Sina Queyras's Blog, page 3

Adrienne Rich on "Easy Poetry"

Career-minded poets, expending thought and energy on producing a "publishable manuscript," on marketing their wares and their reputations, as young poets are now urged (and even trained) to do, may have little time left over for thinking about the art itself, ancient and contemporary, and why it matters -- the state of the art itself as distinct from their own poems and vitas. This shallowness

If a poem costs nothing to write I don't want to read it

MR: Oh, sure. By my early thirties, I think I'd stopped believing I was going to succeed as a poet. It'd been years since I'd had a poem accepted anywhere, and I could tell that what I'd written up to that point was no good. It was indifferent, middling work. I knew that I didn't really know what to do as a poet. I could write semi-competent poems in a couple of different period styles, but they

Stage Door - Lucille Ball's Story 1/2

One of the greats...these are the Lucille Ball clips...

Steven Price reads from Omens in the Year of the Ox (Brick Books)

We Want Reviews: Introducing Laura Broadbent & Call For Work

"The great review is one that approaches the corpus curiously and
dissectively, determining if it works and what makes it tick.” -Vanessa
Place

Who wants a dull review? A good reviewer is a skilled host: ensure
your guests’ enjoyment, present the fare slowly, artfully, and with
flourish so it speaks for itself. Make your guests want more. Make us want more.

If Poetry is thinking made

On Misdirected Energy

The lobbing back and forth of insults between Michael Lista and Jan Zwicky is a depressing thing to watch. I admit I was happy to see Zwicky lob back because let's face it, we rarely see a woman taking on an aggressive young critic the way that Zwicky did. Exhilarating because we see too few women wrestling with public space on this scale. Kudos. Mr. Lista's piece was meant to provoke. That it

Ongoing Notes to My Interview for CWILA

Hi Natalee,I'm not sure what Flarf has to do with anything here...nor am I sure what model you are referring to. 

Good points. This brief interview can't speak for all women. Nor for all experiences. Nor should it. If it's harsh, if it's blunt, it's because I think that we really need to think about the issue of mentorship and promotion and why great pools of women go unnoticed, their work

Adam Dickinson on Zwicky & "Lyric thinking"

When I think about realism and how differently people describe the moves of realism, my head hurts a little. When I think about metaphor, and how differently we describe the uses of it, again, my head hurts just a little. When we attempt to describe place, to simply describe place, it seems to me we are entering into radical territory. Capital wants us to be oblivious to place. To be able to see

The Allen Ginsberg Project: Mind Mouth & Page - 23 (Pound and the Vernacular)

So Pound, being a great scholar, went to find all the parallels in history where there was a transition from an official, or archaic, or classical, prosody and tongue and language to a popular language. There are other times in history when this has happened, and those have been times of great growth and creation of new forms. So he went, as I mentioned before, toSextus Propertius, who had made

If it walks like apocalypse: Dennis Lee's Testament

This morning I awoke to some heavy rhymes. I caught only the last two lines:


And we plan about snacks and not washing our hands/

And the letter J. and he understands.


The he, in this instance, is a worm: my partner was reading Dennis Lee’s Garbage Delight to our 8 month-old twins. I did not grow up on Alligator Pie and Garbage Delight. My first encounter with Dennis Lee was his Civil