The eternal sophomore

Writing vers libre is like saying "Tennyson" without a hairnet.

Sneaking a pentameter into an otherwise "free" poem : forbidden fruit! Or the fun of passing along a secret code to others who might understand it.

Just wanted to share this

Aretha and Condoleezza. Making music together.

Recalling ...

Recalling a conversation with a follower of this blog who objected to my having called a sequence of five prose-poems "alternative sonnets," I note with a degree of satisfaction that the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) gave one of his prose-poems (from his book Illuminations) the title of "Sonnet." It is the second section of this poem, "Jeunesse."

Dylan Thomas reading

"Poem on His Birthday":

It wasn't Fifth Avenue!

It was Seventy-sixth and Broadway!

Quotation of note

Infrarub should not harm him but it doesn't lend a ball player luster exactly.

Marianne Moore, tweaking Roger Maris for appearing in a commercial. From The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (Penguin, 1987), p. 687

A harsh review

of the Best American Poetry series, and particularly of its latest (2009) installment. Here.

It looks as if it's going to be nothing but gratuitous invective as one begins reading the review, but as one proceeds, one begins to perceive justice in the reviewer's complaints.