Poetry and Poetics

A Grumpy Old Man Laments

by Joe Weil February 16, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

I am a “mutt,” a cut up, a clown. Clowns are trained to run the emotional registers from funny to sad, from sublime to raunchy. Clowns believe that these mixed registers provide the ontological truth of existing.

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mUutations: George Hitchcock

by Brooks Lampe February 7, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

The poem suggests that the dialogue between conscious and subconscious thought is more complicated than the liberated, unproblematic “leap” of the school of Bly.

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Folk and Commodity, Part Two

by Joe Weil February 1, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

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

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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“Poetry Means You’re Writing About the World”: An Interview with Anne Winters

by Sarah Eggers January 16, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

I was introduced to Ms. Winters’ work in graduate school and, ever since, have been a ardent admirere of her lushly orchestrated, yet intimate and searingly honest poems about the “big issues” that so many contemporary poets seem to shy away from: race, class, poverty, and gender.

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The Problems and Potential of Slam

by Joe Weil January 11, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

I do not hate spoken word. I hate ham acting.

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Psychoanalysis and the Mad Artist: Hölderlin’s Empty Center

by Daniel Tutt January 2, 2012 Poetry and Poetics

Psychoanalysis is a good system for those of us that like structure.

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2011: End of the Year Poem & Book Roundup

by Metta Sama December 29, 2011 Poetry and Poetics

b bearhart, Alexander Long, and Jonterri Gadson name their favorite books and poems from the 2011.

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Primer on Imagery

by Joe Weil December 19, 2011 Poetry and Poetics

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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