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Sherman Alexie: Juliette Torrez interview Sherman Alexie: New York Heavyweight Poetry Bout miekal and: “Literature Nation” Attila the Stockbroker: “Welcome To Cyberia” Avotcja: Returning To the Open Mic Ritual Marc Awodey: 95 Theses, Mission of the Machines Azulao: Cordel Amiri Baraka: The Firesign Theater Meets the Sullen Art Amiri Baraka: Preface to A Rebirth Announcement Michael Benedikt Charles Bernstein: Laura (Riding) Jackson Paul Blackburn Max Blagg: “Autobio A Gogo” Joseph Brodsky & the National Poetry Literacy Project Gwendolyn Brooks: Two Poems for Gwendolyn Brooks Gwendolyn Brooks: An Overheard Conversation Meagan Brothers: With Your Ears Tuned South Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Count the Ways Lord Buckley: Dig Infinity! Charles Cantalupo: Against All Odds Todd Colby: Labor Day Picnic 1999 Wanda Coleman: Wanda Coleman’s Book Club Peter Cook: A Deaf Poetics, Part I Peter Cook: A Deaf Poetics, Part II Peter Cook: A Deaf Poetics, Part III Paul Copeland & Rinaldo Rasa Cid Corman: American poet in Japan Gregory Corso: 1930-2001 Hart Crane: The Lonesome Death of H. Crane Robert Creeley: The News in Poetry 99! Maria Damon: “Literature Nation” Ram Devineni: Rattapallax Emily Dickinson: What Would Emily Say? Ani diFranco: “To the Teeth” Dennis Downey: Poet Visionary, Stand-Up Philosopher Denise Duhamel: “Sex With a Famous Poet” Anne Elliott: Why I Love Her Is Revealed Eman: HipHop, Performance Poetry, Spoken Word, Slam: Definitions from a Teenager John Farris: A Poem for Elian Gonzalez Raymond Federman: Translating Ginsberg’s Queer Shoulder Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The Beat Goes On, He’s Still a Rebel Galinsky: GO! PO! Live! Allen Ginsberg Gary Glazner: Count the Ways Gary Glazner: Inspiration 101 Mike Golden: “Bring Me the Head of Gregory Corso” Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: “Refuting the Book of George” or, why one month a year for poetry isn’t enough... A movie review, news article and poem, all wrapped up in one....
Joe Gould: Joe Gould’s Secret Steve Greenberg: “If I Were Chubby Checker... Reesom Haile: Eritrean Millennium Poems Joan Joffe Hall: Amy Lowell, Mother of Us All Janet Hamill: Three Rules for Performance Poems qr hand jr.: Searching for the Legend Bob Holman: “Re: ACCESS” Bob Holman: “WebSter’s All New Collegiate Alan Horvath: Keeper of the Mimeo Flame Langston Hughes: Poet laureate of Black American life & culture Paul Hunter: Poet without punctuation Lawson Inada: “Eatin’ With Sticks” Victor Infante: “But What If These Are June Jordan: Founder of Poetry 4 the People June Jordan: Poems to Rebuild Kosovo Clifton Joseph (& Sheri-D Wilson) Eliot Katz: “In Praise of the Seattle Coalition” Jason Kirin: The Poetry Kids from Pittsburgh klipschutz: “Two Swan Songs & A Second Coming” Russell Leong: “Enter the Dragon 2000” Russell Leong: “Shatter the Glass Wall” Linda Lerner: Stone Soup Revisited Larry Levis: “How Things Outlive Us” d.a. levy: “listen the battlefield is in the mind” d.a. levy: Time Traveling to the Wilds d.a. levy: The Flaming Mimeo Lives d.a. levy: mimeo Frank Lima: idobelieveidobelieveidobelieve Amy Lowell: Mother of Us All Anne MacNaughton: “Hiring a Professional” Denis Mair: Notes from the Walla Walla Poetry Party 2003 Taylor Mali: Clarity Born in Contradictions (w/Attitude) Jeff McDaniel: The Real Chancellors of American Poetry Jack McCarthy: Report from the Venue William McGonagall: The Worst Poem of All Time Whitman McGowan: Caught in the Act: Whitman McGowan: Hyperlinkage William McLain: Not Forgotten: A William McLain Memorial Peter Meinke: Comes out of Retirement Jack Micheline: RIP, Brother Man Stephen Paul Miller: The Gulf War Phones Paul D. Mills: What Ever Happened To Poez? Marta Mitrovich: A Memoir by Victor Infante Till Müller-Klug: Poetry Flash from Deutschland Gaston Neal: “The Has-Been Poet” Marcellus Nealy: Light Walker Pablo Neruda: Latin American “people’s poet” Ngoma: Entering the Dreamtime Through Music and Poetry Naomi Shihab Nye: “An Open Letter to Any Would-Be Terrorists” Naomi Shihab Nye: Crossing Borders David Ossman: The Firesign Theater Meets the Sullen Art Wili Otey: Death Row Poetics Maureen Owen: Resurrection of a Mimeo Press Willie Perdomo: Willie Perdomo Gets Political Fernando Pessoa: Poet as Poetry Wanda Phipps: “Rose Window, or Prosettes” Miguel Piñero: Piñero & the Poet’s Life Charles Plymell: “The Prince of Tides” Charles Potts: “The Charles Potts School of Thought, Action and Poetry” Rinaldo Rasa & Alan Sondheim Rinaldo Rasa & Paul Copeland Laura (Riding) Jackson: Charles Bernstein John Rodriguez: “cuando éra niño” Luis Rodriguez: Hearts and Hands Diana Roose: “hiroshima morning” Michael Rothenberg: Issue Zero Carl Hancock Rux: The Contents of His Backpack Ed Sanders: 1968.2 David Shapiro: Open Takes Over Jackie Sheeler: What Ever Happened To Poez? Danny Shot: “The Blame Game” Hal Sirowitz: A Wedding Poem: “Why God Created Eve” Patricia Smith: The Community-Word Project & “Left Memories” Patricia Smith: Journalism & Poetry Patricia Smith: New York Heavyweight Poetry Bout Margery Snyder: Travelers’ Guide / Coming Home Margery Snyder: “If There Are Only Minds, Alan Sondheim: “do wah” Alan Sondheim & Rinaldo Rasa Barry Spacks: “Fame” & the lives of the poets Sparrow: Mathemetrics Sparrow: The Battle of The New Yorker: A Diary Sparrow: A Literary Miscellany (with Mike Topp) Eve Stern: The Adventures of Book Waitress Mark Strand: Poetry’s Future Stranded? Mike Topp: Zen and the Art of Poetry Mike Topp: A Literary Miscellany (with Sparrow) Edwin Torres: “How to Stay Kool” Edwin Torres: Holy Kid Edwin Torres: A Morning For Prisoners Juliette Torrez: The Art of the Literary Gossip Column Juliette Torrez: “lately i’ve been dreaming of bridges” Mike Tyler & Emily XYZ Phillis Wheatley: America’s first black poet Ron Whitehead: American Omphalos Sheri-D Wilson (& Clifton Joseph) Ruth Yarrow: Poems to Rebuild Kosovo John Yau: “830 Fireplace Road (2)” Don Yorty: The View from My Window Daniel Zimmerman: Creative Cursing
A reprint of Juliette’s interview with National PoBout Champeen Sherman Alexie from (Sic) Vice & Verse, the mag that’s guaranteed to smear yr fingerprints and stain yr mind.
Sherman Alexie and Patricia Smith went six rounds head-to-head, poem-to-poem, and in the end it all came down to the Improvisational 7th Round.
Bob Holman interviews miekal and & Maria Damon -- two collaborators who have created the most fully developed HTML poem on the Net, interwriting, a poem that weaves your mind in...
The first cyberpoem from England’s one-man revolution in a poem.
On the open mic poetry scene you can see & hear not only up-&-coming younger poets, but also established writers & performers who come back for the special energy of an open mic -- poets like Avotcja, profiled here by our Northern California Museletter correspondent Martha Cinader.
Modern-day Martin Luther of poetry & P.T. Barnum publisher Marc Awodey posts his manifesto on the electronic cathedral.
Alternative distribution means of poetry, from the mimeo revolution of the 60s to Azulao & Brazilian literatura de cordel, “poetry on a string.”
From David Ossman’s interview with Amiri Baraka, then Leroi Jones: “I thought that anything -- anything you could grab -- was fit material to write a poem.”
Haiku: A poem by Bob Holman for Amiri Baraka, on birthday numero sesenta: Deeper’n’deeper’n’deeper’n’deep / Voice, where you lead us?...
The Compleat Michael Benedikt: Editor of essential but out-of-print anthologies, he has discovered the limitless possibilities of the Net & come roaring back.
Talking about Talk Magazine... A reprint of Bernstein’s recent Buffalo Poetics listserv posting... He wants it both ways! and so do we. Always.
And the fragmentation of the New American Poetry: He was a walking exponent of the oral tradition... with the word at the center and poets breathing them in and out.
The Web Shakes Proud To Present American Classic: The most remarkable poem about New York since Walt Whitman crossed Brooklyn Ferry, since Frank O’Hara did Second Avenue....
The poet is gone, the poems live on... but “we are glad you are here, dear.”
Patricia Smith and Quraysh Lansana had their lives irrevocably altered by the earthfire word magic of this Schoolmarm of the Heavens.
Patricia Smith and Quraysh Ali Lansana remember: “She didn’t have a career. Now that she’s dead, she can have a career. She had that white hot moment of silence after she finished reading a poem.”
Miriam Stanley introduces us to Meagan Brothers: “She’s a polite bad ass hailing from Lake Lure, North Carolina... in NYC not nearly a year, but she has made a big buzz...”
Gary Glazner takes a step back & whirls EBB ’round the dance floor: “How Do I Slam Thee?” (+ EBB & American Objectivist links).
Bob Holman reviews Oliver Trager’s new book on Lord Buckley: “the Hip Messiah, the Hiparama of the Classics, the comedian sans punch lines, the entertainer who went for astonishment, not laughs....”
Cantalupo organizes the lit conference to begin all lit conferences for the new millennium in Eritrea & translates Reesom Haile’s Tigrinya poems into English.
A poem for the Labor Day holiday by Todd Colby --void where prohibited by law.
Who knows from Oprah? Wanda Coleman is the Most Out Poet There Is, and we offer our readers her nonhierarchical Top Ten to educate themselves.
“The body’s speaking now, hush / Listen with ecstatic eyes.”
An interview with Peter Cook, American Sign Language poet of the Flying Words Project.
The conclusion of our interview with Cookie Monster Peter Cook, and links.
We at About Poetry have a bent towards mimeo cyberpo, the lo-tech arrangement of characters and words into a concrete, graphic representation.
Cid Corman was a beloved & amazingly prolific poet, translator of French & Japanese poets, host of the first American poetry radio show, respected essayist and the independent editor & founder of Origin Press, which published a great deal of the most important new American poetry from the 1950s on.
A gathering of memories & stories: “I’m Gregory Corso! The poet! I’ll sign all the books! and, I’m hungry!”
Janet Hamill offers a remembrance of the death of poet Hart Crane, who was only 33 when he committed suicide by jumping off a ship in 1932, and her poem in his memory, “The Lonesome Death of H. Crane.”
Robert Creeley Wins the Bollingen Prize! A cause for great celebration... Let us pause to praise and then let us party.
Bob Holman interviews miekal and & Maria Damon -- two collaborators who have created the most fully developed HTML poem on the Net, interwriting, a poem that weaves your mind in....
The Sound Googles the Blast for a New-Po Zine: an email interview with cyber visionary Ram Devineni, publisher of Rattapallax poetry journal & Rattapallax Press.
An Indeath Interview by Robyn Su Millerz with Emily Dickinson, who speaks out on the current movement toward war, the poets’ anti-war protests & the recently cancelled White House symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” in her poems.
A holiday present from our poet of the year, Ani diFranco... the title track from her just-released album.
Through him you can talk with television sets, have a myth for breakfast, get married in the Upanishad Room....
The best Poem of the Day online is dished up by Anastasios Kozaitis... and Denise Duhamel is one of poetry’s most raucous unstoppable young voices.
An email interview with the publisher/editor of Big Fat Press, who with Big Soul and Talent... has made some of the loveliest books of the past few years.
An interview with Eman, 16-year-old poet & host of 2 weekly open mics: “If you’re looking for the definitions of the New Poetry, she’s the one to ask.”
...is contained in a pickle jar in a David Hammons exhibition. “How many things can a poem do? Everything.”
Something’s lost in the translation -- is that the poetry? And something’s gained -- the illusion that homo sapiens actually communicate... These are the queries in Raymond Federman’s “Reflections Concerning the Translation of Poetry.”
Victor Infante interviews Ferlinghetti on the Poet as Outsider: “Poetry is news, and it’s important when it articulates a new vision of reality or an old vision in a surprising way. When it subverts the dominant paradigm.”
An interview with the director/emcee of the live weekly Netcast that “...allows the Free Mind of the Poet to synergize with the Free Medium of the Internet.”
The Bard His Own Self... Ginsberg says “That’s all good night.”
Gary takes a step back & whirls Elizabeth Barrett Browning ’round the dance floor: “How Do I Slam Thee?” (+ EBB & American Objectivist links).
How to bite deep into the media, releasing the strong protein juice of Inspiration....
An epic poem by Mike Golden -- song of the “famous drunk poet hustle,” the Tyson-Douglas fight, terrorizing the squares & transcendance -- translated into French by Raymond Federman & Patricia Privat-Standley.
Speaking Seagull & Recording the History of the World... a hero in the US Oral History/Performance Poetry world... It’s time that his poems see print.
...How I Would Change the World”: A meditation on a passage from Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice.
Tigrinya poet Reesom Haile, translated for us by Charles Cantalupo, brings African poetry into the 21st century.
Joan Joffe Hall read this poem at the great birthday party for Curbstone Press. Here’s the news in poetry: an overlooked minor poet leaps from the page to remind us what it’s all about.
Rhythm, hooks, simplicity. Three keys for a poem that will work in performance. Thanks, Janet!
Northern California Museletter correspondent Martha Cinader seeks out the mystery & meaning of a man every poet seems already to know, who is remarkably absent from the World Wide Web: “Part of the answer is the humble nature of this man, but another part is the stuff that legends are made of...” And she returns from her search with... a poem!
Your intrepid PoGuide lays it out for you: “All we are is a poetry Web site with the idea that poetry can change the world, ok?”
Poetry NetZine ManifeStationary!!” “I proclaim no I! / Language itself weaves the Web....”
An interview with Alan Horvath, poet & homemade publisher who has just reissued a series of d.a. levy’s books.
Langston Hughes was a radical democrat at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz/blues lyrical poet, humorous storyteller, political playwright, passionate advocate of African American pride, civil rights & artistic freedom.
Paul Nelson, founder of Global Voices Radio & the Pacific Northwest Spoken Word Laboratory (SPLAB!), interviews Paul Hunter on his new collection, Breaking Ground (Silverfish Review Press, 2004), a book which explores the vanishing American experience of farming on a small scale.
You Are How You Eat... Sometimes a poem says it all, nutritiously.
Poetic Times?” Victor Infante comments on the LA Weekly’s review of local poetry & the furor that followed.
June Jordan was the daughter of West Indian immigrants who endured racism & violence growing up, and created her own voice as “a radical political activist poet with a wicked sense of humor. Constantly pulling the string on rhetoric, homing in on her own foibles, she collapsed overt political issues” into the personal, and inspired generations of poets in her teaching.
New poems by June Jordan and Ruth Yarrow bring the war home to all of us. This is poetry’s job.
Outrageous perfpoets corral a mixed audience with aplomb: A report from the PanCanadian WordFest in Calgary, October 2000.
A poem by Eliot Katz, for those who put their organizing energies, eyes, brains, and bodies on the line in December 1999.
Here comes 19-year-old Jason Kirin (nom de plume “Jasin”) from Pittsburgh to remind us why we write ’em, and how the “Sullen Art” (Dylan Thomas), the Solitary Muse, is going pop, communal, active...
klipschutz was moved by the debate over Bruce Wexler’s article in Newsweek, “Poetry Is Dead, Does Anybody Really Care?,” to write a triptych of poems for us.
A fun poem for the New Year: “Bruce Lee / left us a long time ago...”
To honor Wei Jing-Sheng: “It’s hard to find the news in poetry,” but we’re proud to print Russell Leong’s new news poem.
Linda Lerner tells the story of her return visit to Stone Soup in Boston, a homecoming to the venue where for three decades Jack Powers has enabled poets to experience “the condition of poetry.” Plus two poems: “the poem the rare soul,” by Linda Lerner, and “A Condition, Not an Event,” by Andrew Gettler.
On the occasion of the posthumous publication of Larry Levis’ Selected Poems, Museletter correspondent Shann Palmer interviews Greg Donovan, his friend & the man who discovered the body he left behind in 1996.
d.a. levy & his poetic heirs: To dig past the officially anointed and remember the fallen who contributed their lives to poetry... gives the lie to the notion of the current poetry resurgence as a blip fad.
of Beat Era Cleveland: The new edition of The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle gives d.a. levy his due as protodeconstructivist/visual-conceptual artist/poet.
An interview with Alan Horvath, Keeper of the Mimeo Flame, poet & homemade publisher who has just reissued a series of d.a. levy’s books.
Alternative distribution means of poetry, from d.a. levy & the mimeo revolution of the 60s to Brazilian literatura de cordel, “poetry on a string.”
The reappearance of Frank Lima after twenty years... drawn out by the magnet flame of poetry, is to be taken as a sign.
Joan Joffe Hall read this poem at the great birthday party for Curbstone Press. Here’s the news in poetry: an overlooked minor poet leaps from the page to remind us what it’s all about.
A backstage report in the form of a poem from the 2001 Taos Poetry Circus & World Heavyweight Poetry Bout.
Denis Mair’s notes from the 2003 Walla Walla Poetry Party, condensed for About Poetry by klipschutz, plus a previously unpublished poem by Denis, “Try a Little Dialogue.”
Bob Holman reviews Taylor Mali’s brand-new CD, Poems from the Like Free Zone: “Listen... and you learn How to Read with your Ears.”
In a discussion of the various crises of the Chancellorships at the Academy of American Poets, we challenged Jeff McDaniel to create a whole new Academy and he gave us this total crossover roster.
We’re big fans of Jack McCarthy. No pretense, no formulae, nothing but the poem delivered generously and direct. Here, he nails every venue in one all-purpose review.
We invite you to partake in what we consider the absolute freefall of his bottomless barrel: William Topaz McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster.”
Whitman McGowan recounts his experience producing a live poetry performance CD, from its genesis in the dream of a European performance tour through collecting recordings and permissions to designing the CD package, selecting & mastering the audio tracks, and enduring the glitches in the actual CD manufacturing process.
A short poem extends its arms all over the Net.
Poems & recollections in memory of William McLain (1911 - 2003), “Southern California's oldest performance poet,” who will not soon be forgotten.
Florida Museletter correspondent Stazja McFadyen spoke with well known poet, creative writing professor & self-avowed “book person” Peter Meinke, who offered comments on page vs. spoken word and a piece of “Naked Poetry” for your reading pleasure.
Jack Micheline, painter, poet, the guy next to you at the bar, boho, true spirit, pappy, sappy, smart sass and free-flow po.... No one can keep you out of Heaven.
We believe in Poets Theater, where the language creates the character... Stephen Paul Miller’s one-page play features the Voice of Afghanistan.
Jackie Sheeler answers the “how did you become a poet” question... “she started in about this guy who used to read in the park back in the day... Poez, Paul D. Mills, was a rogue poet, lone wolf, his own mission.”
Looking back across 2002, we count our losses, the poets who have passed on... Marta Mitrovich, who lit the poetry fires in Orange County, California, remembered here by Victor Infante.
German Cyber Slammer, he has been known to perform at his home club in Berlin, SO36, using only the light from a reindeer cigarette lighter for illumination.
A poem by Bob Holman: “The over-the-hill poet suddenly is not only not over it / But king of it queen of it prince and princess kiss the frog / Royalty of it....”
Taylor Mignon, our Museletter correspondent in Japan, profiled the multi-talented Marcellus Nealy, “producer of events, poet, radio DJ, and sometimes jambe player... the most experimentally progressive spoken word artist in Tokyo... the only poet I know of who can improvise lines of poesie to the accompaniment of live musical riffs.”
Pablo Neruda was a Nobel laureate, diplomat, exile & returned native son of Chile, the most respected & beloved of Latin American poets, still widely read & translated 30 years after his death. His centenary in 2004 prompted lots of publishing, filmmaking & celebratory activity.
Ngoma, master of words and music, brings a poem of the didgeridoo, whose deep droning earthy sound, “Primordial Subterranean Funk,” is a world-connection.
“Find another way to live. Don’t expect others to be like you. Read Rumi. Read Arabic poetry. Poetry humanizes us in a way that news, or even religion, has a harder time doing...”
Poems need no passports. There must be a Universal Artist Passport, with no borders. Naomi Shihab Nye is the First Citizen of the World of Poetry!
From David Ossman’s interview with Amiri Baraka, then Leroi Jones: “I thought that anything -- anything you could grab -- was fit material to write a poem.”
The silence where Wili Otey once was, from where he stood and spoke, sat and wrote, is an emptiness that indicts us all.
An interview with poet/Telephone Books publisher Maureen Owen: Did I just call typing stencils romantic!!!?... To eat, sleep, dream, and sweat the work as one puts the book together....
Where a Nickel Costs a Quarter: One of the best young poets at work today, Willie Perdomo talks about the poetic & the political.
More than any other human, he lived life solely in his poems, his life a shell for the literary movement that was himself.
The piece Wanda read at Speech Acts, accompanied by Joel Schlemowitz’s film work & Marc Sloan’s soundscape.
Michael Salinger talks with Dahveed Ben Israel of the Last Poets after a screening of the poetic biopic, Piñero -- fertile ground for a conversation about the poet’s lifestyle, the relation between suffering and creativity, poetic communities and the arts’ affirmation of life.
A Timely Fable: Hearing the need of a nation to create heroes and myths... That is the poet’s job, and Charles Plymell, a nation’s poet, responded at the Literary Kicks Summer Poetry Happening.
klipschutz introduces us to “dynamo-slash-lightning-rod of underground letters” Charles Potts -- poet, publisher and founder of the Temple School of Poetry. Plus four poems by Charles Potts.
Poems take shape on the screen: We see a poem on a screen as a poem, a connector of linguistic holistic hooliganisms, a shameless shaman sham’n’truth shake.
We at About.com Poetry have a bent towards mimeo cyberpo, the lo-tech arrangement of characters and words into a concrete, graphic representation. And we love showing off our far-flung poets.
& Talk Magazine: A reprint of Bernstein’s recent Buffalo Poetics listserv posting about Laura Riding’s appearance in the premiere issue of Talk.
As we move into a new millennium, let’s remember Poetry Everywhere... here’s a found poem for which John gets finder-credit, & a made poem of his own.
Let’s call him hero, and be done with it: he’s devoted his life to blasting holes in the prison walls allowing the poem to pass through... And now he’s gone and opened Tia Chucha Café Cultural.
A special hidden bonus track added to our June Jordan, Ruth Yarrow feature: Poems to Rebuild Kosovo.
“The Lady in Stripes,” a letter from Michael Rothenberg about the March 2000 Literary Magazine Conference in New York, “a community shower town crier kind of party... weaving the antitradition small press tradition into the Web that is us now.”
His new album is da Bomb & Rux is so clearly on the go that we asked him what he was taking with him there.
Ed Sanders, a poet who has inspired me, over the years... To set poetry free to be the news: to investigate. Ed Sanders is the poet/scholar/creator of Investigative Poetics.
David Shapiro on Open Mikes and Fame: Just as Anonymous is the most prolific writer in English, so Open appears at more poetry performances than any other reading.
Jackie Sheeler answers the “how did you become a poet” question... “she started in about this guy who used to read in the park back in the day... Poez, Paul D. Mills, was a rogue poet, lone wolf, his own mission.”
His blend of personal and political illumines the roles of father, teacher, poet....
Hal’s next book may be My Wife Says -- We congratulate the Happy Couple on their NuptiNuptials!
All of a sudden we are sitting in the poem as the griot inserts the poem into each of us. A collaborative poem, built on lines written by these children. A poem about possibilities and love, children and poetry....
Shall we meditate on Truth? As a journalist, Patricia Smith is a great poet -- she gets at the truth under the skin.
Sherman Alexie and Patricia Smith went six rounds head-to-head, poem-to-poem, and in the end it all came down to the Improvisational 7th Round.
Poetry can bring us together; a poem that allows us inside as we move, mutually, towards a center called love is rare indeed.
Who Will Breathe For Us?... The poem is in the body, see?” (with an answering poem by Bob Holman)
Here’s another jewel mined from the Buffalo Poetics List -- Use your voice. Read this one ALOUD.
Poems take shape on the screen: We see a poem on a screen as a poem, a connector of linguistic holistic hooliganisms, a shameless shaman sham’n’truth shake.
In honor of Richard Brautigan’s birthday January 30th, Barry Spacks posted a lovely & provocative poem to the NewPoetry email discussion list, and that got your guides musing about “the Bitch Fame-Goddess” & the poets who climbed onto “her gerbil-treadwheel.”
Having conquered the worm of Dirty Words in his Bad Poetry Curriculum, Sparrow, former Presidential candidate and full-time Poet Laureate of Comic Relief, has invented a new poetic form: Mathemetrics.
In 1995, Sparrow & the Unbearables descended on The New Yorker with poems, chants & slogans: “GIVE OUR POEMS HOEMS.” Sparrow is our National Town Crier; here is his journal of that time.
Drawn from the Collected E-Correspondence. Q: What do Sinatra Haiku, the Boston Knicks, Damon Bunyan, Ahab Rehab, and Arthur Godfrey on Acid have in common? A: Sparrow and Mike Topp.
Eve Stern tells the story of National Poetry Month in the Peace Corps, teaching Literature as a Foreign Language in Suburbia.
Speaking on “The Future of Poetry,” Mark Strand preaches political indifference at UC Irvine & our own Victor Infante offers a response.
Mike “The Spinner” Topp’s parables allow for a truth, but only when ROTFL....
Drawn from the Collected E-Correspondence. Q: What do Sinatra Haiku, the Boston Knicks, Damon Bunyan, Ahab Rehab, and Arthur Godfrey on Acid have in common? A: Sparrow and Mike Topp.
Hot Poem! We commissioned one of our, ahem, most favorite of cool poets to compose a How To Poem to melt the mind.
An interview: “Poetry lives on page as words in type, poetry lives on stage as words in body, challenge of CD is to let poetry live as words in air...”
He’s got a story to tell, of his trip bringing poetry into St. Thomas Prison: “A lifetime for me, a morning for prisoners.”
An email interview with Juliette Torrez, editor/instigator/host of the Poetry Channel & Information Network.
To conclude our interview, a sampling from her newest work.
From Tyler to XYZ: two of our favorite poets get down with a million eyes and a few yi-yis.
A brief profile of Phillis Wheatley, African slave, first African (American) to be published in the USA... the original voice of the Other on US shores.
Dr. John Rocco reviews Whitehead’s Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon: fragments of a lost text: The Bone Man Saga... “our post-Beat Theseus working his way through the labyrinth of America.”
Outrageous perfpoets corral a mixed audience with aplomb: A report from the PanCanadian WordFest in Calgary, October 2000.
New poems by June Jordan and Ruth Yarrow bring the war home to all of us. This is poetry’s job.
The Pollock takes its place beside our previous feature the Rothko as a new poetic form inspired by a painter.
Two letters from inveterate East Village correspondent-at-large Don Yorty: a reading of Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers,” and a letter with yellow spring and sonnets.
A Poet’s Disstionary: Daniel Zimmerman’s got a word bead on ya.... floats word bombs that invite snortin’ retortin’ and gaffe-in’ guffawin’.
