The Best Answer to This Question Ever

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

It achieved its final form when I stopped making it worse.

Philip Levine in How a Poem Happens

[Via the RocketPoet]

My New Career

A tattoo artist hides words in her designs. When the owners of her tattoos age and their ink fades, the words will become more and more legible and the poem hidden therein will amaze the world.

Wait for it.

As the Humans Retreat

Now that the poets are dying and rhymes are being made out of chunks of broken pottery fitted together electronically, it's good to see poems finding their own life out in the world, without the poets getting in their way. Why, it's positively brazen. The electronic May edition of Poetry tells it like it is, spotlighting Ilya Kaminsky, who opens it up with the lost leader:

I am not a poet.

Thanks for the tip, Ilya.

Today I suggest a journey to the Banff Centre for the Arts, a massive project for replacing the Rocky Mountains with hollow versions suitable for human inhabitation. Do note the poems grazing around the edges of the project, like vampire deer or something. No wonder the humans are locking themselves away and trying to figure out irony, a century after Eliot started to develop his infamous distaste for peaches.

Gad, even they are out in the world!

Prufrock must be turning over in his grave! (Aw, go ahead and click on that last link and read the last line of iambic pentameter written in English.)

Ye Gods, More Dead Poets

It's a plague!

W.D. Snodgrass now. At least he was 83. "Heart's Needle" is still an amazing poem (and the title poem of a fine book). And The Fuehrer Bunker: ballsy to write dramatic monologues (rare at that time) in the voices of those down in the bunker. Both of these books helped broaden my vision of poetry.

And also Danish poet Inger Christensen, whose work I didn't really know but I will. Now. Too late.

As cummings would say, "dying is fine)but Death" ... "(forgive us,o life!the sin of Death."

Mick Imlah (1956-2009)

This past year, the poet whose work I discovered and liked best was Mick Imlah. I bought his The Lost Leader and loved it, and was looking forward to more books by him. Just January 1 on my personal blog I posted about this. I was thinking how nice it was to find a new poet whose work I was looking forward to.

Then yesterday I discovered that he had just died.

No more books by Mick Imlah. The poetry world is now bleaker.

On the possible upside, maybe his first book will be reprinted. And The Lost Leader exists to be re-read.

I also like The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, which he edited with Robert Crawford.

There, I've cheered myself up already.