A few items worth your time:
Grace Cavalieri on Moira Egan's Hot Flash Sonnets Passager Books. 69 pgs:
Moira
Egan’s triumph is here—a poetic victory for all, women and
men—impeccable
sonnets of classic frame containing the grammar of the day. This is
prize writing. Poetry is a kind of behavior and Egan’s is
mischievous, witty, wise, perceptive and just plain adorable at
times, as she declaims the body’s progress toward maturity. She
displays the many states of womanhood with the journey’s full
potential, more interesting every page.
The Big Father Essay by Jeff Oaks from At Length:
In the fall of 2009, while we were discussing Joe Brainard’s I Remember,
one of my writing students said that she thought Brainard’s book, which
she loved, was a kind of one-off project. He’d been “lucky” to discover
the form of that book, which repeats the phrase “I remember….” at the
start of every entry. Surely no one else could get away with that kind
of artifice in memoir anymore, she said. Many in the class agreed.So I set that up as a task for that class—to find a structure or
repeating phrase that they might use to write about their own
autobiographical material. We had talked about the variety of
structures—sonnets, sestinas, and so on—that poets could use to generate
work. What were structures that prose writers might use? That was the
first question. Is any repeating form simply a gimmick, or did the
particular phrase affect what could be remembered? That was the question
I didn’t pose directly to them, but hoped they’d find out for
themselves.For the first assignment I gave that class, adapted from an exercise by Carol Bly in her book Beyond the Writers’ Workshop,
I asked them to write a 5000-word autobiography in three days. In
addition, because I’d recently been irritated by a lack of
sentence-level attention among undergraduates, I made a rule that they
couldn’t use the same sentence structure twice in a row. I had to remind
them of the five basic sentence types—fragment, simple, compound,
complex, and compound-complex—that they had to work with.
Shanna Compton's review of Dara Wier's You Good Thing:
Start with the title—its pronoun, that boldly caps-locked YOU on the cover. This is where each of the poems in You Good Thing begins. Contemplate its transformation from person into thing, into object of contemplation. Wonder about that sweet but somewhat noncommittal descriptor good.
These are the book’s fundamental questions. But readers of Wier’s
previous work will know not to expect any fixed answers: Her poetics
relies on destabilization, and she has a penchant for mystery. Her
narratives, where they exist, are heightened by uncanny imagery amid
occasional drifts of abstract wordplay. Her method of meaning has been
characterized as one of accrual, but she also enjoys reversal, negation,
and collision. Her moves tend to be tentative or interrogatory rather
than declarative. Sometimes she grounds the fluctuations of her work by
choosing to constrain them with regular stanza patterns or
pre-determined forms, as she has here.
Described in the publisher’s copy as a book of “loose sonnets,” Dara
Wier’s new collection indeed contains forty-two identically sized poems,
each with the requisite fourteen lines, and all but two are addressed
to you. If readers enter the collection expecting love poems,
they won’t be disappointed: “Is 250 years a very long time? I don’t
think so, and you? / For a good long time, I plan to love you,” she
promises in one of the most straightforward pieces in the book, “You Are
Our 3rd Destination and Our 9th Destiny.” “For you / I believe in
forever. I mean this, literally.” This is Wier’s one sure thing, and as
absolute as she’s willing to get.
Is "Poetry Genius" genius? (ed. note: Tom Lehman is no relation to David Lehman)