Monthly Archive:: March 2010
Wordsworth at Passover
Guest post by Alicia Jo Rabins One of the fantastic things about the Torah as a literary work is how it combines impossibly broad swaths of narrative (the world is created, a flood destroys it, etc.) with precise details (Rachel, having stolen her father’s idols and hidden them
Shall I Compare Thee to a Taco Bell?: Pop in Poetry
Guest post by Peter B. Hyland In 1877, Joseph Ray, M.D.–“late professor in Woodward College”–published Ray’s New Practical Arithmetic. I own a copy for some reason, part of a small collection of nineteenth-century books that my father-in-law gave me, containing everything from an abridged version of Livingstone and Stanley
Travel, Tor House, and Negative Capability
Guest post by James Arthur During the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to have some opportunities to travel, and not surprisingly, the places I’ve visited have begun showing up in my poems. In fact, these days when I sit down to write, I usually begin by flipping
Spiritual Twins, Poetry Chavrutas
Guest post by Alicia Jo Rabins There’s nothing like those years when you don’t yet have what you are working for. There’s a lot of freedom because there’s so much possibility. You need friends who are working for something, too…Everything starts with an all-night conversation. Find a spiritual
Broken Plank & Immortal Veil
Guest post by Peter B. Hyland In book five of The Odyssey, the sea goddess Ino comes to the aid of a storm-tossed Odysseus. She emerges from the waves and loans him her veil, a talisman that ensures he will arrive in one piece on the island of Scheria,
Extreme Isolation
Guest post by James Arthur Several years ago, I had a brief, obsessive relationship with Winged Migration, a 98-minute documentary about birds, and I went to see it three times in theaters around Seattle. To my outrage, every time I saw the movie, there were people in the audience
Real Risk: Writing as a Performance Art
Guest post by Alicia Jo Rabins A palace must have passages….a poem must have transitions. –Samuel Johnson (via Barbara Guest) In making poems, we cross from the known to the unknown. We destroy the drywall of the consciousness-room we’ve been living in, look at the sky beyond, and then
You Talk Funny: Some Notes on Accessibility and Poetry
Guest post by Peter B. Hyland At a dinner event last week, I met an engaging lawyer who was very interested in the fact that I write poetry. He had an enthusiasm for wanting to read poems, but admitted that he rarely does. His explanation was familiar–poetry can be
The Bottom of the Mere
Guest post by James Arthur I’d like to think that although poetic styles change, as they should, the themes of poetry are more durable: that poets will keep writing love poems, for example, as long as romantic love exists, and writing elegies as long as there is death, because
Cleveland and the Art of Living
“The Full Cleveland and the Salon of the Refused”: Part II Guest post by Alicia Jo Rabins Read Part I here. III. Julie Patton, an artist, writer, visionary and teacher with roots in Cleveland, asked this question (about Cleveland the place, not Cleveland the suit from last week) in
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