for your perusal, nikki giovanni's remarks from the wednesday memorial service at va. tech.

( nikki giovanni's remarks )

there are very few, joyful and irreverent poets, but it seems to me that the ones who pull the combination off--that combination of gumption and grace, with a touch of wonder--are women. this is also likely my bias. i think that i would find aggressive irreverence in a male poet off putting--a sign of artlessness and hubris--the literary equivalent ( Read more... )

some of you will remember this. i had almost forgotten, but thanks to the random feature on my music player i was reminded of the ( the slant )

i thought, it's the first day of spring,
i shall mark the occasion with a poem!
but damned if i could find any verse
that wasn't expressly about april (it's cruelty
roundly praised). i guess i should not be surprised.
poets take their time, tending to awaken
late. finally, they emerge from their winter
seclusion, tardy but warm.

i recently bought a collection of ted kooser's work called flying at night. old teddy is very much a rural midwesterner and he mostly writes about his life. although his life experiences are vastly different from mine, i find that i relate to his work in a very personal way. it's not the subjects of the poems that stimulate that place in me that ( Read more... )

minneapolis is full of witchy old bookstores. when i used to visit A there, we would drive around the older parts of the college town admiring the weird mix of architetures--from colonial columns and urban greystones to ultra-modern grey stucco--and stopping at the creakyist bookshops we could find. most of the owners were middle-aged women who ( Read more... )

so, i finally caught up with my friend D yesterday and among other delights, he acquainted me with a new poet. ( carl dennis )

mercyI ( Read more... )

did you know that there were poems about how much it sucks to write papers that exist outside the journals of teenaged college students? me either. but i was tooling around some poetry pages today and found this little ( diddy )

there just isn't anything wrong with czeslaw milosz. i keep trying to discover a single bad poem penned by this recently late and eternally great poet, but i have always been and happily remain, completely unsuccessful in that endeavor. have a look at this unexpectedly hopeful piece: ( account )