I frequent an independent local coffee shop (The Grind), attached to a video rental place (The Groove). And by "frequent" I mean I walk there almost every day after work and hang out for 1-4 hours. Their "genre of the week" $1 rentals rock, they sell vegan donuts,

They co-sponsor a monthly open mic night, where people mostly perform music. It's gotten rather popular, about 100 people came to the last one. I read two recent poems, the first time I have read in front of an audience in many years. I was very nervous up until I got to the front and then it felt natural and easy. I was pleased with the response and promised several people I would read at least one fisting poem next time. It really re-energized me with regard to my writing, and boosted my confidence.

Paul Zukofsky posted this notice about his father's work, saying that, among other things, grad students need permission to quote his father in their dissertations and people can't post pieces of his father's poems on their blogs. It's a really, really bitter post and fails to realize that "fair use" encompasses things he doesn't agree with as well as those he does. Responses have been . . . interesting.

It seems (so incredibly wrong-headed & crazy) like it must be a joke, or a publicity stunt to regain some general interest in LZ's work (outside of the dedicated circle, already committed). Maybe not. I have it on good word that it is very likely sincere, as paranoid and deluded as it may seem. -Daniel E. Pritchard

But even if you grant him that he owns the copyright and therefore should be paid for citations, why would someone want to prevent people from studying Zukofsky’s work? Why so aggressive, and even threatening (and not even to a specific person who might actually have been an ass, but to anyone in general who is (thinking of) doing scholarly work on Zukofsky). -jeroenn

The tenor of his notice . . . sounds to me in the voice of someone deeply alienated from humanity, a condition that, were it my own, I would find extremely painful. -J F Quackenbush

Unsurprisingly, there are now half-a-dozen scanned copies of LZ's masterwork "A" circulating teh interwebs. Don't worry Paul, I'm sure they won't stoop to reading it! -Ben H.

If you look at the poets who sell the most copies you will notice that, like Eliot, they are quoted everywhere. Quotation is advertising. Poets who aren’t quoted fade into obscurity. Who is going to pay to promote a poet by quoting snippets from his work? Not even I. -Dirk Johnson

I'd sure love to buy a copy of your dad's book "A", but it's, like, impossible to find, yo! -Bryan Coffelt

Srsly. There's one book in print, a collection of his selected poems. Barnes and Noble and Borders don't sell it in their stores. Copies of "A," which is supposed to be his seminal work, can't be found in English online for less than $70. Paul, dude. A good way to make money from your dad's poetry would be, like, making it so people could buy it.

R. Crumb has given interviews saying his graphic novel version of Genesis is pretty close to a literal translation. He didn't satirize it, he just illustrated what actually happens. Of course, Christian spokespeople are furious. There is sex! It's violent! It's like they have never read the damn Bible before.
"It seems wholly inappropriate for what is essentially God's rescue plan for mankind. If you are going to publish your own version of the Bible it must be done with a great deal of sensitivity. The Bible is a very important text to many many people and should be treated with the respect it deserves."
Of course not everyone interviewed is crazy, just the person quoted first. It would not be much of a story if they gave up when they found a few ministers who said, "Eh, whatever."
-Jessa Crispin

A look at the women who write Twilight "smut fan fiction," to fill the "people who take obsessions with young adult fiction to a kind of creepy extreme"-shaped hole in your heart. -Michael Schaub

In fiction, you're damned if you hew too close to the facts, and you're damned if you change them: you can't win. The intensity with which I engaged with these characters – and thus with the real people who loosely inspired them – was a tribute of a sort, even if the results of that scrutiny were not always kind; how would my family feel if over a lifetime I never wrote about them at all? -Lionel Shriver: I sold my family for a novel

I had always believed that a good poem can stand on its own, that it made no difference if some creep you’d never want to meet in your life wrote it; but, obviously, that’s not how it is with many readers. -"That Domineering Creature Called the 'I'" -Charles Simic

In "Grammar Questions," the narrator looks at her father's dying, considering the grammatical angles: "I don't know if there is a 'he,' even though people will say 'He is dead.' But it does seem correct to say 'he is dead.' This may be the last time he will still be 'he' in the present tense. Or it will not be the last time, because I will also say, 'He is lying in his coffin.' I will not say, and no one will say, 'It is lying in the coffin,' or 'It is lying in its coffin.' " Here is the translator/fiction writer revealing the possibilities (and impossibility) of objective language. -BOOK REVIEW 'The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis' by Lydia Davis By Susan Salter Reynolds

I am not a musician—people often ask me this, and I’m not sure why—especially because if I was a musician, that’s so much cooler, why would I be a poet? Though there’s that thing that if someone writes well, a fiction writer or a musician say, people declare that he or she is a “poet.” This is frustrating, needless to say—you work all your life to craft actual poems and all the poetry belongs to Bob Dylan. Who I love, by the by, I just don’t feel he needs to be a poet for me to love him, or justify my love (to quote Madonna, qua Lenny Kravitz, which I never thought I’d do). -Kevin Young Interview -Mary Donnelly

Doctors swear an oath to do no harm. For this project, I've taken an oath to lose no money. -Doctorow's Project: With a Little Help

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

So I'm reading literary criticism on Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market" and maybe it's just the sort of mood that studying 19th Century literature puts one in but I thought this summary of what happens after Laura eats the goblins' fruit was hilarious:

Coming home in a nigh bulimic buzz, she brushes aside her sister Lizzie's scolding with a promise to go out again the next night and get more fruit for both of them. As that next night falls, Laura finishes up her farm chores and goes out cruising for goblin. But she can't score: frustrated at first to find no goblin on the scene, she then learns to her horror that, while Lizzie can hear the vendors as usual, she herself has gone stone-deaf to their cry. . . . Lizzie races home in an afterglow of ecstatic renunciation (remember, it's a Victorian poem) and invites Laura to "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices ... Eat me, drink me, love me" (don't worry, it's a Victorian poem). Aghast at Lizzie's apparent sacrifice, yet obedient to an addict's need, Laura ingests the pulpy juice, only to have it work as a homeopathic antidote kicking her into a high-speed delirium, from which she recovers Completely Cured.

Tucker, Herbert F. "Rossetti's Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye." Representations 82 (Spring 2003): 117-133.

Candidates, who must be published poets and five-year residents of the county, will be expected to do more than come up with the write stuff. One of the new laureate's duties will be to undertake a project to make poetry more available and accessible to people in their everyday lives.
Silicon Valley is going to get a poet laureate.


Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.
Alien vs. Predator by Michael Robbins

Here's an interview with the poet.


There are plenty of intellectual heavyweights, English literature dons even, who have never read Joyce's Ulysses. It's an amazing book (I've read it twice, but only so I could boast that I'd read it twice) but there's nothing in there that you can't crib just as well from the brilliant essay Nabokov once wrote, summarising the plot and pointing up the clever bits.
You don't have to read John Updike. As if I needed permission.


Outside the (Grand Army Plaza branch) library, I found that the seat of my bicycle had been stolen. Is this a great country or what?
Jonathan Safran Foer, on where he writes.

I THINK I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;
And all my pretty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.



II

TIME does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, -- so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

for George Kirstein

Always the setting forth was the same,
Same sea, same dangers waiting for him
As though he had got nowhere but older.
Behind him on the receding shore
The identical reproaches, and somewhere
Out before him, the unraveling patience
He was wedded to. There were the islands
Each with its woman and twining welcome
To be navigated, and one to call "home."
The knowledge of all that he betrayed
Grew till it was the same whether he stayed
Or went. Therefore he went. And what wonder
If sometimes he could not remember
Which was the one who wished on his departure
Perils that he could never sail through,
And which, improbable, remote, and true,
Was the one he kept sailing home to?