Here in these dawning days of spring, one sometimes gets an itch to wander. Or to unwind reflecting on dark wintry days. So, blues poems for this week. To start things off, Sonia Sanchez, with “Blues”: “in the night in my half hour negro dreams i hear voices knocking at the door i see...
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Everyone likes Jose Martí. It’s taken me a long time to figure out why. You would think it would be easy, growing up in Miami, where you can find Martí tchotchkes, parks, monuments, etc., galore. But the thing is, Cuban exiles in Miami are pretty partisan, and so I couldn’t quite get my head...
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Note: this post was meant for last week’s theme, and failed to go live due to technical difficulties. Appended to the end is a poem selected for the current week’s theme. Gramsci used this phrase to characterize his attitude during his time as a political prisoner under Mussolini. He did not come up with...
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“Tight” is a word with some significant ambiguity in modern usage. It can mean drunk, cheap, fit, cool, calm, close, angry, well-rehearsed, cautious, or secretive… For my money, and I’m cheap, “tight” is as rich a word as circulates in modern American English. It has a long and international history of ambiguity bringing it...
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Archie Bell and the Drells’ 1968 hit “Tighten Up” is one of a long line of American popular songs built around a dance. There are few lyrics beyond Bell’s cajoling the band and the dancers (you!). He does claim at the beginning of the song that “we dance just about as good as we...
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Vladimir Mayakovsky is perhaps best known nowadays in the U.S. for two things: First, he “taught” Frank O’Hara to speak to the sun. The conceit of O’Hara’s great poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island” is borrowed from Mayakovsky’s “An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a Summer...
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The German literary critic Walter Benjamin, as much an avant guardian as anyone yet mentioned in these pages, once saw the revolution in an advertisement for this salt. Bullrich’s. He tells the story in his unfinished Arcades Project, his massive collage of historical ephemera drawn from nineteenth century Parisian street life. Benjamin left his...
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Poets care a great deal about color. They’re artists in black and white, but they refer to color. The words for color, the associations they call up in the reader’s mind and their music, have fascinated poets for centuries. Goethe went so far as to write a scientifically-ridiculed theory of color, completely ignoring its...
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The Saints victory in the La Supair Bowle this past week gave everyone ample opportunity to talk about Kim Kardashian’s big ass. Why, you may wonder? So many questions torture my already fevered brain… If they lost, would her presence on the field have blamed like Jessica Simpson was for Tony Romo’s flameout awhile...
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I’ve been thinking lately on the subject of poetry contests, trying to figure out the ancestry of poetry slams (shouts to Bob Holman and his Bowery Poetry Club for many a fine evening), and literary magazine competitions (no one here to really shout out, and would they be listening). I guess I wonder about Tyler’s...
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University of Wynwood
