Sam Hamill: Old Bones
I. All the quiet afternoon splitting wood, thinking about books, I remembered Snyder making a handle for an ax as he remembered Ezra Pound thirty years before, thinking about Lu … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: Word Gluttons and Rhythm Sluts, Book Letches and Paragraph Drunks — The Magic of Metaphor
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. –Pablo Picasso With your permission I’d like to take a few minutes … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: From this Rubble
From this rubble I reach down and retrieve a poem that requires no electronics just a sharp rock to scratch it out on another rock. There. Done. Now I climb … Continue reading
Jose Padua: Notes from a Poem Rewritten while Listening to Prince
The first protest I ever attended was on a beautiful spring day and I was asked to leave. because I wasn’t animated enough for a spring day or for a … Continue reading
Audio: Muddy Waters performs ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’
Written by Willie Dixon and first recorded in 1954 by McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, the father of Chicago blues. McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983), better … Continue reading
Jose Padua: The River after David Foster Wallace
Every love story may be a ghost story but some may also be stories about assassination and greed, depending on who’s in love and who the ghosts are and if … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: In Praise of the Sentence
What do cocktail party talk and poetry have in common? Like Barbara Hamby at the end of her gorgeous “Millennium Rave,” I come to praise the sentence in poetry “in … Continue reading
Alice Friman: What Is This Thing Called ‘Voice’?
To my way of thinking, your poetry matches who you are. Not just in the subject matter you choose or that chooses you, or even in the words you select, … Continue reading
Celeste Gainey: between takes
Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese, dir.) Columbus Circle, summer 1975 . De Niro idles in his Checker. Cybill flirts behind her Jackie-Os. Scorsese sucks oxygen from a tiny tank trailed by … Continue reading
Ed Ochester: Poetry
I too dislike it the mystified truisms the dusty puzzle-prunes the theatrical exaggerations: “the brutal crescendo of woodworms”— yet I think of O’Hara’s delight in the endless pleasures of quotidian … Continue reading
Video: “Father Death Blues” sung by Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the … Continue reading
Video: Alan Watts — Can we change the world?
In this 1971 video, philosopher Alan Watts talks about the problem with trying to change the world. — Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a … Continue reading
Jose Padua: A Simple Declaration of my Personal Philosophy
Efficiency is the enemy of art, purity the death of the soul. Curses are rarely stranded at the tip of my tongue, and the blades I work with are dull … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Singles Ad
Old, that is, damn near seventy two, but possessed. You must be able to love the inconvenience of the hot coal in my heart that goes white hot with breath. … Continue reading
