Art makes problems by solving problems, I tell students, and solves problems by making problems. After stepping away from the writing desk for some time―COVID chaos, teaching obligations, family preoccupations―I returned to it disenchanted with problems of received forms and accentual-syllabic verse. Where better to turn than the prose poem? Russell Edson defined the prose poem as “a burst of language following a collision with a large piece for furniture.” No injuries occurred during the making of this poem.
Joseph J. Capista on "Myth" |
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"Hettie Jones, Poet and Author Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 90"
"Ms. Jones was the author of 20 books, many of them works for children and young adults that focused on Black and Native American themes. Among them was Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music (1974), which included the biographies of Ma Rainey, Mahalia Jackson and Billie Holiday. Her first book of poetry, Drive, was published in 1997, and she went on to publish two more collections."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Ian U Lockaby on Edward Salem's "Fullness"
"In Edward Salem’s poem “Fullness,” thought is derailed, not from the first instant but nearly, and in each subsequent instant the poem expands and contracts simultaneously in a dissent against time and space, as it leads us to a divine, non-existent anal inner mountain, where there is nothing (and everything) to be seen (at once). Operating intertextually with a Godhead in its poetics of negation, the poem manages, paradoxically, to build possibility through its persistent negations. Each time a line of argument becomes discernable, it’s quickly and forcefully wrought back around its own tail, creating coils of energy in refusal." |
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