David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Going Back to 1968
45 years ago was a barricaded, world-rocking year. Both in politics and in poetry.Between January and the end of March came the beginning of both the Prague Spring and the Tet Offensive. North Korea...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: You Will Be Judged
About to board a flight from Portland to New York, about to meet with the jury that’s been convening for 12 months by e-mail, Skype, and face to face meeting, to select a recipient from the five...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Poesis Delenda Est!
I’ve never much gone in for shoot ‘em up movies. I’ve never seen Terminator, other than the most famous clip (“I’ll be back”). I can’t stomach Quentin Tarantino movies or, his precursor, Sam Peckinpah....
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Identity v. Identification
T. R. Hummer has a comely piece up on Slate, “The Intimacy of Walt Whitman’s ‘America,’” about the influence and pleasures of Walt Whitman, plus an alleged recording of Whitman reading lines from...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl meets Gay Marriage
Yesterday was the 56th anniversary of the day that U.S. customs agents seized some 500 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl on the grounds of obscenity. Yesterday and today, the Supreme Court of the United...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Republican House Set to Banish Poets from America
In a surprise vote during a rare Sunday night hearing, the House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Other Agencies that has jurisdiction over the amount of funding provided to the National...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Politics and Post-Modernism?
No one can know for sure what literary historians will make of it, least of all me as I pound out an editorial about poetry every week. But if I were a betting man, I would wager that the most...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Boston Stands in a Sahara of Blood
“The old South Boston Aquarium stands / in a Sahara of snow now,” begins Robert Lowell’s masterpiece, “For the Union Dead,” a poem about race and class in Boston. To my mind, it’s one of the great...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: What is Lyric Poetry II
Back in December last year I offered not so much ten definitions but ten clues, fixings, or renditions about lyric poetry. A couple dozen of you chimed in as well, which was fabulous.Let’s do it again!...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Syria’s Poets Under Threat
The debate about political poetry in the United States sometimes has an arid feel to it. Essential, yes. But fatally so? Not very often.But poets caught up in violent political events are brethren. I...
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Poetry Wire: Follow Your Strengths, Manage Your Weaknesses, and Don’t Let...
One of the unfortunate, perverse, even terrifying aims of some creative writing workshops is to help you become what you are not. We look at your writing in workshop and identify what is not happening,...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and Bad Judgment
Asked by James Dickey why he got “into this,” meaning into the literary business, into poetry, Robert Penn Warren says, “bad judgment.”I suppose, one thinks about this sort of thing often when one is...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Cynicism of Mark Edmundson, Or Poetry Is...
Mark Edmundson’s take down of contemporary American poetry, “Poetry Slam,” (currently behind the paywall) in this month’s issue of Harper’s, is not so bad really. He’s right about the insularity of the...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Death of the Natural
When Algernon Swinburne died in 1909, William Butler Yeats, not yet 40, is reported to have said to his sister, “Now I’m king of the cats.” Yeats would die in 1939. Born that same year was Seamus...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Fading of September 11
We live in a world where whenever the discussion turns to humanitarian assistance or military intervention what is meant by that is American assistance and American intervention.There are good reasons...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Reading My Hate Mail
Every since I wrote this weekend with the news that I’m stepping down, after 11 years, as a columnist on poetry for my local paper, I’ve received some very nice farewells. I mean, very nice. One woman...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 10 Burdens for American Poetry
As with the myth of America, America’s poets believe a poem should go from rags to riches. And yet, why so much surprise when it actually happens?There is more to American poetry than its genial and...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Poetry Shutdown Begins – Poets and Critics Fail...
A flurry of last-minute phone calls, philippics, tweets, and Facebook posts by poets and critics late last night failed to break a bitter standoff over the latest poetry-is-dead attacks, setting in...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Art of Communion
There comes a time in the process of writing a poem when you find yourself putting the reader’s interests and desires ahead of your own as the poet. Not that the reader is a potted plant, I mean....
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: When JFK Read Poetry
Not that one needs an excuse such as the imminent threat of nuclear armageddon to read poetry, but the early 1960s might have been a good time to turn to poems for comfort, insight, solace, and...
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