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Out loud

Hilary Plum — Sun, 27 May 2012 15:30:42 +0000

Through periods of illness I have recently taken to listening to books on tape. I know they’re not “on tape,” but I can’t help but use that phrase: bound by childhood, when my parents loaded in cassette after cassette of…

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Mix Tape: Message in a Bottle

Maggie Smith — Thu, 24 May 2012 11:53:21 +0000

Here it is, the commencement address everyone’s talking about: Neil Gaiman at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. “A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping…

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Craft Note: Duet (Part 3) — Beginning and Ending With A Reader’s Comment

Jake Adam York — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:12:20 +0000

In a comment on our last post, “Craft Note: Duet—Part Two (Ending With A Post By Tarfia Faizullah Ending With A Line By Vallejo),” Judith wrote toward an undeveloped idea that will move us into a third (and probably last)…

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The Binary-Breaking HHhH

Weston Cutter — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:25:01 +0000

I guess part of me is mildly surprised that the release of Laurent Binet’s HHhH (translated by Sam Taylor) hasn’t triggered more chatter about it and the whole blown-up-over-nothing Lifespan of a Fact tempest that struck…

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Taking back the sponge cake & other adventures

Hilary Plum — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:33:43 +0000

This post should come with a dateline: Seattle. This weekend I was lucky enough to go to my first reading at the legendary Elliott Bay Books. Four great poets—Zach Savich (KR’s own), Andy Stallings, Melanie Noel, and Sierra Nelson—read work…

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The Reproductive Success of a Poem

Amit Majmudar — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:08:17 +0000

There’s more than one way of conceiving of the “success” of a poem; one that’s never talked about is its biological/evolutionary success, that is: How effectively does it replicate itself? I do not mean “influence.” “Influence” is similar—akin to getting…

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Mix Tape: Reinvention

Maggie Smith — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:24:21 +0000

Is the “well-crafted” poem of today formulaic? According to Marjorie Perloff, yes. “The poems you will read in American Poetry Review or similar publications will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the following characteristics….” Check out this Boston Review article to see…

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Two Recent Publications by Carl Djerassi

Admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:36:20 +0000

The Kenyon Review excitedly notes two publications by Carl Djerassi, famed chemist, playwright, novelist and man of letters. In March of 2012, Haymon-Verlag released a bilingual edition of Djerassi’s poetry collection Ein Tagebuch des Grolls/A Diary of Pique 1983-1984. In…

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Toward New Pasts and Old Futures: an interview with Linda Norton

Andrew David King — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:25:31 +0000

So-called “alternative” poetics always end up construed as self-conscious investigations into what it means for poems to be poems. This is an important question—one not asked nearly enough—though it need not be the only question such a book can pose.…

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The Reconquest of the Long Form

Amit Majmudar — Sun, 13 May 2012 14:25:47 +0000

There are, by my count, only two things that can save a long poem in English. Heterogeneity (Eliot and Pound; and those polyphonic, formally quite various sustained dramatic poems of Shakespeare) and/or Rhyme (Chaucer, Golding’s Ovid, Chapman’s Homer, Marlowe’s Hero…

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