Monday, May 28, 2012

Monday Morning Quote: Maxine Kumin on Dreams

Virtually every dream example I call up out of my poems teeters on the border between life and death, this seems quite apt to me, for I feel that poetry is essentially elegiac in its nature. We hold hard to those we love even as they die away from us and we continue to pursue them, through dreams into poems.


—Maxine Kiumin, Always Beginning

Friday, May 25, 2012

The Final Poetry Top 10 for 2011

  • Refusing Heaven, by Jack Gilbert
  • Song, by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
  • Without: Poems, by Donald Hall
  • Hoodwinked, by David Hernandez
  • Deepstep Come Shining, by C. D. Wright
  • In No One's Land, by Paige Ackerson-Kiely
  • The Great Fires, by Jack Gilbert
  • A Village Life, by Louise Glück
  • Life on Mars, by Tracy K. Smith
  • Dearest Creature, by Amy Gerstler
  • Well, this took forever to get posted, again due to my a desire to say something about the list. Here's the short version: author jags (Gilbert, Glück), recommendations (Kelly, Hall, Smith, Gerstler), class reading (Ackerson-Kiely, Wright) and sheer good luck (David Hernandez, whom I discovered through the wonderful AGNI Online). I'm starting to understand better what most appeals to me, and also where my tastes are starting to stretch (at least a little).

    Monday, May 21, 2012

    Monday Morning Quote: Jeanette Winterson on The Consoling Power of Poetry

    So when people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

    —Jeanette Winterson, in "Shafts of Sunlight, in The Guardian