A Poem Store Open For Business, In The Open Air

Poet-for-hire Zach Houston works at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco. Houston says he is paid about $2 to $20 for each poem.

By Cindy Carpien

Zach Houston runs his Poem Store (on any given sidewalk) with these items: a manual typewriter, a wooden folding chair, scraps of paper, and a white poster board that reads: “POEMS — Your Topic, Your Price.”

Houston usually gets from $2 to $20 for a poem, he says. He’s received a $100 bill more than once. The Oakland, Calif., resident has been composing spontaneous street poems in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2005. Five years ago, it became his main source of income.

“I quit my last conventional job on April Fools’ Day, 2007,” says Houston, 29. “They didn’t believe me, because I said I was going to write poems, on the street, with a typewriter — for money.” It was no April Fools’ joke.

On most Saturdays, you can find Houston at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Passersby eye his sign and watch intently as Houston types away on his Swiss-made, green 1968 Hermes Rocket.

“Straight out of Switzerland, man,” Houston says. “And it’s my purse full of language. I love it.”

A woman visiting from Olympia, Wash., gives Houston three ideas for her poem: spring break; road trip; and Olympia. Houston starts typing away immediately. In roughly 60 seconds, he pulls out the small, asymmetrical piece of white paper from the typewriter and reads it aloud:

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The best love poems: writers choose their favourites – interactive

  By Paddy Allen

Lustful gazing, unrequited yearning and passionate wooing – AS Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson and many others pick the poems that stole their hearts. Plus Carol Ann Duffy writes a new poem for the occasion. Click on the images to read the poems

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Carol Ann Duffy is ‘wrong’ about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill

Oxford professor of poetry Geoffrey Hill: "Bits of oligarchical commodity English such as is employed by writers for Mills & Boon" Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Oxford professor of poetry attacks Duffy’s praise of text language, and compares hers to Mills & Boon.

By Alison Flood

Carol Ann Duffy might have won numerous literary awards and become the country’s first female poet laureate, but Oxford professor of poetry Geoffrey Hill has nevertheless compared her writing to that of a Mills & Boon author.

Hill, who frequently earns the sobriquet of the English language’s greatest living poet but whose learned poems are also often described as “difficult”, was giving a lecture at Oxford University when he laid into Duffy. Taking umbrage with an interview the laureate gave to the Guardian in September 2011 , in which she said that “the poem is a form of texting … it’s the original text”, Hill sonorously laid out his reasons for disagreeing to gathered students.

“When the laureate speaks to the Guardian columnist to the tremendous potential for a vital new poetry to be drawn from the practice of texting she is policing her patch, and when I beg her with all due respect to her high office to consider that she might be wrong, I am policing mine,” said Hill, in a lecture entitled “Poetry, Policing and Public Order”. The Oxford professor of poetry has previously described difficult poems as “the most democratic because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing they are intelligent human beings”, saying that “so much of the popular poetry of today treats people as if they were fools”.

Speaking in Oxford, he said that he “would not agree that texting is a saying of more with less, and that it in this respect works as a poem”. “As the laureate says, poetry is condensed. Text is not condensed, it is truncated,” said Hill. “What is more it is normally an affectation of brevity; to express to as 2 and you as u intensifies nothing. Texting is like the old ticker tape: highly dramatic and intense if it’s reporting the Wall Street Crash or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, not through any inherent virtue of the machine. Is the breaking news which runs at the foot of the screen on the BBC news channel condensed and consequently poetic? I fail to see how anyone could rationally claim that it is. Again texting is linear only. Poetry is lines in depth designed to be seen in relation or in deliberate disrelation to lines above and below.”

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The mystery of poetry editing: from TS Eliot to John Burnside

If one poet edits another, whose work is it? In the week that John Burnside won the T S Eliot Prize, Sameer Rahim investigates the unseen hands behind that most personal and mysterious of literary forms.

 

Alone on the verge of Hell, Dante is rescued by a fellow poet. When his hero Virgil appears before him he is star-struck: “You are my master, and indeed my author; / It is from you alone that I have taken / the exact style for which I have been honoured.” The Aeneid’s author generously guides him through the Commedia cajoling, correcting and encouraging him on his long poetic journey.

Every poet needs a Virgil. Wordsworth had Coleridge; Tennyson had Arthur Hallam; and Edward Thomas had Robert Frost. However, the best-preserved example of one poet editing another is Ezra Pound’s work on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. The poem’s manuscript, first published in 1971 and now available on a snazzy iPad app, shows Pound’s boldness. On the first page of the second part, “A Game of Chess”, he wrote disapprovingly: “Too tum-pum at a stretch”; further down he complains a line is “too penty” – too regular a pentameter. Eliot redrafted the lines until he got an “OK” in the margin. Eliot acknowledged his friend’s role when he dedicated the 1925 edition to Pound, calling him Il miglior fabbro or “the better craftsman” – a phrase from Dante.

In the week that John Burnside won the TS Eliot Prize, it seems a fitting time to investigate how poet-editors (editors who are also poets) can shape the literary landscape. All the main poetry publishers – Faber, Picador, Jonathan Cape, Carcanet and Bloodaxe – have practising poets as editors, and a house’s tone and fortunes can be radically altered depending on the poet in charge of the poems of others.

Often seen as the most personal and mysterious of literary forms – and therefore least likely to be guided by an outside hand – poetry is, in fact, strikingly indebted to invisible creators. What, we might ask, are the effects and risks of this little-understood practice on the nation’s verse?

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Poetry anthology sparks race row

Rita Dove (left) and Helen Vendler Photograph: Garry Weaser/PR

Poet Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry attacked by renowned critic Helen Vendler for valuing ‘inclusiveness’ over quality.

By Alison Flood

A furious row has broken out in the rarefied confines of American poetry circles, after grande dame of poetry criticism Helen Vendler attacked former poet laureate Rita Dove’s anthology of 20th-century American poetry for its focus on “multicultural inclusiveness” rather than quality.

Dove’s collection, The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, is the Pulitzer prize-winning poet and professor of English’s pick of the best US poetry of the last 100 years. Vendler, a critic and Harvard professor, laid into the book in an excoriating write-up in the New York Review of Books, criticising Dove for deciding “to shift the balance, introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors”.

Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg and Sterling Brown are left out of the anthology – although Dove explains in her introduction that this was down to a rights issue: Penguin’s budget was not enough to secure rights to include their poems in the book.

Vendler lambasts Dove for her inclusion of “some 175″ poets and for her choice of poems: “mostly short” and “of rather restricted vocabulary”, she says.

“Multicultural inclusiveness prevails,” she writes. “No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Anthologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as ‘elitism’, and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom.”

Later, Vendler enumerates that “of the 20 poets born between 1954 and 1971 (closing the anthology), fifteen are from minority communities (Hispanic, black, Native American, or Asian American), and five are white (two men, three women)”, saying that “Dove’s tipping of the balance obeys a populist aesthetic voiced in the introduction”. And Dove feels obliged to defend the black poets she includes “with hyperbole”, says Vendler.

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Former inmate wins $18,000 poetry prize

Robert Adamson

BY GIA METHERELL

Poetry was Robert Adamson’s passport out of jail, and now it has won him the 2011 Patrick White Award.The $18,000 prize is a significant literary award, established by Patrick White with the proceeds of his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature, for writers who may not have received due recognition for their contribution to Australian literature.The judging panel described Adamson, 68, as ”one of Australia’s truly great poets of place”.”His place is the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, where his grandfather was a fisherman and where he has spent much of his adult life.

”The Hawkesbury operates as both a real and an imaginative homeland in his poetry.”

Adamson said he was ”thrilled to be part of White’s marvellous legacy in the company of previous winners like Christina Stead, Gwen Harwood and Randolph Stow”.

Besides 21 collections of poetry, including the prize-winning The Golden Bird and The Goldfinches of Baghdad, he has written an acclaimed memoir, Inside Out, which tells of his troubled childhood and adolescence, leading to his imprisonment in Long Bay jail.

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New sponsor backs T S Eliot prize

T S Eliot

20.10.11 | Benedicte Page

The Poetry Book Society has obtained three-year sponsorship for the prestigious T S Eliot Prize from private investment management firm Aurum Funds.

There had been concern for the prize, which goes to new collections of poetry in English and was established by Sir Stephen Spender, after Arts Council England announced last spring that its funding for the PBS would end from April 2012.

Aurum Funds is understood to be donating a substantial sum to support the management of the prize, with T S Eliot’s widow Valerie Eliot and the T S Eliot estate continuing to provide the prize money itself. The winner receives £15,000 and each shortlisted poet wins £1,000.

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The Poet Laureate, the ode to an Achilles and a pair of Beckham’s boots

Carol Ann Duffy has been assured David Beckham's boots are on their way

By Arifa Akbar

When the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy struck a deal with David Beckham – she would send him a handwritten poem about his ankle injury if he sent her a pair of his football boots in return – she expected a package to turn up six months ago.

Last week, in an interview on Radio 4, she revealed her frustration with the footballer who had evidently forgotten to post them, pleading: “Can I have the boots by Christmas, please?”

But now, in an interview published in today’s Independent, Duffy appears to have calmed down: “Beckham saw the poem ["Achilles", about the injury that kept the former captain out of the 2010 World Cup] and got in touch [to] ask if he could have a hand-written copy of it. And I said, ‘Yes, but only if I can have a pair of your boots.’ The boots apparently, are on their way. He’s had the poem.”

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Carol Ann Duffy: ‘Poems are a form of texting’

The poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, is launching a poetry competition for secondary school pupils. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The poet laureate believes the fun and creativity of mobile texting will turn today’s children into exciting poets of tomorrow.

By Joanna Moorhead

Hardly a week goes by without a warning about how educationally detrimental it is for children to spend hours of every day screen-gazing and message-sending. But now there’s a note of dissent – from the poet laureate, no less, who says she believes texting is an ideal springboard to good poetry-writing.

“The poem is a form of texting … it’s the original text,” says Carol Ann Duffy. “It’s a perfecting of a feeling in language – it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We’ve got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It’s a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form.”

Duffy, who became Britain’s first female poet laureate in 2009, is passionate about the teaching of poetry in school. She believes there’s a myth that poetry is considered “difficult” or “complicated” by teachers – but says that’s simply not borne out by what’s really going on in the nation’s classrooms, where poetry is enjoying a major revival. “The poem is the literary form of the 21st century,” she says. “It’s able to connect young people in a deep way to language … it’s language as play.” Just, one might say, as text messaging is language at play.

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Ten Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now

This is the first of a series of articles focusing on the very best works of contemporary poetry in the United States.

By Seth Abramson

Of late there’s been a strong sense in the national poetry community, and not entirely without warrant, that those with the largest megaphones for their opinions — including certain writers for The Huffington Post — have more commonly used their pulpit to bully contemporary poetry and poets than to effectively promote either one. There have been, from this media outlet as well as others, wild claims regarding the demise of poetry in America, each more haughty, vitriolic, and (dare we say) desperate than the last. Don’t believe it; the poetry scene in America is the largest, most diverse, and most vibrant it has ever been, and it’s time for poetry-lovers associated with online media to strike a solid blow against the seedy, nigh-incoherent malcontentism of certain contemporary poetry critics. The robust state of poetry in America is evidenced, in part, by this non-exhaustive, unranked list of superlative books from the past 15 years, all of which are must-reads for those looking to push back against the gloom-and-doom of poetry’s ambient naysayers:

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