As I began researching witness poetry centered around the Holocaust, I didn’t expect to find anything new. As the great-granddaughter of Jewish refugees to Chicago following the Franco-Prussian War, I’ve always known to the Holocaust—both publicly, through the atrocities committed in the name of hate, and personally, through the loss of much of my family […]
Author Archive | guthmannsl
Flarf Poetry:
Flarf poetry is confusing. Poets.org provides a brief guide to flarf which somehow confuses me further. There were three options of a definition to observe: 1) Wrong. Un-PC. Corrosive, cute, cloying, awful. 2) Poetry with a heavy use of google searches, almost community written. Poems that are continuation, revision, or even a plagiarization, all out […]
When a Rose is Just a Rose
Dan Disney says in his article, “‘Let Me In!’ Opacity and Illumination in an Age of Technological Reproduction,” that while lyric poetry serves as an “illuminating gesture towards the real,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems “act as a metatextual invention which problematizes all claims to linguistic transparency.” But what does this really mean? Metatextual is defined as a […]
Power of the Protest Poem
FOR THE CONSIDERATION OF POETS where is the poetry of resistance, the poetry of honorable defianceunafraid of lies from career politicians and business men,not respectful of journalist who writeofficial speak void of educated thoughtwithout double search or sub surface questionsthat war talk demands?where is the poetry of doubt and suspicionnot in the service of the […]
An Aggressive Defense of the Confessionals
The definition of bias is a prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared one with another, usually in a way considered unfair. This is a critical response, though not, perhaps, the critical response you expect. It is my opinion that the articles, namely Nelson’s “Confessional Poetry,” and Thurston’s “Psychotherapy and […]
Alphabet Soup
I was particularly impressed with the style of Frank O’Hara of the New York School of poetry this week. Reading through his poetry, I noticed his repetitive use of enjambment and what Reed would describe as gleeful babble. The New York School frequently wrote about urban life and finding bliss in the then and now. […]
“I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You:” Applying the Guidelines of the Projective Verse to Shakespeare, Charles Olsen, and Suz Guthmann
Charles Olson, commonly thought to be the founder of the Black Mountain School of Poetry, proposed rules for poetry in his essay, “Projective Verse,” which was published in 1950. He said in the essay, “One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception… get on with it, keep the momentum going.” Olson believed […]
Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”
In the first stanza of Ginsberg’s poem, “A Supermarket in California,” he opens with addressing Walt Whitman, the famous 19th century poet. Ginsberg walks under the full moon and then, “shopping for images,” enters a supermarket and thinks of Whitman’s enumerations. Enumerations are defined as “the action of mentioning a number of things one by […]