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
[The] volume is prefaced with five blurbs that indicate the quality of its backing as well as a list of acknowledgments that make it clear the poems were written in a community of friends. This is an old convention – in Don Quixote (1605), Cervantes parodies the custom of prefacing books with long series of … More The next wicked comment
It is good that people write, but this person is not a good poet. It is difficult to come up with things to say that are diplomatic yet still true, and I feel I am putting more effort into the review than the writer did into the poems (as happens with grading papers). Of course … More The first paragraph of a bad review by me
A novella in pictures: Lives of Passion Gene McCormick’s Lives of Passion: Edward and Antoinette (Rockford, Illinois: RWG Press, 2013), the author’s thirteenth book, is a series of interlocking prose poems that tell, in seventeen short pieces, the story of an ordinary couple–mid-century figures whose lives have run together–from childhood on. The meanings of “passion” here include … More A good review by me, from the past
The foreign graduate students are trying to convince a longtime faculty member not to go home to New Orleans every weekend, as he does. They have told him he is snobbish. He should respect and participate in the fascinating folkloric traditions of our town. Faculty member: I am intimately, ancestrally connected to this area. In … More 50 shades of white, or, still more on that dictum, “Take a job, any job”
coldhearted scientist وداد 