Plath-o-Rama

From Bookslut on Girlhood Plathophilia: Rereading Sylvia

By the way, I just realized that SP was born on the same exact day, month, and year as my father. One of those not-improbable yet nevertheless odd-seeming coincidences. But, no, my dad doesn't write poetry (that I know of.)

Quote: Katrina Vandenberg...

... the author of Atlas writes in the latest issue of Poets & Writers, in a great article about putting together a book of poems, this prosaic yet perfectly succinct summary of what a poem is:

A poem is an accumulation of different kinds of repetition. When you repeat a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, you get meter; when you repeat sounds you get alliteration, rhyme, assonance; when you repeat images, you get a motif; when you repeat an idea, a theme. A poem's natural compression heightens these sensations of repetition.

Poetry Humor

Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks

Spring poem

A.R. Ammons: Eyesight

Reading List: Jane Mead, Dorianne Laux, Michael Dumanis

As thesis time gets closer, I've been reading more poetry, as well as writing more.

See my post below for highly understated fawning over Dorianne Laux. Her newer one is Facts about the Moon, but I'm reading What We Carry.

Also reading Michael Dumanis, My Soviet Union -- really original; good stuff.

And Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World. Some of it's really amazing. I don't think her more recent stuff is as powerful, although she's honed her craft to perfection. But I like poetry with urgency and "teeth."

Antilamentation

It's been a while since I posted a poem (or a link to someone else's, that is) on here. We read this one in class last week.
Don't know what else to say about it, except that I just ordered one of her books.
By Dorianne Laux.

Even Poets Have to Grow Up Sometime

When I was younger I used to write poems that used the word "fuck," just to prove that I knew what it meant.
And write about drugs I had never used (and never likely will) as well as ones I had, and about Lacanian psychology and esoteric critical paradigms.
Now that I've been writing for a while, and reading for a while, I've learned to relax and write (not always, but often) with everyday words, on everyday things.
With much better results, too, but that's in part due to age and practice, as much as the subject matter. I'm sure I'll find a home in some poem for the "F" word again, some day, some way, as well as a stray paradigm or two.
Like everything else in life, writing doesn't get simpler; it just gets a little easier.