It's really interesting how just a simple edit can open doors for you. I've been studying the Ginsberg poem "Howl" and all its revisions for my seminar class at the New School. We have been really examining the second part with the introduction of "Moloch" and that crazy refrain. It's amazing how he uses sound in this piece, the overuse of Moloch makes you kind of go crazy hence the second part, the more eviler side of Howl, to me at least. But the edit I am talking about happened in his 4th draft where he went from, "Moloch in whom we sit lonely" to "Moloch in whom I sit lonely." That one small edit to me was a doorway for him to really get into this piece. Throughout the first few drafts you get a sense that Ginsberg was trying to separate himself from Moloch but once he realized them one in the same the drafts get a lot more exciting and more focused. The drafts for this part were at one point 8 pages long, it's amazing how he got it to only 3 very small City Light's pages. I always find it interesting when other writers are against editing. For me writing a poem is like building a door and frame. The editing is the opening of the door and allowing the poet in.
the Greek-political-Byronized-book of cultural understanding and blue
Thomas Fucaloro on George Wallace.
Read MoreTwo Books: Linda Opyr, Nicole Terez Dutton
The Ragged Cedar by Linda Opyr (Writers Ink, 2012)
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Great weather for media has really become more than we could have ever hoped for. Reading through the submissions for the new anthology, it's just so gratifying the great writers out there sharing only their best with us. It's inspiring to us as editors, it's inspiring to us as writers. And thank you, to all the great weather poets who have really upped the playing field as in what a reading should be and do and without you there is no animal. So you got about 2 more weeks before submission deadline and we just hope you submit. We are excited to read your work. greatweatherformedia.com
Three Books: Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Laura Read, & Thomas Stock
Reviewed by GEORGE WALLACE
With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women by Jane Rosenberg LaForge (Aldrich Press, 2012)
Being and on-being, Lao Tzu said, produce each other. Rosenberg LaForge’s third chapbook of poems is smart like that. A prismic oscillation, with explorations and transmutations as ephemeral as dust that rises like mustard, as day that liquefies into heat. She offers up country girls who, failing to subsist on water and lard, diminish into sand. Faces of loved ones flicker into and out of being like improbable origami. Locked in the cambric of the world’s relentless weaving, it leaves us where it begins, where all things begin—in the whistling wind which sings in the heart of bone.
Instructions for My Mother's Funeral by Laura Read (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)
In these poems we find Laura Read in some unusual places; leaning out through a car window into the Wyoming dark, to avoid not hearing the silence of the man she rides beside. Riding the Octopus in Coney Island, heart like salt water taffy, screaming to get off. In the kitchen of a donut factory squirting raspberry filling into donuts, fingers thick with sugar and lips still swollen from a night of long dragged out kisses in ditches littered with anonymous boys. This is the America you were born into, dead so long you don’t even remember its voice, empty as pink Depression-era glass. “These breasts are heavy,” she intones, “Louisiana sweating down between them, and my body’s gone limp like the trees.” It’s enough to make you want to cut off your hair and offer it to the wind.
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Hidden Agenda: A Poetry Journal by Thomas Stock (Writers Ink Press, 2012)
We find poet and naturalist Stock "walking among pitch pines (and) mosses, crouched and touching their breast" in these placid and centered poems of his adopted home within the Long Island Pine Barrens ecosystem. Stock teaches us to live richly on little things—dragonflies in a zinnia patch, green frogs on the edge of a small pond. Stop here for a daily dose of the tender beauty of nature unfolding from the sometimes prickly stuff of bone-dry woodlands and tannin-brown water.