I have attended dozens of poetry readings. Virtually all of them were identical:• The introductions made me think I was about to witness the second coming of John Donne.• All of the “poems” were preceded by tedious, unhelpful explanations. Typically, these involved the author’s state of intoxication when they wrote this stuff or the unknown friend or relative who served as the inspiration or subject. Like we care.• As I recall, there was only one elegy, that being for a poet.• Indeed, the only people mentioned, living or dead, were either poets (often portrayed reverently) or leaders (almost invariably shown in a negative, political light).• What little humor was in evidence usually amounted to that desiccated, self-conscious, congratulatory intertext. “Oh, did you see how I [...]

Reviewed: No End in Strangeness: New and Selected Poems by Bruce Taylor. Cormorant Books, 2011. There’s a marvelous description in Book X of Paradise Lost of the astronomical and climatological changes that accompany the Fall, and of the beginnings of predation among the animals.  Milton is more concerned there with the vast scales that the still new Copernican Cosmology had introduced, and with squaring that cosmology with Biblical narrative, than with animal suffering, but he does describe how,Beast now with Beast gan war, and Fowle with Fowle,And Fish with Fish; to graze the Herb all leaving,Devourd each other; nor stood much in aweOf Man, but fled him, or with count’nance grimGlar’d on him passing…   (710-714)Milton, God love him, didn’t know the half of it. It [...]

When Solon declared that he learned something new every day (or was it Pericles?—some dead Greek guy, at any rate), he perhaps was not thinking of the utility of the Pratt-Shelby Knot when trying to keep a leather tie proportional enough that the thin end does not emerge at an inconvenient and insistent angle. However, after futzing around with the Windsor and half-Windsor (which rather vitiate the point of wearing a leather tie, don’t they?), I am quite convinced I’m right. I make no apologies for that. The tediously ubiquitous Seth Abramson recently wrote in an essay on corruption in poetry that: “If you spend even 10% of the energy you spend on your writing on efforts to be a hipster in dress or manner or [...]

After his reading, the poet was approached by a tearful woman. She thanked him for the poem about his brother who had died. “My brother died recently,” she said, “and I sympathize with your feelings about your brother’s death.” “Oh, thanks,” the poet said, “but I don’t have a brother.” Why is this story disturbing? If a fiction writer were reading from an I-based story in which a relative died, no one would be surprised or upset that the I in the story wasn’t the I of the writer. However, although every poetry workshop tries to imbue the poet with the idea that the “I” in a poem is not the real I—that it is not actually the poet speaking—no one listening to or reading [...]

Stand-up comedian Tony Campanelli confessed Monday to the Feb. 26 killing of 180 comedy-club patrons during a performance at Crack-Ups in Royal Oak. . . . “Man, I killed ’em,” the 33-year-old Campanelli told Royal Oak police interrogators. “You shoulda seen them rolling out there. I really knocked ’em dead. . . .” —The Onion, March 1, 2000 “These Are the Poems, Folks”: On the Relationship Between Poetry and Joke-telling by David Yezzi once heard the actor F. Murray Abraham bemoan the fact that, after his Academy Award–winning turn as Salieri in Amadeus, he was, for years, straitjacketed into serious roles and that, in fact, he was very funny.1 (Abraham had played Bottom to great acclaim at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York, after all.) [...]

Invariably described by critics as “difficult,” Ashbery (perhaps disingenuously) considers himself a simple and direct author of poems that deliberately switch tone, speaker, mood, tense, voice, and idiom seemingly at random. He cobbles together an aural surface that imitates the ADD noise of our channel-hopping daily lives, our bombardment by contradictory opinions, unconnected images, and raw data on a scale impossible to assimilate. He acknowledges in an interview with Daniel Kane for What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde that he “frequently incorporate[s] overheard speech,” and, as for the role randomness and chance might play in his poems, he concedes “I am a believer in fortuitous accidents.” These are trappings commonly associated with the urbane postmodern aesthetic. Put another way, postmodernism of the kind that Ashbery offers is frequently a nihilistic type of modernism. At times, he seems to enjoy confusion and instability, even as poetic process: “It’s a question of a sudden feeling of unsureness at what I am doing, wondering why I am writing the way I am, and also not feeling the urge to write in another way.” This does not arise from a provocative or incendiary instinct, as he explains in the Paris Review, but rather the belief that one must keep moving or be in danger of ossification.