Joe Weil

Folk and Commodity, Part Two

by Joe Weil February 1, 2012 Poetry and Poetics
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A true folk artist wouldn’t worry about the purity of what he was doing.

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On the differences between folk and commodity art, as per slam and academia

by Joe Weil January 25, 2012 Poetry and Poetics
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I read Williams the same way I read vampire comics: for pleasure and for the purposes of theft. This is the folk art way, and it survives commodity art even when it is packaged and sold.

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Sweet Sue Terry and “Hurt Hawks”

by Joe Weil January 18, 2012 Other Writing and Arts
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At one point, I made a very precarious living playing piano in a couple bars, one of which was run by a coke fiend who had a driver pick me up for the gig three times a week.

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The Problems and Potential of Slam

by Joe Weil January 11, 2012 Poetry and Poetics
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I do not hate spoken word. I hate ham acting.

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Primer on Imagery

by Joe Weil December 19, 2011 Poetry and Poetics
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Before Modernism, most poetry told, with showing as merely a form of decoration. Either that, or poetry sought a synthesis between showing and telling where the showing told and the telling showed.

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Disabilty as talent: The perfection of the broken

by Joe Weil December 14, 2011 Society
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I have an older brain damaged brother, Peter. In 1953, a small pox vaccination failed to localize and shot up to his brain.

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Poetry Speaks with its Hands

by Joe Weil December 7, 2011 Poetry and Poetics
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My theory of narrative is that it is arc, gesture, syntactical force the most common of which is what we call a story, but not exclusive to story.

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Sleep to Wake and Wake to Sleep: A comparison of “Prufrock” and “Nightingale”

by Joe Weil November 30, 2011 Poetry and Poetics
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What draws these poems together is simulation of death-states in relation to the afflatus of night and song—of rising or sinking to the occasion.

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Why I can never hate the Susquehanna

by Joe Weil November 22, 2011 Other Writing and Arts
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I can never hate the Susquehanna, not if it took my last dollar, not if it made me look like a grade z version of some extra who got lost on his lunch break from a remake of “The Grapes of Wrath” and ended up standing poised against the wrong unforgiving sky.

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Why Lesser Talent Succeeds

by Joe Weil November 15, 2011 The Other
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I believe being recognized is a talent, a capability in its own right.

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The actual slaughter of the gods: The Great Gatsby, Goldman Sachs, and Zombies

by Joe Weil November 8, 2011 Society
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We worship death and call it ultimate life.

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The Old Rocker

by Joe Weil October 21, 2011 Poetry and Poetics
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It was the sort of chair working class people purchased on the way up along with the upright spinet to prove they were no longer poor.

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