For those waiting on correspondence etc., just bear with me. I have precisely three weeks to finish the PhD. Everything is behind. Time itself is altered. Peace to all while I set sail into the hurricane.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Reckoning
For those waiting on correspondence etc., just bear with me. I have precisely three weeks to finish the PhD. Everything is behind. Time itself is altered. Peace to all while I set sail into the hurricane.
Monday, July 20, 2009
NEW! Ryan MacDonald In The Continental Review
Delighted to be featuring these two stunningly beautiful pieces from Ryan MacDonald, commissioned by The Continental Review editor Jordan Stempleman.
Come into the eye of the storm . . .
Come into the eye of the storm . . .
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Journey Towards The North
Extraordinary times. I've just this week been appointed on a one-year contract to the comparative literature department at the University of Lille 3. I'm going to live in Lille. I will be leaving Paris. More on all of it when this work is over, and when I start to realize what it all means.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Will I Be Sued?
Why does everyone threaten to sue people in the poetics community today? We'll see if I get sued for my piece beneath. I thought the satirical nature of the thing was utterly obvious.
Anyway of course Billy Collins didn't say that his own poetry is awful. Considering that I link to the original article, where you can read what Billy actually said in full, I thought it was clear.
Ah, I too remember free speech.
Feel free to comment though if you feel I should be sued.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Former laureate says country needs some better poets than him
(Below is an entirely satirical I mean duh unedited transcript of a recent Billy Collins interview, which recently arrived at The Newer Metaphysicals' Paris bureau. We are unsure what happened during the copy-editing phase of the final version, which for interest may be viewed here, replete with its many typos).
LONE WOLF, Okla. — Billy Collins unwound the tangled wool from his half-knit Christmas stocking, unhitching it from the rusty gramophone in his library. He placed the gramophone next to a spiral notebook, then slowly wrapped the stocking around his head.
“I only have about 1 song on this thing,” he said, gesticulating towards the gramophone. "And I have to change the, what do you call it, memory-plate.” The lack of music isn’t that big of an issue though, Collins noted. "I just use it to tune out the noise", he said. Noise created by humans, that is, and what Collins simply refers to as "The Voices."
Billy Collins doesn't like "The Voices". For the next 30 minutes or so, the former laureate rocked back and forth, speaking of "Them", and droning on and on about the stark beauty of Oklahoma.
Yes, Billy Collins speaks poorly.
But he writes even worse.
“I was listening to Lady Gaga coming out here,” he said. “I’ve even learned a couple of her songs, but I would never play them in front of anyone. I hate people. They make noise. Also, nobody can really play Lady Gaga. She is too unique. I think trying to play that is a form of trespassing. BANG.”
And while trying to play Lady Gaga might seem like a violation, for Collins, writing poetry which evokes pantless one-pieces, rain, snow and household items, is his life’s work.
Chosen as a member of the faculty of the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, Collins has spent the past week boring to tears a select group of high school students with what the latter called his "old man stories". Last Friday, Collins spoke to the entire petrified group during a poetry reading at the Kerr Performing Arts Center, where his hour-long performance was greeted with continuous booing. Over three quarters of the crowd walked out, leaving only the comatose and the dead to be later awoken by the remaining security personnel.
“Coming here has been fascinating,” he said. “It’s sort of an ‘end-of-the-line’ experience for me. In that, I think this is the ‘end-of-the-line’ for my poetry."
Still, while Billy Collins found Quartz Mountain particularly suited to his often hilariously bad one-dimensional sentimental linear narrative poems, he’s less excited by the poetry the rest of the country has produced.
“One of the reasons people don’t read as much poetry anymore is the fault of the poets,” he said. “It’s not the public’s fault, except that they're usually much too noisy (I like taking naps). What I'm saying though is that there’s an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I’d say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn’t worth reading, and mine is certainly at the forefront among them.”
It’s the other 13 percent, Collins said, that he would love one day to be a part of. “I suppose my poetry is so dreadful because I think poetry needs to be transparent. Of course I have no idea what 'transparent' in this context means, or in fact could ever mean. It just makes no sense. It's a meaningless term. Sometimes I just feel so inadequate. I'm sorry is it mealtime yet?”
Collins then speculated that perhaps his poems were so awful because he believes that poems should always say something about the state of the poet and his environment.
For Collins, that philosophy bubbled to the surface when he was asked, as poet laureate, to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the terrorists’ attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“I’ve only been asked to write two poems in my life,” he said. “At first I didn’t want to. But, later, as I thought about it, it disturbed me that I didn’t feel I was up to the challenge. And I was right: I wasn't. I suppose I just panicked. Did you see that crap I turned out? I feel ashamed."
Collins did change his mind though. He said he took advantage of two literary devices — the form of a eulogy and the alphabet — to build his work. “I needed the eulogy and the alphabet, I needed those as a frame for the poem. But, as I said, it was just . . . awful.”
Later, Collins read his work to a joint session of Congress. “I remember the tears running down Senator Patrick Moynihan’s face. It was that bad. I never knew poetry could be so dreadful it would make politicians weep. It was an interesting way to see the country’s politicians.”
It was in moments like those, Collins said, that he understood the absolute lack of any power in his poems.
But even with his bizarre descent, Collins continues to write. "I just can't help it. 87 percent of the country's poets suck, and I suck more than all of them. But for me, the future is basically the next poem. It’s always been that way. It’s always been one poem at a time", he observed, gazing out with melancholy at the Oklahoma landscape.
"And they just keep on getting worse.”
LONE WOLF, Okla. — Billy Collins unwound the tangled wool from his half-knit Christmas stocking, unhitching it from the rusty gramophone in his library. He placed the gramophone next to a spiral notebook, then slowly wrapped the stocking around his head.
“I only have about 1 song on this thing,” he said, gesticulating towards the gramophone. "And I have to change the, what do you call it, memory-plate.” The lack of music isn’t that big of an issue though, Collins noted. "I just use it to tune out the noise", he said. Noise created by humans, that is, and what Collins simply refers to as "The Voices."
Billy Collins doesn't like "The Voices". For the next 30 minutes or so, the former laureate rocked back and forth, speaking of "Them", and droning on and on about the stark beauty of Oklahoma.
Yes, Billy Collins speaks poorly.
But he writes even worse.
“I was listening to Lady Gaga coming out here,” he said. “I’ve even learned a couple of her songs, but I would never play them in front of anyone. I hate people. They make noise. Also, nobody can really play Lady Gaga. She is too unique. I think trying to play that is a form of trespassing. BANG.”
And while trying to play Lady Gaga might seem like a violation, for Collins, writing poetry which evokes pantless one-pieces, rain, snow and household items, is his life’s work.
Chosen as a member of the faculty of the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, Collins has spent the past week boring to tears a select group of high school students with what the latter called his "old man stories". Last Friday, Collins spoke to the entire petrified group during a poetry reading at the Kerr Performing Arts Center, where his hour-long performance was greeted with continuous booing. Over three quarters of the crowd walked out, leaving only the comatose and the dead to be later awoken by the remaining security personnel.
“Coming here has been fascinating,” he said. “It’s sort of an ‘end-of-the-line’ experience for me. In that, I think this is the ‘end-of-the-line’ for my poetry."
Still, while Billy Collins found Quartz Mountain particularly suited to his often hilariously bad one-dimensional sentimental linear narrative poems, he’s less excited by the poetry the rest of the country has produced.
“One of the reasons people don’t read as much poetry anymore is the fault of the poets,” he said. “It’s not the public’s fault, except that they're usually much too noisy (I like taking naps). What I'm saying though is that there’s an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I’d say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn’t worth reading, and mine is certainly at the forefront among them.”
It’s the other 13 percent, Collins said, that he would love one day to be a part of. “I suppose my poetry is so dreadful because I think poetry needs to be transparent. Of course I have no idea what 'transparent' in this context means, or in fact could ever mean. It just makes no sense. It's a meaningless term. Sometimes I just feel so inadequate. I'm sorry is it mealtime yet?”
Collins then speculated that perhaps his poems were so awful because he believes that poems should always say something about the state of the poet and his environment.
For Collins, that philosophy bubbled to the surface when he was asked, as poet laureate, to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the terrorists’ attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“I’ve only been asked to write two poems in my life,” he said. “At first I didn’t want to. But, later, as I thought about it, it disturbed me that I didn’t feel I was up to the challenge. And I was right: I wasn't. I suppose I just panicked. Did you see that crap I turned out? I feel ashamed."
Collins did change his mind though. He said he took advantage of two literary devices — the form of a eulogy and the alphabet — to build his work. “I needed the eulogy and the alphabet, I needed those as a frame for the poem. But, as I said, it was just . . . awful.”
Later, Collins read his work to a joint session of Congress. “I remember the tears running down Senator Patrick Moynihan’s face. It was that bad. I never knew poetry could be so dreadful it would make politicians weep. It was an interesting way to see the country’s politicians.”
It was in moments like those, Collins said, that he understood the absolute lack of any power in his poems.
But even with his bizarre descent, Collins continues to write. "I just can't help it. 87 percent of the country's poets suck, and I suck more than all of them. But for me, the future is basically the next poem. It’s always been that way. It’s always been one poem at a time", he observed, gazing out with melancholy at the Oklahoma landscape.
"And they just keep on getting worse.”
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
BORN
25 poems, pink pages, bound with pink thread, $5USD
the volta
verses * at its pitch
like your nose needs its fatalistic
noose ! hanging
past
lovers by the leavings
they have * left . . . it is as if in
protrusions some potency hid its pur
-loined pouts stolen * by shadows
in a triangular artistry
where the breath
fogs life *
anew
by mere geo-
metric * mimetic terms . . .
and all this is past some shivering :
it lies in the point * of waiting
still and still destructive
above the thing
to kiss
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