Poetry, You Win

Poetry Magazine

Then, recently, a friend who is, like, a for-real legit poet gave me a book of poems by John Ashbery, and I was like, damn. This is the real deal. I’m not ready for this. It had been a long time since I’d read any poems at all, and I considered carrying the book around and pretending I was reading it, like everyone did with Infinite Jest when it came out, so that I’d either absorb its contents through osmosis or I’d eventually be so bored that I’d actually crack it open and read it. But it was kinda too heavy to carry around so I just stuck it on a shelf and forgot about it. I finally dragged it out months later out of guilt and shame, and, holy shit! I didn’t know words could be this good!

Girl is a gun, a gun, a gun

We Bleed Words

Does this title strike you? It sure did me.

It came just as a woman friend and I were doing a series of emails about violence - after the Vegas shooter was in the headlines. One thing we can all agree on (all of us) was the violence against us, in our lives, especially our young lives. And how everyone covered this up.

This gal writes poetry, although she sometimes denies it.  Poetry has the advantage of extreme condensation of emotion in textual form.

The Land of Lost Content

NY Review

This review is almost a book in itself. It secures Mark Ford's reputation - and at the same time, the Review's reputation as the premier arbitrator of English Literature - American and British.

I quote one stanza:

But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.

I bought the Kindle version for $15.

ModPo Penn

Introductory Video: Modern Poetry - Al Filreis - University of Pennsylvania

This is a MOOC, an online class - about Poetry. I am taking it for the second time.

Many of the additional videos, shown to the right on YouTube - are about software. Is there a connection between these two activities?

YouTube seems to think so, and so do I!

David Whyte

TED

This guy is a poet - nothing unusual about that, there are thousands of them out there. But he has made a good living this way - doing his own road show, letting people hear (and see) what a real poet looks like.

People really want to know - and he has to satisfy them that he is real. Mainly by quoting his own poetry - and putting that into context. As he does here.

I saw him this way, back when I was working in Silicon Valley, in the Nineties. We have both aged since then, but his message has become even more forceful:

I work with the conversational nature of reality.

Evidently he is part Irish - making his own contribution (as many others have) to English Lit.