Joe Weil

Folk and Commodity, Part Two

A true folk artist wouldn’t worry about the purity of what he was doing.

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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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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Poetry Speaks with its Hands

by Joe Weil December 7, 2011 Poetry and Poetics

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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Why I can never hate the Susquehanna

by Joe Weil November 22, 2011 Other Writing and Arts

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 E-books are not Books (and will probably change publishing)

by Micah Towery October 24, 2011 Society

Until now, many publishers have treated e-books as an extension of the book: hardcover, paperback, e-book. It’s not; it’s an entirely different medium.

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The Solipsist in Purgatory: Jollimore’s AT LAKE SCUCOG

by Micah Towery August 19, 2011 Philosophy

It’s always a relief to me when I see a book published by somebody outside the “poetry ghetto.”

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Presence beyond the spoken or written word

by Joe Weil June 15, 2011 Poetry and Poetics

I always think that a poem “off the page” becomes an “act” of language rather than a poem, a thing made out of words.

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Poem of the Week: Wallace Stevens

by Joe Weil March 24, 2011 Aesthetics

[Large Red Man Reading]

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Terms, Truth, Sun Sparrows: A Very Important Lesson from My Father

by Joe Weil March 21, 2011 Academia

I tell my students that education can do the work of evil: it can make a bunch of aleatory systems with PHDs think they have a right to be superior to the Rocky Weils of this world. They can make a son misunderstand the wisdom of his own father. They stink of torture and snobbery, they are rank with the odor of exclusion and bias, and we call this “truth” or “Dogma” or “terminology.”

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The Book Bag

by Joe Weil March 15, 2011 Memoir

The weirdest things survive. I lost my parents and some of those friends also died: Eric, who introduced me to vampire comics and Henry Miller novels, his brother Greg who netted the biggest trout I ever caught, Huey who threw a good fast ball, and liked jamming with me on the piano.

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