 Joshua Weiner: 03.13.06-03.17.06Friday 03.17.06 I don’t crawl the web very much, unlike, I think, a lot of younger poets I know. I don’t get much pleasure from it, though it’s proven a convenient tool for looking stuff up. And I’ve only poked around on the blogs. Ron Silliman has a good one, what an astonishing amount of energy he must have! The one website I feel I’ve really learned something from is Jacket, edited by the Australian poet, John Tranter, now about 30 issues out, and 5,000 pages total (he informs us). (I’ve never published anything on it). I find myself going back to it every so often and losing hours. . . . Read More >>Permalink | Comments (1) Thursday 03.16.06 Watching late night television last week, I came across that ridiculous movie, Twister—the screenplay could’ve been written by a computer, circa 1980—but was struck by the brief scene of a woman alone in bed reading Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno—anyone familiar with this edition would recognize it from afar, by virtue of Michael Mazur’s dramatic cover image, for Canto XXI (Sins of Fraud). . . . Read More >>Permalink | Comments (1) Wednesday 03.15.06 Unfinished business. Something I left out of the essay on the “Best Of” anthologies (elsewhere on this site) significant to the argument about canon formation: that when it comes to contemporary poetry, what looks like a pure exercise of taste and historical perception is often contingent upon rights and permissions. The publisher gives the editor a budget for the republishing rights; sometimes a poem the editor wishes to include exceeds the capacity of the given budget. The picture of an historical moment then changes subtly, as poems are dropped and replaced for material reasons. . . . Read More >>Permalink | Comments (2) Tuesday 03.14.06 For about 15 years after graduating from college, I went to just about every poetry reading I could, which in the Bay Area (where I was enrolled in graduate school) was considerable. Now I hardly go to any. Not many actual voices I feel the need to hear. I’d rather stay at home and read the poems out loud to myself, sub-vocalize, remain in control, and avoid the social scene. Is this a matter of age, my younger need to discover what was happening out there, in blue chip venues and bars, university rooms and living rooms, superceded gradually by a need to withdraw, to filter out the noise? . . . Read More >>Permalink | Comments (1) Monday 03.13.06 Wondering about the apparent appetite for the endless voluminous discourse around poetry. Poems are difficult, but what is called poetics seems easy. I’m sympathetic to the commenter on Beckman’s blog (on this site) who asked why real politics drops away in the concerns of contemporary poetry, eclipsed by interest in the politics of poetics. Real politics, like poems, are difficult. . . . Read More >>Permalink | Comments (1) |
 Joshua Weiner is the author of The World's Room. He is the recent recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Writers’ Award. He has published poems and prose in Best American Poetry, the Nation, the American Scholar, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Yale Review, Slate, and elsewhere. Weiner has written poems about the need for music, the fear of fatherhood, the fear of a beloved child growing up and disappearing. His poems employ formal conventions in unexpected ways, and they have a searching quality about them, a vivid clarity. |
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