Here we have a good poet. Long for Stanley Plumly It’s about to be too late. Every shred of the usual weather is precious and sexual as it goes, the way the links of a fugue become one another’s strict abandonments. As for the future, it will not swerve. Fire sleeps in the tree. Which … More William Matthews
In the conversation poem, the problem of establishing the authority of the speaking voice is even more acute than in confessional. The speaker cannot lay claim to the ethical or moral authority of the confessional voice by virtue of testimony alone. Nor is the conversation poem a dramatic monologue. The reader must be willing to … More Holden 2
So much depends upon the chicken or rooster, that is to say when you have a Death Row visit to Angola on a winter day, the first of a thaw and you are riding on the Angola bus with a young man who has ridden from Dallas to see his father whom he only knows … More Poem written in under five minutes, unrevised and not workshopped
I am disappointed that she is promoting poetry of poor caliber. El que diga yo esto means that I am more loyal to poetry than I am to alleged poetic leaders in what has also become my Raza. Que así sea. Axé.
Is it possible that there are different levels of poetry? Poetry that is like commercial pop music, and good in this genre, but that you should not compare to good music? Should we call poetry that aims for a support group level of discourse, poetry? Holden says that in confessional and conversation poetry, the life … More In Radical Pursuit
Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1986) Jonathan Holden CHAPTER 2 (pp. 33-44) The Contemporary Conversation Poem The most personal type of contemporary poem—personal because in this type of poem we find the poet speaking in his or her own person directly to the reader—is the poem which appropriates, as … More Holden 1
Do not make verses about happenings. For poetry, there is no creation or death. In her eyes, life is an unmoving sun, Which neither warms nor lights. The attractions, the anniversaries, the personal incidents do not matter. Do not make poetry with the body. This excellent, complete and comfortable body, so unfit for lyrical flow. … More Drummond: “Procura da poesia”
Writin’ La Vida Loca: Laundry, Poetry, Love Ella qué será She’s livin’ la vida loca Y te dolerá Sí, de verdad te toca –Ricky Martin No one should try to climb this Mexican electric fence –Treviño The title of Natalia Treviño’s collection Lavando la Dirty Laundry (Norman, OK: Mongrel Empire Press, 2013) is most surely … More Only one section to go, and I am learning from doing this, and/but is it too negative?
Here is a poem I like. Freeway 280 Las casitas near the gray cannery, nestled amid wild abrazos of climbing roses and man-high red geraniums are gone now. The freeway conceals it all beneath a raised scar. But under the fake windsounds of the open lanes, in the abandoned lots below, new grasses sprout, wild … More Lorna Dee Cervantes
I am angry because this is considered prize winning poetry and because writing even a polite review of it takes the kind of effort grading a really bad paper does. These autobiographical poems are stories of the joys and sorrows of women in families – wives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts – on both sides of the … More This paragraph instead
