"Concepts create idols, only wonder grasps anything."
- Gregory of Nyssa
 

User Login

Subscribe via Email

(Don't worry. It's safe. +

Unsubscribe at any time.) 

Poetry
Litany PDF Print E-mail
Poetry
Written by Matt Browning   
Sunday, 28 October 2007
image
Facebook!

Has a phrase every come out of your mouth that by the time it was spoken you realized it was a phrase that one of your parents or grandparents had used regularly when you were growing up? This has happened to me from time to time: I'll spit out a saying that my mom would use when I was a kid and more than just that it actually sounds like she would say it, the phrasing and intonation.

Language is a learned ability. Not just what we say but also how we say it. About a year ago I was working on a series of poems. I was trying to figure out how to use line more effectively; how to break and also form the lines to more closely match the voice of my poetry. As I read some of my own poetry out loud to myself I heard something that wasn't necessarily part of my normal speaking voice. When I read my poems out loud I spoke deliberately and with a slow clarity. I spoke with some sort of authority and wonder that one speaks with when speaking of a great mystery that he or she has the privilege of speaking about.

 
The Political Poetry of Hayden Carruth PDF Print E-mail
Poetry
Written by Matt Browning   
Monday, 24 September 2007
Poetry
Title: Various
Author: Hayden Carruth
image
Facebook!
Hayden Carruth is a poet that doesn't pull any punches. His political views have been called "radical" and often inform his poetry. Carruth lived for many years in Vermont and the images of poverty and hardship in rural Vermont pack his poetry. About Carruth poet Galway Kinnell said, "This is not a man who sits down to 'write a poem'; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being." But Carruth's poems are also some of the most accessible poems that are also critically acclaimed.
 
Beat Poetry Gets Religion PDF Print E-mail
Poetry
Written by Matt Browning   
Thursday, 20 September 2007
Poetry
Title: Sometime During Eternity
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
image
Facebook!
We all have an impression of the Beat Poets, but rarely do we associate religion with beat poetry. But maybe beat poetry and the story of Jesus have a simbiotic relationship. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem Sometime During Eternity is lent a certain classical authority because of its subject matter (which in some ways the Beat Poets were trying to cast off, so I don't know if that would be see as a positive for Ferlinghetti necessarily), which the story of Jesus, after being told over and over again in the same manner in our culture, also seems to benefit for Ferlinghetti's 'hipsterized' retelling. Take a look and see what you think...
 
The Power of Language PDF Print E-mail
Poetry
Written by Matt Browning   
Tuesday, 04 September 2007
image
Facebook!
Words have more power than we sometimes realize. We tend to think of words as being a means of communication, but there is something more to words than just getting a message across. Words are much larger than a few letters on the page. The four letter word that starts with "F" and rhymes with "puck" is much larger than it might seem to someone who came across it without understanding its cultural (and personal) connotations. At a poetry reading I attended once, the poet Li-Young Lee described poetry (and the words that make up a poem) like the walls of a building. What's important to us about a building are not necessarily the walls, but the empty space that the walls create. When I say, "this is a nice room," I am not talking about the walls, but rather about the empty space that is divided off by the walls. The walls exist to create a larger, empty space, which we call a "room."
 
The Poetry of Sports PDF Print E-mail
Poetry
Written by Matt Browning   
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
Poetry
Title: Various
Author: Bill Matthews
image
Facebook!

William Matthews, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 11, 1942, was educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina. He was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the City University of New York.

Bill Matthews published his first book of poetry in 1970, Ruining the New Road: Poems. Nine others followed during his lifetime, including A Happy Childhood (1984), Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-91 (1992), and Time & Money, New Poems, which received the 1996 National Book Critics Circle award for poetry. He won the Modern Poetry Association's 1997 Ruth Lilly Award. He was a former chairman of the literature panel of the National Endowment for the Arts and a former president of the Poetry Society of America.

 
<< Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>

Results 1 - 9 of 14

Interested in Submitting?

If you are interested in submitting poetry, fiction, or non-fiction shorts, please see our submission guidelines page .

Technical Difficulties

We apologize as we are currently experiencing a few technical problems (registration and some sections). The good news is these problems are the pre-cursor to a new site we are working on (both in design and philosophy). In the short term, we hope to fix these problems soon. Thanks for your patience.