One thing I'd ask for folks, who enjoy the poetry they read here, to do, is support the writers we highlight. I know a few folks have commented that they've purchased the books. In most cases you can get them pretty cheap on Amazon, or even better, at your local independent bookstore. Just a note on keeping the art of alive. The audience for poetry is, regrettably, so small these days. But the art is so important. Frankly, I believe all writers, starting out, should study, and write, poetry. You will most certainly not end up being a poet, and most of what you write will suck--I know this all too well--but when you go to other forms, you will know things that your peers don't. Poetry focuses on many of the essentials of writing, but it does it in a concentrated form. The great Thomas Sayers Ellis once told me poetry doesn't belong to poets. In other words other writers can benefit from spending some time studying--and deploying--the art.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
"[. . .] you will no things that your peers don't."
And, by way of reply to that bit of poetic serendipity: you will yes things that your peers can't.
“J’ai embrasse l’aube d’été….
“La première entreprise fut, dans le sentier déjà empli de frais et blâmes éclats, une fleur qui me dit son nom.
Je ris au wasserfall…
A la grand’ville, elle fuyait parmi les clochers et les dômes, et, courant comme un mendiant sur les quais de marbre, je la chassais.” (“Aube,” Les Illuminations, Arthur Rimbaud)
“I embraced the dawn of summer….
The first adventure was, when on a path already filled with fresh and pale shafts of light, a flower whispered its name to me.
I laughed at the cascade…
Downtown she fled among the buildings, and like a beggar on the marble steps, I chased after.” (“Dawn,” The Illuminations, Arthur Rimbaud)
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
From Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas"
That opening still kills me.
RE: Amazon vs. Indie Book Stores, and keeping small markets alive
Poets and other writers whose work is published in small quantities and who do most of their marketing by word of mouth and self-financed book tours and readings should consider self-publishing and distributing to Amazon directly. The percentage of each sale that end up in their pocket via self-distro to Amazon (and other outlets) is way way way higher than going through traditional publishing/distro models.
Yeah, I know. Talking money isn't as romantic as talking stanzas, but poets gotta eat too!
I forget if you like being corrected, but there's a mistake towards the end of that "You will most certainly not end up being a poet" sentence. I mainly don't read poetry anymore because 98% of the new stuff is really poor. You know, Plath-influenced tripe, or... well I don't need to break it down, you know what I'm talking about.
Asher,
You are only half right and even the half's no reaon not to read the old stuff.
Yes, the old stuff is still good. But it's just not how I think. I prefer to read a good legal opinion, or watch a good Godard movie. Unless we're talking something really old, like Milton. But past 1870 or so, not much grabs me. And the stuff that is good has become so cliched. Like how many times have you heard someone invoke Yeats's Second Coming in conversation about totalitarianism, Stalinism, Islamic fanaticism, or just the dangers of electing Sarah Palin? Probably way too many. To the point where it makes the poem itself seem trite.
you chickenhawk i haul berefture
up past a county cordon,
blame hypertexture, count the late
reddest trees that a blue candor keeps its date.
I was recently turned on to poetry by David Whyte and his radical CD collection Clear Mind Wild Heart. He talks about using poetry to bring the conversation of your life closer to a vital edge. He reads a poem and talks about how the poet, with her voice, grows around the subject in a way that the straight line of prose cannot.
I can't recommend it more.
Just an FYI because it profoundly influenced me and the way I engage life.
Best rgds,
Jack
Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
-William Carlos Williams
Hey, as someone who spent twenty-five years as an independent bookseller, I just wanted to say thanks for plugging indie bookstores. Small point, I know, but they need all the support they can get these days, so....thanks again.
"I forget if you like corrected"
But just in case you were on tenterhooks about whether there was a typo in your post, I'll make sure to point it out. Important stuff.
I think there was a 'being' in that sentence, Gramsci. Have you actually read Gramsci? Because I... haven't. And don't really intend to. I feel like I'm pretty young to already be closing the door on ever becoming literate about this or that, but I don't think I'll ever really spend much time on Hegel or Althusser or Hardt and Negri. I mean, maybe Hegel.
The key is not to dive indiscriminately into stuff. If you start "The Phenomenology of Spirit" from the beginning you'll quit it very soon. You might read Charles Taylor's Hegel as an introduction. Althusser, Hardt and Negri you can wait on.
Now, as for Gramsci. Maybe start with "The Modern Prince" or "Americanism and Fordism" in the Prison Notebooks. Then imagine a hunchbacked, sickly guy in prison throwing this together, often by remembering excerpts from books he read years before.
I heard Andrei Codrescu say a few years ago (in that godmother of all indie bookstores, City Lights): "I get all my best news from poets." And it's more true than we know.
The older I get, the more I tend to go to the poets first.
" —It takes me so long to read the 'paper,
said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker,
because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, including the corpses, pal.'"
-- John Berryman
T, I will (logically enough) beg to differ with you. While you can pick the books up for less elsewhere, the independent bookstores are still the place poets, small and large presses call for support, especially emerging voices.
I know the convenience of Amazon is seductive, but seeing and hearing the poet read in a bookshop conveys a great deal more than simply reading the words on a page. You and I both know the interesting post-publication self-editing that takes place: a line break changes, a word is substituted, a line dropped entirely. Also, think of the all the poets who read well, but their poetry does not stand up and speak on the page.
The rhythm and song of the poet is there in person in a way that never caught on a produced audiobook--the interaction with the audience, the small intros to special poems written after a lover breaks things off, the death of family. Carolyn Forche, Willie Perdomo, Sonia Sanchez and so many more bring themselves fully to their audiences, not to mention the pandemonium that folks like Tom Sayers Ellis, Kevin Powell & Raz Baraka created back in the day.
A room full of people--intently listening together--creates community in a way Amazon never will.
A Study Of Reading Habits
Philip Larkin
When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
From A Latin Primer, by Derek Walcott, who is the man:
In tweed jacket and tie
a master at my college
I watched the old words dry
like seaweed on the page.
I'd muse from the roofed harbour
back to my desk, the boys'
heads plunged in paper
softly as porpoises.
The discipline I preached
made me a hypocrite;
their lithe black bodies, beached,
would die in dialect;
I spun the globe's meridian,
showed its sealed hemispheres,
but where were those brows heading
when neither world was theirs?
Silence clogged my ears
with cotton, a cloud's noise;
I climbed white tiered arenas
trying to find my voice,
and I remember: it was on a
Saturday near noon, at Vigie,
that my heart, rounding the corner
of Half-Moon Battery,
stopped to watch the foundry
of midday cast in bronze
the trunk of a gommier tree
on a sea without seasons,
while ochre Rat Island
was nibbling the sea's lace,
that a frigate bird came sailing
through a tree's net, to raise
its emblem in the cirrus,
named with the common sense
of fishermen: sea scissors,
Fregata magnificens,
ciseau-la-mer, the patois
for its cloud-cutting course;
and that native metaphor
made by the strokes of oars,
with one wing beat for scansion,
that slowly levelling V
made one with my horizon
as it sailed steadily
beyond the sheep-nibbled colums
of fallen marble trees,
or the roofless pillars once
sacred to Hercules.
Damn, Ta-Nehisi, I desert you for a few days and miss this one?
Poetry gives you the ear. It tunes you up. It forces upon you the sense of cadence, the weight of words. I know some fantastic poets, though all I can say is that studying (more than writing) poetry made me better at prose.
The small poetry presses have their own websites these days, mostly. Support 'em. (Martin Amis wrote a fun story about a world in which sci-fi novelists and poets had the opposite fortunes to the real world. Dig it out.)
Mr. Gorski sounds suspiously like Hedley Lamar in "Blazing Saddles." Thank you Harvey Korman and thanks to one of the most prescient and funniest political satirists of all, Mel Brooks.