The title of Ross Gay’s poem “Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others” recalls the kind of clarity Billy Collins found refreshing in reading Chinese poetry. Unlike […]
Author Archive | bruce birdman
Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers: The Postconfessional Familial Lyric
Good evening all, Though I am going to provide physical copies for tomorrow’s class, I thought I would go ahead and post my final project proposal. I am…probably going to need help rephrasing some things, focusing my research, and figuring out when to capitalize “postconfessional” and when to not. Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers: The […]
From Old Marble Notebooks
From Old Marble Notebooks (even though the poem is not an excerpt) A bat, a rat, and a cat all came from animals. Ghoti reads fish, remember the lessons? They say finesse for steal, box for hit, some type of way for emotion, steal on for dupe, play for mess with, lit for exciting, bet […]
Complicated: A Response to Amiri Baraka’s “Black Arts”
Thank You Because somebody had to do it because words are weapons: fists and daggers, guns. And your guns were not indiscriminate your poems were not bullshit, they were a hot-handed snapshot that hurts liberal eyes almost forty years later just like acid in the face of the enemy. The violence is what the […]
Being Huffy with Henry: A CloseRead of the First “Dream Song”
This is not my first rodeo with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, but I feel like I have much more of an appreciation on how to read them. Upon reflection of how to do an explication of the first of them, “Dream Song 1,” I became hesitant; is it appropriate to do a close reading of a […]
Fun and Play with O’Hara and His Progeny!
Jennifer Brewington’s article “The Tradition of Play in the New York School of Poets” focuses on one of the more charming aspects of our reading this week: the “play” that frequently occurs in the poetry of the New York school. She defines play as “provid[ing] a method for processing the chaos and suffering of the […]
Following Ginsberg Following Whitman: CloseReading “A Supermarket in California”
The first two things that are immediately apparent in Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” both relate to form. One is that the lines are long, with no stanza, if the groups of lines may be called that before each break, shorter than two actual lines on the page. In fact, upon editing this close […]
Zukofsky and Trostsky: The Poetics of Uneven Development
Ruth Jennison’s article “Combining Uneven Developments: Louis Zukofsky and the Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism” attempts, in her words, to “explore the ways in which Objectivist poetry elaborates in aesthetic terms the economic and social concepts of twentieth- and twenty-first century political economists of uneven development” (146). Her primary argument is that, through paratactic aesthetic […]
Three Young Men Sitting in a Bar in Harlem
Three Young Men Sitting in a Bar in Harlem Due to my unfamiliarity with our blog system, I am attaching my second blog post, a poem, as a PDF so that I don’t lose its formatting. I found myself very conflicted when reading our poems and academic material for this week; I am taking […]
Blog Post 1: Gertrude Stein and Picasso (Context/Archival)
The contextual readings for this week brilliantly provided an overlapping picture of what many of our poets for the week were all about, from their manifestos on society to their hard and fast but also accommodating rules for poetry. I do not know, however, if in any one or a number of the readings, was […]