David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 142
June 19, 2019
Clementine Unbound will publish my poem “Now Is Not the Time to Talk about Guns” online beginning August 20.
Clementine Unbound will publish my poem “Now Is Not the Time to Talk about Guns” online beginning August 20.
This is the second of my poems published by Clementine. Thank you Editor GF Boyer.
Congratulations to Joy Harjo, the new Poet Laureate of the United States.
Congratulations to Joy Harjo, the new Poet Laureate of the United States.
Read an interview with her HERE.
June 11, 2019
Don’t misread Darwin: for humans, ‘survival of the fittest’ means being sympathetic | Aeon Videos
One of the shockwaves from Charles Darwin’s idea that humans evolved from other animals was moral panic. If our ethics are not guided by an omnipotent and all-knowing god and, instead, life is driven by ‘survival of the fittest’ via natural selection, how could we possibly expect humans to behave with anything other than brash self-interest? Yet Darwin’s use of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was hardly meant to suggest that existence was a knockdown, drag-out fight – he was very clear that generosity, sympathy and all those other traits that give us warm feelings are central to human survival. In this short video, the psychologist Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley puts kindness in evolutionary context, connecting his own recent neural-imaging work on compassion with Darwin’s view that sympathy is a cornerstone of human flourishing.
— Read on aeon.co/videos/dont-misread-darwin-for-humans-survival-of-the-fittest-means-being-sympathetic
And poetry expands our ability to by empathetic.
June 10, 2019
Review: The Wanderer shows a poet in prime and vital voice worth reading and rereading.
The Wanderer by Christine Gosnay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Christine Gosnay’s chapbook “The Wanderer” contains some of the finest poetry I have read from a poet of the new century so far. Gosnay is not afraid to use imagery from nature, but she does it in a fresh way.
Yellow heat strafes
the hand-deep water
where the shade-eyed darner makes its notch.
At the same time, she also revivifies the commonplace of living.
It means that when I pull nothing out from the soft center
where my stomach, pale and useful, longs,
pulling as if at a doll’s string to say ache
in a bright, unrecognizable voice,
I move my ind by the hand from the dark blue room
where it is thinking-feeling
toward the edge of the blank graph…
Her poems are collages of experiences, images, and thoughts that still maintain an overall unity of feeling and thinking. Unlike many collections, “The Wanderer” does not falter or contain poems that show obvious need for more rewriting. There is a consistency of tone and craft throughout.
Gosnay’s work here shows a poet in prime and vital voice worth reading and rereading.
June 9, 2019
June 8, 2019
Congrats to Allan Peterson – reading from his new collection -June 11 at City Lights
My friend, Allan Peterson, is reading from his new collection, This Luminous: New and Selected Poem, at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco on Jun 11. Stop by if you are in the area.
June 1, 2019
Congratulations to Fredericksburg poet Elizabeth “Beth” Spragins on the release of her new collection “The Language of Bones”
Congratulations to Fredericksburg poet Elizabeth “Beth” Spragins on the release of her new collection “The Language of Bones” available from Amazon HERE.
Elizabeth Spencer Spragins truly is in touch with ancient bards and the glorious music of the incantations of druidic sisters in her collection The Language of Bones. Roaming the geography and history of America, these verses hark back to the British and Celtic ancestry of the original European settlers. “Children run unshod, / Armed with goldenrod,” reenacting the past as they unknowingly step on its buried remnants. As the poet writes, the reader will indeed “linger late” and read with “awe and meditate” on history written in the earth and echoed in these lyrical poems inspired by those ancient bards.
May 31, 2019
Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman,born 200 years ago
Walt Whitman 200 – In celebration of the bicentennial of Walt Whitman’s birth on May 31, explore this selection of his poems, prose, and ephemera;…
— Read on poets.org/walt-whitman-200
Review: Did You Know?
Did You Know? by Elizabeth S. Wolf
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
First, the content: This seems a heartfelt and honest autobiography of a difficult life, often without self-pity. Wolf’s relationships with her parents, other family members, ex-husband, college professors and administrators, health care professionals, and bureaucracies in general are fraught–but she seems to exhibit little malice but much (probably appropriate) anger.
Second, the poetics: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads argued for a more natural language in poetry than what had come before, a poetry that was a form of heightened but still common speech. The Modernists found 19th Century poetry post-Wordsworth still too stilted and artificial. Post-post-Modernists have continued this journey away from “poetic speech,” often going to the other extreme of writing what seems prose with broken lines or even casual conversation strung out across the page. This style is one of today’s orthodoxies, and Wolf’s work falls here.
If you heard someone read from this chapbook, you would think it a transcript of a woman mulling over her life. That is fine, as far as it goes.
But I read poetry for language that is a selection, or a distillation of normal speech and writing, a “making new” from what is too trite, too used up. Yes, this means there is “artifice.” But art is artifice and artifact. Does it ring true in that artifice, speaking in ways that we normally do not but without feeling false? Given this aesthetic preference on my part, you may discount this review if you disagree.
But consider “The Next Night My Mother Called” from Wolf’s collection:
“I can’t talk to my parents,”
she said. “I am so mad.
My mother came over with a hot lunch
and I didn’t open the door.”
“Good for you,” I said. “You talk
to who you want,
when you want.
It’s your house.
It’s you life,”
“Life sucks,” said my mother.
“Also true,” I replied.
Wolf’s collection allows her to face and deal with much trauma. It has value. But it does not reward second reading as the best poetry does.
