Category Archives: poetry

Regenerating My Creative Drive or Choosing Who Controls My Life

A few days ago, Tyco Garen posted about read­ing on his new kin­dle. He pointed out: My main issue is that I’m really bad at set­ting aside time to read when I’m awake enough to actu­ally read. I run into this prob­lem all the time. In fact, it’s the main rea­son I don’t read very much. I responded: I’ve [...]
Also posted in art | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

A Review of W.S. Merwin’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Book: The Shadow of Sirius

I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to start read­ing the Pulitzer Prize win­ners for lit­er­a­ture and poetry. Every time in the past, I’ve read a Pulitzer win­ner (Walk­ing to Martha’s Vine­yard and Gilead for exam­ple) I’ve always really enjoyed them. So I got W.S. Merwin’s book of poetry, The Shadow of [...]
Also posted in art, literature | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Slide from Art and Entertainment and Back Again

A week or two ago, I blogged about poetry and its lack of mass appeal. My brother com­mented and said, “Just write some poetry for us instead of for your poetry buddies.” Today, a friend of mine who’s into film was talk­ing about how he watches TV/movies on three dif­fer­ent levels: 1. base enter­tain­ment2. the analy­sis of [...]
Also posted in art | Tagged | Leave a comment

Poetry Critiquing

A few days ago, John emailed me a poem he had writ­ten. It was a pretty good poem. And even­tu­ally, we got around to email­ing about it. And that’s when I real­ized how much I missed talk­ing about poetry with peo­ple. Not so much ran­dom poetry, but the poetry that the peo­ple I’m talk­ing [...]
Posted in poetry | Tagged | Leave a comment

Art and Estrangement

Here’s an inter­est­ing quote about art from an mod­er­ately inter­est­ing review of a book by a guy named White: Draw­ing on the Russ­ian For­mal­ism of the 1920s, White main­tains that “great­ness” in art depends on “estrange­ment,” a per­cep­tion from unfa­mil­iar van­tages that then tells us some­thing “truer and more com­plete” about the world. And to estrange [...]
Also posted in art | Tagged | Leave a comment

New Poetry Up

There’s a ton of new poetry up at my poetry blog, includ­ing a cou­ple poems to peo­ple, a cou­ple of which are per­sonal enough that I feel a lit­tle uncom­fort­able post­ing them.
Also posted in links | Tagged | Leave a comment

Sam Stecher Strikes Back

Once again, Sam at Wish­ing for Fic­tion has knocked one out of the park. He’s got this amaz­ing poem called “Anony­mous Jesus.” Here’s a sample: “Mir­a­cles are not of the things I believe inbut some­time I wish I was Anony­mous JesusI don’t have a Mes­siah com­plexI just want to healwalk­ing streets and hall­ways that [...]
Also posted in links | Tagged | Leave a comment

New Poetry Up

There’s new poetry up at my poetry blog. If you’re going to say some­thing more crit­i­cal than “i like it”, feel free to com­ment. I’m espe­cially curi­ous about other reac­tions to the first draft of ‘The Next Poem You’ll Read’. It’s cer­tainly still a first draft, but I’d to hear some out­side feedback.
Posted in poetry | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Way The Medium Works

Most of the writ­ing I’ve been doing recently has been in one of those mini com­po­si­tion books, the ones that are 4.5×3.5. Sadly, I wrote “Feb ’06″ on the cover of it, and I’m barely halfway through its 80 pages. The inter­est­ing thing is to notice how the medium I write in affects my poem structure. [...]
Posted in poetry | Tagged , | Leave a comment

New Poetry Up

There’s a bit of new poetry up at my poetry blog. I real­ized tonight that I haven’t revised a poem in a seri­ous way since before I left Arkansas. I’m con­sid­er­ing hold­ing off till July–then I can call it an even year. Maybe that’s not a good idea.
Posted in poetry | Tagged | Leave a comment