Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 10

Dept. of Monday (Summer Wish Edition)

Ice cream socius.

Poetry & Anti-Poetry

In an age of Too Much, the Recovery Project at Octopus is an intriguing intervention against the rising slush pile of the now. A poet writes about an older book, often one that's been passed over or forgotten too quickly, and argues against its neglect. The pieces often take an autobiographical turn, with some account of how the book reached the writer, the mysterious heart of that mysterious process by which poems beat time and find their fans.

Joel Bettridge's take on the poetry of span

Marina Tsvetaeva's Art in the Light of Conscience

It's been a Tsvetaeva/Mandelstam kind of summer, for no reason I can really account for except that the Rethinking Poetics kerfuffle (remember that?) got me curious about a time when the gulag, not Facebook or a conference room, was the endpoint for those kind of discussions. The trouble's been finding translations, which never seem to bring over the poetry with the intensity of the critical discussions it provokes. Prose carries better; so here's something about that, for this.

Thanks to a...

Free Samples

In anticipation of tomorrow's Market Day reading, here are some online samples from the readers.

Island, by Erika Recordon

Two poems from La Petite Zine
One poems from Verse Daily
A "Recovery Project" on William Dickey from Octopus
An article on "Digital Diplomacy" from The New York Times Magazine
by Jesse Lichtenstein

Market Day Poetry: Koeneke, Lichtenstein, Recordon this Saturday 8/14

I give my last reading of the summer this Saturday, August 14 at 12 noon for the Market Day Poetry Series at St. Johns Booksellers in North Portland. I'm reading all new work, but even better inducements to come are Jesse Lichtenstein and Erika Recordon, whom I was lucky enough to get for the bill, plus Nena Rawdah's eclectic and totally reasonably priced collection. Come quiz her on where she got each book and I'll bet she can tell you.

Saturday, 8/14, 12 noon
Market Day Poetry Series
JESSE...

New Reasons to Heart the Internet

"Jar Jar Binks makes the Ewoks look like fucking Shaft!!!!!"

History of My Own Time

Gilbert Burnet is my favorite prose writer. Not the greatest, not the most literary, no ingenious stylist moving the goalposts of English. But in the last few years, he's the writer I go to most when I can't sleep or need to quiet the drone that passes for thinking. I read novels to distraction; if they're good enough to keep reading, they become obsessions that last till the book's consumed. I like Burnet too much to treat him like that. I dip in and out irresponsibly, mix up who's who...

Open Space

I follow the SFMOMA blog for all kinds of reasons—Suzanne Stein, Brandon Brown, Dodie Bellamy, and Kevin Killian are four of them—but one has nothing to do with the museum itself. It's the history of San Francisco's recession-proof gentrification that appears there between the lines of the various posts. Here's Stella Lochman, SF native and the museum's education & public programs assistant, from Wednesday:

"I always like to tell the story of my neighborhood before it became what it is today...

La Mez

Sharon Mesmer's guest blogging through the week at Best American Poetry. "Its like a cathedral of refreshment!"
(Note to David Lehman: Get her to edit the next one before we lose her to Orsk.)

Steve McLaughlin's The American Scene

Around the time I moved to Portland, the Poetry Bus was on its well-hyped roll across the nation. Its local stop at the old Mississippi Studios was the first reading I went to here.

Four years and a mega-recession later, times have downsized. The foundation that publicized the tour has stepped away from paying bloggers; Mississippi Studios upgraded in a down market and became too pricey to host poetry; the planned film of the tour never materialized; and the bus idea, with its carbon debt, pa...