, or gained another badge I never learned to sew on. However, I kept signing up each year so that I could go to the Sleepover at the Museum. You could pull your sleeping bag up … [Read more...]
Visions, Symbols and Intertextuality: An Overview of William Blake’s Influence on Allen Ginsberg
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 publication of Howl, Allen Ginsberg had a dynamic impression of unification and of human understanding through visions. He … [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 presented on this observation at the 2018 Gulf Coast Association of Creative Writing Teachers Conference, I proposed that this … [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 risk of being trite in subject matter or derivative or retrograde as a stylist, or drastically both. Taste is a loaded factor, … [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 to grapple with democracy, slavery, transcendentalism, and spiritualism. Higgins also notes, “But he did not yet understand … [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 region of Chiapas, in the mixteca zapoteca zone of Oaxaca, and in the maya, nicaraos, and pipil of Centroamérica, and the … [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 communication, that is yet not couched in the familiar terms of language, but is instead linked to the failures of language to … [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 these words / before your mind / like rocks” to Lorine Neidecker’s geologically-informed long poem, “Lake Superior.” Recently, I … [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, metaphor, the epic, translation and translatability, the relation between language and thought, and his own “poetic creed” as … [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 for poetry ethics against the decadent poets/poetesses who exploit Poetry for their own social rant seeking and for hunting … [Read more...]
