The serious scholarly activity of PhD poets, sane and measured as it is, or purports to be, is simply professionalism, ventriloquism, transvestism. In the arts there are no rational theses, just the dressed up rantings of hallucinating primitives. Poets are witch doctors in suits, shamans with TVs, witches who ride old Volvos instead of broomsticks. [...]
On False Naivete
Not long ago i sent my curmudgeonly friend Philip a Kimya Dawson song I like, and he sent back a curmudgeonly reply, to the effect that he loathes Kimya Dawson and all of her ilk because he loathes false naiveté. I do still love the song I sent (Underground) but find his analysis [...]
Farfalla Press blog has posted a YouTube recording of Weldon Kees reading three poems. Weldon Kees has been a favorite poet of mine for years, since Bill Ford, my formalist adversary, introduced me to him. Farfalla has also put me in their links, so I happily reciprocate. http://farfallapress.blogspot.com/ . The other poet I associate with [...]
I’ve always worked on Maggie’s farm. I’ve always hoped and dreamed there was a way out but Maggie’s farm has grown from one end of the universe to the other . Maggie’s farm has flattened the earth. You can’t walk out of it. There is no edge or beyond.
“I try so hard to be just [...]
Here’s a good poem for a bleak day, by Yeats, at the end of his life. Some poets you admire and some you love. Milton and Wordsworth I admire. Coleridge and Yeats I love.
A Stick of Incense
Whence did all that fury come,
From empty tomb or Virgin womb?
St Joseph thought the world would melt
But liked the way [...]
Le Ventre de Ma Mere: Blaise Cendrars
My Mother’s Belly
It was my first residence
It was quite round
Often I imagine
What I must have been like…
My feet on your heart mama
My knees tight against your liver
My hand grasping the canal
That ended at your belly
My back twisted into a spiral
My ears filled my eyes empty
Tightly curled up
My head almost [...]
The Triumph of Life
In many ways Shelley is the most difficult of the Romantic poets. Blake also wrote long difficult works of personal mythology, is apocalyptic in sensibility and can be read as a weird sort of Platonist. Both poets are capable of sustained surreal and grotesque imagery and both were exercised by the similar [...]
Item I give to Sire Denis
Hesselin, Elect of Paris
The fourteen hogsheads of Aulnis wine
I risked my neck to steal from Turgis
If he drinks enough of it to place
In jeopardy his good sense and reason
Then put water in the barrels
Wine wrecks many a happy home.
Francoise Villon
The testament 1014-1021
Gallway Kinnell, trans.
Robert Herrick 1591-1674
Herrick is a poet I have loved since my early twenties, but I’m not sure how I found him. Perhaps in a Norton Anthology? Or Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading? Who knows. He’s often crossed with his emotional opposite, austere old Herbert. I admire Herbert as a poet, but I love Herrick. Herrick [...]
Thomas Hardy
These are perfect sonnets by the master. His thought is crabbed, his metre a little eccentric at times, so that he reminds me of Emily Dickinson, but also of Sydney and Shakespeare, who contorted themselves to fit the little sonnet, and of Yeats, especially the first of the She, to Him poems, which I [...]
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