It is of course better than any of the alleged poems in that book I reviewed, but beyond that is it worthwhile to persons besides myself, je vous le demande. Heaven How many roads lead to Heaven? If you trip on the bridge, do you fall? Had some event marked her, did a single moment … More Revised
Kristeva has that famous title Desire in Language but what about joy in language? Arguedas referred to himself as a “demonio feliz” speaking in Quechua and Castilian. Vallejo is a similarly happy demon, surfing seas of metaphor, watching the dance of words. Logopoeia. This is fun to say but one cannot say it without looking … More Ce matin
The days are bright. I do not remember winter light being so bright here and pale, or there being as much sun. It is colder now for longer, as well. I woke up this morning thinking that I would like to understand Adorno, now because he and Horkheimer (1972) say that “homeland is the state … More Lundi encore
To make some decisions about software and train myself in current versions of it, I reformatted a short document with endnotes, that book review I struggled with and complained about before. As a rule one should not review what one does not like. But I find reviewing new poetry very instructive and I learned a … More Othering Spanish
A related feature of the abstract image—one which may make it increasingly attractive to poets—is that abstract statement permits a far wider range of subject matter than we generally find in a poem dependent entirely upon occasion. The emotional range, the subject matter of poems based upon a particular occasion—on a dramatic situation or incident—is … More More Holden
The Abstract Image Two related strands of poetic diction have been handed down to contemporary American poetry from a tradition which we might label roughly “surrealist.” The first of these strands, predominantly Spanish in origin and one which we might label “archetypal,” has been brilliantly analyzed and criticized by Paul Breslin in his essay “Nihilistic … More Spanish influence in American poetry
Although the term “conversation” includes many types of discourse, and the “conversation” poem appears in such diverse guises as the “poem of instruction” invented by Gary Snyder in his “Things To Do” poems, and in “letter” poems best exemplified by Richard Hugo’s letter poems in 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, we may distinguish two basic … More Holden 3
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
