“Geological Time” by Nora Delaney

from Dark Sky Magazine

Black walnut, green ash, and silver maple
stipple the ridge of the river. It cedes,
gradually, to the shore — no shoring up
the riparian zone with riprap, rock
armour, shot rock; no finger in the dike.

The sentinel trees dream of limestone caves:
silica, flint, silt, chert, clay, sand, calcite –
stone scored with more than human history.
. . .

Read the rest: http://darkskymagazine.com/magazines/nora-delaney/

Hear Nora read at U35:


Nora Delaney is a poet, translator, and an editor at The Pen and Anvil Press. Her work has appeared in The Critical Flame, Jacket, Little Star, and elsewhere. She is currently working toward her doctorate at the Editorial Institute of Boston University.

Helen Adams Read/Sings

Susan Stewart @ Boston Review

Today's National Poetry Month Boston Review poem of the day is Susan Stewart's beautiful “Piano Music for a Silent Movie”:

The gossips whisper their reproaches—
was it my fault I was too young for the war?

A muddy rain spoils every picnic‚
but the fields are thirsty‚ the farmers are poor.

My talent lies in kissing and pretending‚
and climbing barefoot up a trellis in the dark.

The neighbors are sharpening their pitchforks‚
though no one dares to tell us. In the park

I found her note pinned to a linden‚
her hair ribbon snagged in a pine

—All the world worries a lover
when all the world seems like a sign. . . .

Read the rest: http://bostonreview.net/NPM/susan_stewart.php


And keep checking the Boston Review site for more daily poems, multimedia, interviews, essasys and more in celebration of poetry month!

Dean Young, Have a Heart!

That's right folks, Dean Young found a heart donor! I hear that the surgery is through and he is in good condition.

Hurling: World's 2nd-Greatest Sport (behind baseball)

Imagine you're sprinting down a 160-yard field. As you run, you balance a tiny ball—small as a hockey puck, hard as a baseball—on the end of your stick, as in lacrosse. Except where the lacrosse stick has a woven pocket, your stick has a flat, wooden blade, and where lacrosse requires protective gear you wear neither pads nor gloves. Now imagine that your opponents are waving these same axe-like cudgels. They are coming at you from all sides, hoping to hook you from behind or block you from the front. You race down the gigantic field while considering your options. You could pass to a teammate, either with a slap of the bare hand or with a kick. No one is open, though, so you prepare to take a shot—never mind that you're still 100 yards out from the goal. You lean back and swing hard, like a baseball player at bat, feeling the satisfying reverb in your arms as you connect with the ball. — Slate

Tóibín on Beckett: Happy Birthday, Sam!

At The New York Review of Books, Colm Tóibín writes: “Beckett was interested in consciousness as a form of comedy close to tragedy and logic as a crime, its perpetrators to be punished by offering them infinite numbers of absurd logical conclusions. He loved the tension in cogito ergo sum and took a dim view of the connecting word, the ergo in the equation. Cogitating was the nightmare from which his characters were trying to awake. Being was a sour trick played on them by some force with which they are trying desperately not to reckon. Beckett produced infinite amounts of comedy about the business of thinking as boring, invalid, and quite unnecessary. His characters did not need to think in order to be, or be in order to think. They knew they existed because of the odd habits and deep discomforts of their bodies. I itch therefore I am.”

I must read more Beckett. Where to begin?

Courage and Sacrifice

“The fact is, their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. As Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing ‘serious’ or ‘courageous’ about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. And this is not a vision of the America I know.”

Ben Mazer @ Boston Review

Today at Boston Review is Ben Mazer's poem “The Exile,” which appears in the current issue of the magazine and is collected in his recent book POEMS. We also have an audio recording of the poet reading his work right in the BR offices, check it out.

I was handled by the handler’s handler
someone (I know who) had sent me to.
A mountain zephyr blew the sunlight cold.
I read the little village paper backwards
and nibbled at my ham. Coffee is birth.
I was surprised to see how things had changed
since I first dreamed I came here long ago. . . .

Read the rest (and listen to the recording) at the BR Web site.

Ron “Iron Man” Silliman

At the newly re-designed Poetry Foundation website (it's gorgeous, you should look; one wishes for an endowment as they have for everyone if it would bring such elegance to the web), Kenneth Goldsmith writes about Silliman's blog: “Ron Silliman was the Cal Ripken, Jr. of the poetry blogosphere. He was a good player, but more important, he consistently showed up for every game. And by getting up and making the donuts each morning he enacted the Long Tail theory of the web, moving so far out in front of the other poetry bloggers that he, by default, assumed the power position he came to have. In truth, he didn’t deserve it, but got it because no one else had the wherewithal to do the work. In his heyday, his output was remarkable. While he often got things wrong — very wrong — one couldn’t help but admire the effort it took to do what he did.”

For probably a year of regularly reading Ron's blog, I had no idea that he had been involved in Language, or that he was a poet of any repute. It was clear that he had his pet interests, of course: avant garde poetics, the San Francisco renaissance, being active against “quietism”. (I once emailed Ron to ask what that term meant, and he responded. I still don't know, despite reading post upon post about the quietists and myself being labeled so, which is like being called a Communist by Glen Beck: you just can't take it seriously. As Silliman retires, Beck is dismissed: what does that say? Nothing probably.) I knew that if he linked to my blog, it got hits; so, people must be reading him. And he is indeed the locus of so much poetry culture on the web that even those who hate everything he wrote were discussing his opinions. “Kingmaker” is too strong a term, but he was important for the debates he instigated. That he was established in the poetry world other than his blog was, for a long time, unclear — in that regard, Goldsmith is probably correct: most people who know Ron know his blog first.

Not irregularly, I disagreed with Ron's opinions on poetry and the merits of certain poets. The conceptual architecture of a work does not, for me, give it inherent value. My guess is that Ron and I would actually agree on many ethical principles, but we differ wildly on poetic practice. The anti-humanistic throttle of contemporary experimental poetry drives me a bit mad. How can you claim an ethical standpoint (which is what undermining hegemony is about), particularly regarding aesthetic approaches, while at once dismissing / attacking the validity of the human person, believing the person to be a dismembered, ephemeral construction? If so, why does the hegemony that controls the masses without their knowledge, and me as a "quietist", not also control an avant poet — Charles Berstein, for example? Something doesn't jib there. Or maybe I just don't feel the messiah trope.

Anyhow, I think Goldsmith is being hard on the man. I've been reading the Campbell biography of James Baldwin that levels a similar criticism of his involvement in the civil rights movement: it took away from his art. Just as Gerard Manly Hopkins should not have been a priest, and Pound should not have been a fascist. Goldsmith has us discern (he never says it) that Ron should not have been a blogger. I'm not so sure. Being a priest was as much who GMH was as being a poet; the two cannot be separated, though they seem to contradict. Blogging was part and parcel of the nature of Ron's person and of the historical moment. He wrote the blog. He did a lot to get poetry and criticism, especially experimental stuff, out to readers. He wrote The Alphabet. He edited Language. He's interested in Project Runway (I guess). These aren't discreet interests, settings, or threads to untwist. They exist as historical, malleable, and whole in the person who unifies the always contradictory elements of any personality.

Timothy Donnelly and Maureen McLane: Part 2

In Part 2 of their interview, Maureen McLane asks Boston Review Poetry Editor Timothy Donnelly, “What does poetry do for you‚ to you‚ that other modes of art-making don’t?” In the course of his reply, Timothy says:

“All of what I claim here as being what distinguishes poetry from other modes might end up being truest of relatively conventional poetry—poetry not only written in lines but attentive to the shifts in sound and sense that happen over a line break‚ poetry attentive to its musicality‚ poetry that makes use of rhythm as a means of further distinguishing poetic language from language more inclined to evanesce‚ as a means of binding it together‚ setting lines into relation‚ and acting upon the reader’s mind and even body by creating a sense of rhythmic expectation‚ which itself is like a state of vigilance‚ really. This is to say poetry that sometimes still gets referred to as ‘well-made‚’ and sometimes disparagingly‚ as if to suggest that it’s analogous to a stately bourgeois residence‚ or that it’s cleverly built but not inhabited‚ or that it’s blindly obedient to convention rather than thoughtfully pursuing what those conventions were able to accomplish so effectively.”

Looking for Part 1? You can get it Right Here.

What will happen. . .

George Kalogeris @ Slate!

This week's poem of the week at Slate is “Odysseus Seeing Laertes” by George Kalogeris!

It's getting dark, and he's still in the yard. By now
She'd be stewing over the steamy kátsaróles
She has to reheat but glad that he's finally home.

He's inspecting his favorite tree, the sour quince.
All day he's been hacking away at carcasses
Of frozen chickens, piled up on his chopping block . . .

Read the rest of the poem at Slate.

Gregory Pardlo for Boston Review

Read his poem “Palling Around” at the Boston Review website!

Timothy Donnelly and Maureen McLane

Over at the Boston Review National Poetry Month celebration, Maureen McLane interviews Poetry Editor Timothy Donnelly (published today is the first of two parts). Timothy says: “when writing, I may start out with some particular impulse or thought or idea, but as soon as I start to articulate it I find myself aware of other shades of meaning that my phrasing might suggest, and certain of them I will cultivate, and others that seem to me of less value I will try to weed out. The same goes for sound. A certain music will begin to reveal itself, assert itself, and my phrasing will want to participate in it. Again, some of the emerging notes or rhythms I will cultivate; others that seem to me less fitting or interesting I will rework. So that (at least in most cases) the writing of a poem is initiated by the articulation of a relatively vague idea or impulse, and the implications that emanate from that articulation in tandem with its sonic properties will guide the next articulation. What writing a poem demands, for me, is a constant attentiveness to the potentiality of meaning and the particularity of sound.”

Read the rest at the BR site

“Majestic Interlude” by Brett Fletcher Lauer

The rainy season is a league away traveling
at the speed of an era. The cloud formation
does not dissolve as I remove my eyes

from my palms. I can no longer walk the distance.
Insects congeal beneath my skin in order
to rest. I think of a number between one and ten

and a ditch to place my body in, shallow
enough to fill—a single spade of gravel
to cover my mouth, and one for each eye. . . .

Read the rest at the Boston Review website!

Brett Fletcher Lauer is managing director of the Poetry Society of America and poetry editor of A Public Space. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, Harper’s Magazine, jubilat, and elsewhere.

Poetry in Crisis?

At Open Letters Monthly, Joseph Wood writes: ‘While creative writing in American literature has always had camps, movements (and the prerequisite back-biting and bickering), I believe our current poetic climate is so conflicted and contentious that we have done away with talking about poems on their own organic terms. Let it be clear: I am not arguing for a return to New Criticism nor do I believe in the overtly easy-blame game of it’s the fault of those fucking universities. We live in the 21st century. What’s the point of asking to return to “the good old days” when those days would have excluded the likes of me — a working class, oddly educated, and peculiarly read writer with gaping holes in my canonical knowledge? I’m suggesting that while it is important to attend to our own academic reputations and political and aesthetic convictions, it is more important that we honor the imagination by not solely treating the poem against a singular interpretive mechanism. Poems can arrive from disparate and conflicting sources — should we not discuss how those poetic sources interact as a kinesthetic presence in our lives? Furthermore, can we believe that poems have the potential to matter to all kinds of human beings without “pandering” to the lowest common denominator? For if we fall further and further into the world of literature departments and literary criticism, we fall into a world whose axis spins, according to literary scholar Stephen Cohen, on “career-making” and “professional politics” by participating in “a self-perpetuating cycle of exaggerations, misrecognitions, and demonization”.’

“A Storm” by Laura Kasischke

In a white car‚ while
wearing a white gown‚ over
bridges and mountains‚ down
into valleys
in springtime‚ or

the ocean’s frozen over.

No. A beast with a tail made of weather
knocking a third of the stars out of heaven. . . .

Read the rest at the Boston Review #NPM celebration!

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About the poet: Laura Kasischke’s thirteen books include Space, in Chains, a collection of poems, and The Raising: A Novel. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

National Poetry Month

It's National Poetry Month! (That's #NPM for you kids on the Twitter.)

Over at the Boston Review website, we've organized a Poetry Month spectacular the likes of which ye hath never seen. There's going to be a new poem published every day for the month of April, video or audio recordings of many poets reading their work, as well as interviews, essays, and other “prosetry.” Featured poets include Rae Armantrout (whose poem “At Least” kicks off the celebration), John Ashbery, Ange Mlinko, Gregory Pardlo, Anselm Berrigan, Harmony Holiday, Harold Bloom, and more. That's in addition to our regular poetry content from the issue (poems, essays, reviews, etc.). Bookmark the BR site folks. It's going to be NPM HQ.

In addition to that, Boston Review is donating 20% off all subscription revenue for the month of April to the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. The festival takes place May 13–14th in Salem, with educational programs for students; poetry readings, workshops, and slams; local food and music; as well as a small press and magazine fair. This year's headliners are Brian Turner, Aimee Nezhukumatathil,  and Jericho Brown. When you subscribe or give a gift sub in the month of April, you support two great poetry institutions: Boston Review and the Mass Poetry Festival!