Jack Kerouac coined the phrased “Beat Generation” in 1948, the year Jack Foley opens his chronology of West Coast poetry, his rich syllabus of literary, political, and sociological texts that define a bygone era. Nineteen-forty-eight was seminal in other ways, as well, announcing the publication of Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (New Directions). T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize, Denise Levertov emigrated to the U.S., and William Everson, whose The Residual Years was newly published, became Brother Antoninus after speaking with God. The following year, Marcel Duchamp lectured at the SF Museum of Art and the Hungary i opened. A new radio station, KPFA, began broadcasting Jarmie de Angulo’s Indian Tales. DH Lawrence came out with his Selected Poems (New Directions), with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth, who took the metrics of Hopkins and Bridges to task, and dismissed the idealized, stilted ways of writing of old masters like Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold. “Sermonizing,” he called it.
Walking the Poem–Landscapes in Hardy, Dickinson, and Ammons
Recently I had the pleasure of Walking the Poem–landscapes in Hardy, Dickinson, Ammons, and others–with the poet Hilde Weisart. We studied the landscapes of more contemporary poets, too, including Maurice Manning and Jane Kenyon. Our workshop, “Walking the Poem,” took place on the lovely, leafy green campus of Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington. Here are […]
Poetic Reveries on the Human Condition
My full review of Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion is now on Poetry Flash. In her new book Stay, Illusion (Knopf, 2013), Brock-Broido’s gorgeous jottings, reveries on the human condition in the early 21st Century by a woman in mid-life––the poet seeks to find and offer to other solace in a heart-breaking world. Living as she does […]
Zen Poetry from a life of travel and Buddhist practice by Elaine Starkman
Hearing Beyond Sound: New and Collected Poems y Elaine M. Starkman Many of the poems in this collection draw on Starkman’s travels to Israel and Europe, and on her lifelong commitment to Zen practice. Fog is universal, but nowhere does it have quite the presence it has in the San Francisco Bay area, where Elaine Starkman, […]
Two Poems by Longfellow: “The Fire of Drift-Wood” and “The Cross of Snow”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Longfellow’s “The Fire of Drift-Wood” and Kasischke’s “Things That Have Changed Since You Died” By Zara Raab We want to read and write poems that speak to us in this time and place. That’s how they come alive. But there may be value in the very strangeness, the otherness of poems from […]