During my reading of this week’s selection, I became drawn especially to the poems of Robert Duncan because of how they flowed together, but also because of what they were saying. My favorite of the three that we were assigned was “Passage Over Water” which took the reader on a journey across the poem. Duncan […]
Unfinished Business Makes the World Go Round: Poetic Tension in Olson’s “Maximus, to Himself”
Reading Charles Olson’s “Maximus, to Himself” (1960) in isolation from the collected The Maximus Poems struck me with a particularly uncanny feeling given the poem’s repeated fascination with estrangement and the complicated status of the individual. The poem is predominantly declarative, even in its reflective manner, which I believe creates a sense of authority in […]
Every Poet Needs Their Own Black Mountain
Burt Kimmelman was not on our reading list for this week, but I feel like he should have been. In addition to the books and articles on literary criticism that he has under his belt, he has also penned 11 books of poetry, with one, Steeple at Sunrise, published as recently as 2022. After reading […]
Creative Post Imitating The Language by Robert Creely
I am so angry. Every time you come around, destruction is in your wake. Words create life, yet you just drain us away. I am so angry. You just focus on yourself, not caring, Unfeeling, except for your words. Why do your words carry such weight, but we are […]
“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 […]
Bio-Writing: Cybernetics, Open Form, and Larry Eigner’s Lifework
When exploring the poems for this week, I became intrigued with Larry Eigner, initially because of his seemingly simplistic poems and then because of his life story. I reread the poems we were assigned a few times and [Out of the wind and leaves] particularly stuck with me. I started researching Eigner’s life and […]
Relearning Denise Levertov’s Alphabet: War, Flesh, and the Intimacy of Otherness
Denise Levertov (1923-1997) Lisa Narbeshuber looks into the work of Denise Levertov in her article, “Relearning Denise Levertov’s Alphabet: War, Flesh, and the Intimacy of Otherness” in which she delves into Levertov’s Vietnam-era poetry and the way the poet’s cultural writing “shares a certain universality of flesh, and it can be used to […]
Denise Levertov’s “Some Notes on Organic Form”
Denise Levertov in “Some Notes on Organic Form” sets out to identify and define some of the key characteristics and/or processes of “organic form poetry.” She based her discussion upon Gerard Hanley Hopkins’ coining of the terms “inscape” and “instress” as referentials to sensory perception: to denote intrinsic form, the pattern of essential characteristics both […]
An Emotional Rollercoaster
Upon reading Denise Levertov’s “Life at War,” I found myself at war with how I should feel. It was as though each stanza intentionally brought me to a different emotion, leaving me as the reader unsure of how Levertov wanted me to feel collectively. This poem has many moments of joy and beauty. In […]
Experimentation “Off the Beaten Path”
After reading the assigned selections from this week’s focus on Beat poetry, I decided to try my hand at producing a poem influenced by some of the aesthetics and conventions of the group. The poem “Holding Down the Fort” included above is the result of this experimentation. Before composing this poetic experiment, I considered how […]