[photo by thinredjellies]
Despite attacks by Charles Bernstein, Richard Howard, and others, April continues to be National Poetry Month. I understand– but don’t share– their antipathy. Honestly, I find most of the protestation to be rather ridiculous and contrived. What’s left then appears to be mostly a symptom of typical elitism [...]

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Over at One Poet’s Notes, Ed Byrne has a really good idea: the recently rich Poetry Foundation should partner up to keep Parnassus alive as a partner publication for the evolving Poetry magazine. I like the changes in Poetry but there is a limited amount of space to fit an increase the quantity and [...]

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Man writes bland article about Paul McCartney for the New Yorker. Blogger comments on article’s blandness. Much unintended hilarity ensues. The funny lesson here is that the “writer” who is upset comes off looking so poorly prepared for his job, while the “blogger who is not a writer by virtue of being a blogger” is [...]

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The question being asked by Dana Goodyear (and many, many others) remains: is Ruth Lilly’s 200 million dollar bequest to Poetry good for poetry? Depending on how you look at it this could mean the same thing as asking whether it will make poetry more popular. It might have to do with having the effect [...]

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Richard Powers on why he never touches a keyboard unless he has to, speech recognition, and the power and utility of the human voice.

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Bob Holman, Poetry Guide, has posted his selection for the Top 10 books of poetry published in 2006. What are your picks?

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From 1993-2004, the number of books in the poetry/drama category of US trade publications grew almost four times over. I have no numbers, but I imagine that small press and online publications grew at least 100x. The decline of mainstream poetry publication– like the decline of poetry publication in general– is a myth.
We can still [...]

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Eric Rosenfield thinks the short story is dead and then points to a dissection of the Best American Short Stories as proof!? BAS hasn’t been representative of the most vital aspects of the short story for decades (if ever). It, like the Best American Poetry series, is representative of a very narrow, exceedingly mainstream slice [...]

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Being a book reviewer must be fun if only for the occasional chance to sharpen one’s knives on some inane romance writer’s leathery hide.
[cosmopoetica reviews jong clitoris nixon]

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I’ve only read a few random Updike novels, though I have enjoyed a lot of his short stories, essays, and critical pieces. Watching a long interview with him on BookTV, it struck me how happy he is. Perpetually grinning, discussing even the most serious topics with a sly twinkle in his eye, Updike is clearly [...]

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Lone Star Statements, by Matthew Baldwin
“Recently, Time magazine published a list of the 100 best novels. But the praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com. A compilation of the best of the worst… about the best.”

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Gleaning from various blog posts and references, I’ve compiled a list of journals and zines that I should be reading (in the area of contemporary, other-than-mainstream, poetry). Many of them are unfamiliar to me and I’ll be ordering most of them. What’s missing?

6×6
32Poems
88
Carve
Chain
Combo
Crowd
Fence
Filling Station
Good Foot
Kiosk
Lipstick Eleven
Magazine Cypress
Quid
Small Town
Spinning Jenny
Syllogism
The Canary
The Hat
The Poker
The Tangent
The Tiny
Zazil

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Remember when Alan Sokal published a gibberish paper in Social Text and people around the world proclaimed the death of postmodern literary theory and the exposure of the post-structuralist Emperor’s lack of clothes?
Now that MIT students have done the same thing in a scientific journal, I expect all those pathetic naysayers to join hands and [...]

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Brennen Wysong responds to Nathaniel Tarn’s letter to The Poker (if you aren’t a subscriber, you should be). Besides feeling a small shiver of recognition in Brennen’s feelings trying to understand Steven Evans, I too thought that Tarn’s letter got at something important about the way contemporary poets and poetry work.
Tarn’s contention that almost every [...]

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The last time I thought about the Best American Poetry series was in mid-September, when I wondered out loud whether or not all the usual suspects would still condemn the series now that Kasey Mohammed (and one of his students) are appearing there. That was actually around the time I stopped reading any poetry blogs. [...]

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I’ve been reading through the Poetry Daily Anthology [Amazon]and it’s not bad! Certainly all “mainstream” poetry, and while I admire trying to do something different with the layout, the whole physical presentation is a bit garish– particularly the cover. But there are some wonderful poems here. A lot of familiar names (some because I know [...]

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I’m interested in what editors do and how they do it because I might find myself serving in that capacity again… and the last time around I didn’t do the job properly. Unlike the work of the author– where I have some sympathy with the notion that “talking about it” is not only a waste [...]

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There is a small-scale discussion on one of the mailing lists I am subscribed to that is circling around the sometimes-incestous relationship between publishers, editors, and writers (stemming in part from a pointer to foetry).
In my latest (and likely last) contribution, I contended that while it is easy to publish authors one knows and types [...]

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