Last Bender

By way of Henry Gould I’ve been reading poet John Latta’s blog: http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/. He writes in the Homage to Sextus Propertius mode but his echoes range much farther than that, and the poets he quotes! I love anyone whose scorn for the fatuous, flatulent poetasters of Flarffff and Lingo and Pobiz and POST doesn’t lead him [...]

  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   [...]

i was knocking about Silliman’s blog and read his August 18th piece on Joel Lewis. A great find. I’ve shelved the one book my library has of his, I’m sure, but haven’t read him. A quick google search turned up this gem: http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs06/Lewis.htm and these: http://web.njit.edu/~newrev/v2s1/r.html and these: http://jacketmagazine.com/07/lewisjoel.html well, thanks Ron, a new poet to read. [...]

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 [...]

  From: The Temple of Glas By John Lydgate 1370-1451 For thought, constraint, and grievous hevines, For pensifhede, and for heigh distress, To bed I went now this other nyght, Whan that Lucina with her pale light Was Ioyned last with Phebus in aquaria Amyd decembre, when of Ianuarie Ther be kalendes of the new [...]

A Luxury of Primes: Jack Gilbert   Why is Jack Gilbert’s book Monolithos only available used, starting at the royal price of $75.00?   Because it is out of print and because it is one of the most moving and brilliant books of poetry of the 20th century. No one ever sells their copy, they [...]

The Sacerdotal Clowns   Surrealism is too massive a topic for a blogh entry, but I would like to mention three American poets whose work I’ve always loved and who are in one way or another surrealists. Surrealism is more than an aesthetic movement, it is an entire orientation towards reality and art, and is [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]