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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: W. S. Merwin: An Appreciation
Until last Friday, when he died at the age of ninety-one, in Hawaii, where he lived for some forty years and restored palm trees and native plants, W. S. Merwin was by unanimous consent synonymous with...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Whitman Notebook: Which Is Ahead
Last night I heard the trains slip past with their lights off. My name was pulled under and didn’t recognize me anymore. My name was like an invisible sleep rolled up under a tree at the side of the...
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Both/And: Republic Café by David Biespiel
David Biespiel’s sixth and latest book of poems, Republic Café, should be within your reach as soon as you can make it happen. The book shouldn’t be placed in between others on your bookshelf or in...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Whitman Notebook: Summer Grass
Sometimes I think I will never leave Walt Whitman’s “spear of summer grass”—that eternity of blade and spike, collar and sheath. The taste of it is intimate as any coming evening. I imagine… I’m...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 14): “Some...
For Thomas Jefferson, to say nothing of his political ancestor Edmund Burke, the order of mankind is rural and agricultural. Agrarianism, the argument goes, is what keeps citizens in harmony with one...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 13): “Letter...
Forty years ago, the poet of last good kisses and broken down lives wrote the following: Dear Charles: And so we meet once in San Francisco and I learn I bombed you long ago in Belgrade when you were...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 12): “Shine,...
We will now have to suffer through hundreds and hundreds more days of the turgid presidency of Donald Trump. One can already hear the saccharine tones of “normalizers” saying to give Mr. Trump yet...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 11): “Skinhead”
“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” begins historian Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” first published in the November 1964 issue...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 10): “The Gods”
In September W. S. Merwin turns ninety. From the view of poetry that orbits around historical movements and groupings of poets based on style or substance, Merwin has always been a misfit. He was,...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 9): “The City...
Asking friends recently what has their attention in contemporary American poetry, I received the reply, “Well, we have a new poetry now that wants to be a record of seeing into the lives of politically...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 8): “Song of...
I may not be the only poet who wishes he could reproduce the vernacular of a two-seater outhouse simultaneously with writing on subjects like capitalism, prison life, art and music, portraitures of...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Against Hatred
“A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness…” – George Orwell Well, that Two Minutes Hate is over. As I prepare for Donald J. Trump’s administration, I don’t imagine there are many of us ready to...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 7): “Facing It”
By 1968, President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and all the people running the Vietnam War, had all said privately to their friends in the Congress, the FBI, and CIA, that...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 6): “To Elsie”
I so distrust the platitude that America is a classless society, with all the inaccuracy of that term as shorthand for the fairy tale of equality. The great battle between the classes is not only the...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 5): “The Lost...
I suppose it’s justifiable to describe war poetry in quasi-literary terms because when you read it, it’s partly a clash between jingoism and cutting documentary: first you see gambit and stratagem and...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 4): “Roosters”
[This installment marks the 100th column by David Biespiel for The Rumpus. It’s been our joy and pleasure to host his work here, and we hope to keep doing it for a long time to come. –Ed.]***At various...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems that Shaped America (Pt. 3):...
To become an American citizen no loyalty oath is required. There is no coerced allegiance test. You could have spent decades speaking or writing highly critical words of the government and never be...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 1): “The Idea...
This column is the first of 21 pieces on poems I’m interested in, and I hope you will be too, that I want to offer here as poems that have shaped America. By that I don’t mean poems really, truly...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Suit
I want to give you a suit, my grandfather said to me one morning in his house in Tulsa. Come into the closet over here. I was visiting from Vermont during the winter. He was nearly eighty and still...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Pale of Vermont
After I left Boston for Vermont I thought that now, at last, I would have my own life. I felt like a man who goes to Europe to find himself. But instead I was going into the north woods. Fewer than...
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