“It happened in the sand dunes, so I’m told. I don’t remember.“
Cordite Poetry Review issue 108 is now live. The issue has the theme of Dedication, and it contains my poem ‘Broken (interaction)’.
Many thanks to editors Lou Garcia-Dolnik, Luke Patterson, and Kent MacCarter!
You can read the poem here: ‘Broken (interaction)‘
I’m delighted that three of my experimental poems went live at Dream Pop today.
The poems are ‘2600 hertz’, ‘Lamplighter variance (2)’ and ‘Lamplighter variance (3)’.
You can read them at Dream Pop.
Many thanks to the editors Isobel O’Hare and Carleen Tibbetts!
Delighted to end the year with a poem in Perverse.
‘You may begin‘ started with two lines I had cut from a different poem but still wanted to explore. I was interested in the idea of trying, and failing, to give up on writing about a landscape.
You can read the poem here: You may begin
Many thanks to editor ChrissyWillisams!
Very pleased that two of my poems appear in issue 11 of The Shore.
The poems are The Gallery and No mountains, great lakes, cliffs,
Thank you to the editorial team!
Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal. I exaggerate, of course.
— Robert Lowell, National Book Award acceptance speech, November 1960
The award was for Life Studies.
Delighted to say that The Interpreter’s House issue 68 is out, the final issue edited by Martin Malone and assistant Charles Lauder Jnr. I’m delighted my poem ‘The Cooler’ is included, my second appearance in TIH after two of my poems appeared in issue 58. Thanks to Martin and Charles.
It’s a great journal, 130 pages of always interesting poetry and reviews, and I look forward to seeing the next issues from editor Georgi Gill and assistant Andrew Wells.
The Summer 2017 issue of fantasy zine Mirror Dance has gone live, with a theme of masks and disguises.
As well as fiction, it contains poems by Jeana Jorgensen, Mary Soon Lee, Todd Dillard and Robert Beveridge.
Delighted that it also includes my long poem ‘Sheer‘, a fairy tale retelling, or perhaps a fairy tale slice-of-life.
Thanks to Megan Arkenberg!
The eleventh issue of Liminality has gone live today.
I’m very pleased that my poem ‘The Well‘ is included, my fourth appearance in the journal.
Thanks to Shira Lipkin and Mattie Joiner!
In 1958, in July, [Wright] wrote me a letter (I’m sure similar letters went to others) in which he announced that he was through writing poems. […] The first issue of Robert Bly’s magazine, The Fifties, which he read at this crucial point, arrived like a reproach. (He did not yet know Bly.) He told me: “So I quit. I have been betraying whatever was true and courageous […] in myself and in everyone else for so long, that I am still fairly convinced that I have killed it. So I quit.” In the letter he called himself “a literary operator (and one of the slickest, cleverest, most ‘charming’ concoctors of the do-it-yourself New Yorker verse among all current failures) […]”
A day later he wrote again, admitting that “I can’t quit and go straight. I’m too deep in debt to the Olympian syndicate. They’d rub me out.” (This is Roethke talk, who during mania often alluded to The Mob.)
— from Donald Hall, introduction to James Wright, Above the River (1992), p. 29-30
Penelope’s situation (in Homer, of course, it’s a death shroud she’s weaving) seems to me an interesting figure for the predicament of the writer or artist: making something, ripping it up, making something, ripping it up, all the while vaguely hoping for one’s ship to come in, whatever that would mean, with nobody in the immediate vicinity paying much attention.
–Joseph Harrison, note on ‘The Cretonnes of Penelope’ in The Best American Poetry 1998, ed. John Hollander and David Lehman, p.302
A.D. Harper 