"To write about poetry is to believe that there are answers to some of the questions poets ask of their art, or at least that there are reasons for writing it," writes Michael Weigers, editor of the anthology One Art: Poems about Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2003).
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was born December 22, 1905 in South Bend, Indiana. Orphaned at fourteen, Rexroth moved to live with his aunt in Chicago, where he was expelled from high school. He began publishing in magazines at the age of fifteen. As a youth, he supported himself with odd jobs--as a soda jerk, clerk, wrestler, and reporter. He hitchhiked around the country, visited Europe, and backpacked in the wilderness, reading and frequenting literary salons and lecture halls, and teaching himself several languages.
Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. He has published sixteen books of poetry and prose, including The Gary Snyder Reader (1952-1998) (Counterpoint Press, 1999); Mountains and Rivers Without End (1997); No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1993), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; The Practice of the Wild (1990); Left Out in the Rain, New Poems 1947-1985; Axe Handles (1983), for which he received an American Book Award; Turtle Island (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; Regarding Wave (1970); and Myths & Texts (1960). He has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, and the Shelley Memorial Award. Snyder was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2003. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.
How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1328.html
http://wc3.worldcrossing.com/webx?14@@.1de35bad/13
Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California in 1948. The son of migrant farmers, Herrera moved often, living in trailers or tents along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California. As a child, he attended school in a variety of small towns from San Francisco to San Diego. By middle school, he was drawing cartoons, and by high school, he was playing folk music the likes of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. He graduated from San Diego High in 1967, and was one of the first wave of Chicanos to receive an Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) scholarship to attend UCLA. There, he became immersed in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, and began performing in experimental theater, influenced by Allen Ginsberg and Luis Valdez.
So I started to make a list of questions: were the 10 poems that everyone quoted the best 10? Do the sonnets contain what we believe them to contain? Are they still useful to us? Do these poems still move us, speak to us, enlighten us? Is their reputation as a lovers' handbook deserved, or have they simply hitched a ride on the back of the plays?
207 years ago, the German poet, philosopher, and historian Friedrich Schiller passed away. As a representative of the Weimar Classicism and the 'Sturm und Drang' (Storm and Drive) movement, Schiller published some of the most influential works of the time.
209 years ago today one of the most important English poets of the Victorian era was born, Alfred Lord Tennyson.
The works of Alfred Lord Tennyson are best known for their close affinity with the English mythology and English history, they influenced the movement of the 19th century's Victorian Art as well as the Arts and Crafts Movement, which was to join art and handcraft using simple forms applied to mostly romantic or medieval styles.
Sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Rochester, and the Scholarly Editions and Translations Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The William Blake Archive is an online hypermedia environment that allows its users to access high-quality electronic reproductions of a growing portion of Blake's work. These reproductions have been prepared according to the highest technical and scholarly standards, with the cooperation of a number of the major museum, library, and private collections. By eventually incorporating as much of Blake's pictorial and literary canon as possible—with both images and texts organized, interlinked, and searchable in ways that only hypermedia systems will allow—the Archive will for the first time give scholars and students access to the major intersections between the illuminated books and Blake's other creative and commercial works.
by Charles Bernstein. National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally "positive." The message is: Poetry is good for you. But, unfortunately, promoting poetry as if it were an "easy listening" station just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant and has done a disservice not only to poetry deemed too controversial or difficult to promote but also to the poetry it puts forward in this way. "Accessibility" has become a kind of Moral Imperative based on the condescending notion that readers are intellectually challenged, and mustn't be presented with anything but Safe Poetry. As if poetry will turn people off to poetry.
Representative Poetry Online, version 3.0, includes 3,162 English poems by 500 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today. It is based on Representative Poetry, established by Professor W. J. Alexander of University College, University of Toronto, in 1912 (one of the first books published by the University of Toronto Press), and used in the English Department at the University until the late 1960s.
On September 6, 1780, the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote with a pencil on the wall of a wooden cabin on the Kickelhahn mountain in Ilmenau, Thuringia the poem 'Wanderers Nachtlied'.
The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. His many notebooks, manuscript fragments, prose essays, letters, and voluminous journalistic articles all offer key cultural and biographical contexts for his poetry. The Archive sets out to incorporate as much of this material as possible, drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the United States and around the world. The Archive is directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa).
new poems, new fiction, and new creative non-fiction, new visual art gallery, a new movie, and new music. "Western society is broken including art, We hope to be able to help repair this brokenness."