Gary Snyder’s notebooks and journals
As Snyder says, what counts is writing, not being organized. But damn if he isn’t really organized too.
David Shapiro (1947–2024)
Quoth the raven: I am language. I am language, And nothing in language is strange, to me.
Helen Vendler (1933–2024)
The New York Times obituary begins: “In the poetry marketplace, her praise had reputation-making power, while her disapproval could be withering.” I find it hard to imagine that anyone who spent a lifetime reading and writing about poetry would appreciate such a summary of her work.
“Frost” and Frost
I was teaching a poetry class and getting ready for our first meeting after a break, when it’s always a challenge to get back to the realities of a semester. I realized that I had forgotten to bring the two poems we were going to talk about, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I printed out a copy of each poem in my office and went off to teach.
Helen Keller’s sources
The New York Review Books volume of Helen Keller’s writing, The World I Live In (2012), has a few pages of notes identifying sources for quoted material, but many such passages are left unidentified. Having looked up the unidentified bits in Keller’s prose (thank you, Google Books), I thought it appropriate to share them here, for anyone who might looking. They reflect a great breadth of reading and are someimes quoted imperfectly, from memory perhaps, or from a faulty source.
Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024)
A force for good in the world of poetry.
Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024)
“But a word is a bottomless pit.”
The Langston Hughes House
20 E. 127th Street.
“To err is human”
A passage from page 87 of Judge Arthur Engoron’s decision is getting considerable attetion: “The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) first declared, ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine.‘” Actually, it’s “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” But to err is human.
Word of the day: ekphrasis
I recall sitting in an NEH seminar and being told that if one wanted to befuddle colleagues, all that was necessary was to speak the word ekphrasis. Well, maybe. I’m not so sure.
Hail to thee, blithe Parsnip!
I think of the parsnip as the carrot’s quiet cousin. There’s the carrot, in the center of the room, doing a magic trick or telling a colorful (heh) story. And there’s the parsnip, over in a corner, looking at the titles on the bookshelf.
“Leaning. a little to the left”
“St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left.”
“Cause I Ain’t Got a Pencil”
Food for thought: Joshua T. Dickerson’s poem “Cause I Ain’t Got a Pencil.”
Recently updated
A thought about the John Berryman lines in Succession.
Succession and poetry
Frank O’Hara and John Berryman.
Recently updated
A poem to go with the Vekkia book light.
The passionate surfer
Christopher Marlowe meets Brian Wilson.
The Harlem Branch Y
As in Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.”
A Caedmon drawing and anecdote
A drawing from a record cover, an anecdote from Ron Padgett.
ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
ChatGPT has difficulty distinguishing “in the style of” from a hazy idea of subject matter. And ChatGPT assumes that almost all poets write in quatrains of iambic tetrameter, with clumsy rhymes and inspirational messages.
Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry
1983: “If you could accurately enter your whole life into a computer without leaving the minutest fact out, then the computer could possess a chance of becoming artistic. But even then the computer would have to be considered the protégé of its programmer. For now, computers may be profitably used as electronic thesauri, as servants to the new craft of electronic poetry-writing. As far as the art of poetry is concerned, computers will have to wait.” Still true.
More ChatGPT fails
More 500-word analyses of well-known poems, from John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin, and William Butler Yeats. In each case, ChatGPT produces phrases and lines nowhere to be found in the poem.
ChatGPT fail
I asked ChatGPT to write a 500-word analysis of Ted Berrigan’s poem “Red Shift.” It produced text with fake quotations that had nothing to do with the poem.
The view from here
I’m not Wallace Stevens, but I do have a window, and plenty of ice.
Recently updated
The New York Times now has an obituary for Bernadette Mayer.
Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)
“Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous.”
A Ted Berrigan event
At Magic City Books, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Kenward Elmslie (1929–2022)
“Routine Disruption,” a poem.
“Chopped prose”
the New York Times poetry columnist thinks that Ezra Pound and Marjorie Perloff think that nonmetrical poetry is “chopped prose.”
From the Poetry Project
The Library of Congress has made available 420 recordings of poetry readings at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. And that’s just what the Library calls “the first round.”