Verbatim

"Maybe the epic poet of Newfoundland has yet to be discovered. She may be out there contemplating sending her first suite of poems off to a literary journal. She may be thinking about taking a creative writing class or may just be now reading the poet that will change her life and draw her to poetry. I’d like to think that she’s the person this anthology was compiled for. A little message in a time capsule that reads, 'Here is your inheritance. Now carry on.'"
James Langer and Mark Callanan discuss their new anthology The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry.

Sunday Poem

SAD LOG! 

Triste Lignum!—Horace 

Branches like a Bacchic dancer thrashed
Ever more furious and faster
Through the storm, then catastrophically crashed
Into my window, not the last disaster
But a mere mishap that may be mended.
No mere cataclysm ever ended 

The war of winds, the travail of the trees
As they changed from ghastly green to grubby brown
Till, secretly subverted by disease,
They trembled to their roots and tumbled down,
As I shall do, one long-awaited day
When whatever wind will carry me away.

From Reliquary and Other Poems by Daryl Hine (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2013)

Ahead of Their Time

Amit Majmudar has unburied masterpieces by Matthew Arnold, Lord Byron and Tennyson where no one ever thought to look—including the poets themselves.

Some traits that we value in poetry—irregularity of rhythm, unpredictability of language, a highly personal bent—were things that the Victorians allowed themselves only in their letters. The letter also lent itself to a structural characteristic so ubiquitous in contemporary poems it is almost unrecognized: the first-person anecdote. So Matthew Arnold is terribly out of favor among contemporary poets; I myself find much of his poetry unreadable. But what a shock in the Letters!

According to Benjamin Schwarz, it would take another two decades after Tennyson's death for someone to anticipate Majmudar's insight:

Frost, who urged Thomas to turn to poetry, proposed that he transform into poems some segments from his finely observed book on country life In Pursuit of Spring—a decisive suggestion. “All he ever got from me,” Frost said years later, “was admiration for the poet in him before he had written a line of poetry.” Thomas would, shortly before his death, characterize his poems as the “quintessences of the best parts of my prose books.”

What's Linda Besner Reading?

Can Twitter Make You A Better Poet?

Robin Richardson thinks so.

I was always meticulous about individual lines, but having to make them stand on their own made me think about their function on a whole new level. Every time I post a tweet I ask to myself “is this musically cohesive?” “Does it resonate content-wise without its context?” and most importantly, “Does it give the reader something more than what’s contained in its 140 characters?” This last consideration is what’s really improved how I approach writing. I don’t want these tweets to be clever little quips, or single thoughts that make a person sigh or chuckle. I want them to open infinitely off the edges of the page, or screen, so that each new tweet is the key to its own, much larger universe. Alice Munro is brilliant at this: in a single gesture or off-handed comment her characters inflate before the reader’s eyes, becoming fully realized within those few strokes. Poetry, if anything, should do the same in even fewer strokes.

Patchwork Poetry

Working with Mary Dalton on her new collection, Hooking, brought into sharp relief how little I knew about the cento. Over at Oona, a blogger makes a case for the form's cultural relevance:

 In an age of sampling, remixes, & flarf, the renaissance of the cento, a form that dates, one way or another, at least to ancient Greece, is oddly apt. The possibilities of this kind of poetic collage are dizzying.

Marie Okáčová zooms in:

I believe that the cento, rather than being an eccentric curiosity devoid of all literary value, is primarily a kind of intricate and actually perfectly legitimate play with language, which reflects its principles of operation. Being in fact the embodiment of absolute intertextuality, the patchwork poems implicitly question every notion of literary originality because they emphasize the interdepenence of individual texts representing different literary meta-languages. The cento is therefore "recycled" art only in a more conspicuous way than the rest of literature inevitably is; this, however, does not mean that a work of literature can actually never be original and inventive. In fact, as an example of intertextuality par excellence, the patchwork poetry is, at least conceptually, a highly innovative literary form.

What's Evan Jones Reading?