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Dan Chiasson’s poetry is “unsettled and unsettling,” wrote Kay Ryan in the New York Times. “So much in Chiasson is uncomfortable and misproportioned. So much suffers. At the same time, his poetry is mischievous and meant to be understood playfully.” Ryan made those observations in 2005, just after the release of Chiasson’s second collection of poetry, “Natural History”. But her description remains apt. In “Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon”, published by Knopf on February 2nd (and out in Britain later this year), Chiasson applies his analytical, nervous, literary and often playful sensibility to the poignancy of parenthood.

"It's very easy to identify with your child," Chiasson says over the phone from his home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. "It's also very weird because there are things about your child that you'll envy in a way. So there's a split consciousness. You can see yourself as the child and you can see yourself as the father."

In new poems, such as "Man and Derailment" and the multi-part "Swifts", Chiasson juxtaposes childhood memories of his own father with a decidedly adult consciousness. (In the former, a man takes his son to a ravine to view a train crash; the child internalises the scene by wondering "how he would remember the scene / and, once he knew his father better, later, / and later, knew himself better, what it would mean.")  read more »

How can you resist a "poetry and illustration magazine gently intent on
hoodwinking poetry back from the clammy hands of tweed jackets and school
anthologies"? It's not often that a mission statement–– that rote recycler of wearisome
phrases––whets a reader's appetite. Even better, Popshot delivers on its promise.

Jacob Denno, the young founder and editor of this small, Britain-based magazine, wisely chose to set a theme for each issue. Parameters can ease readers into a more unusual reading experience. Popshot also includes a brief primer on how it should be read. Presumptuous? Not really. "Make yourself a cup of tea or find a suitable biscuit," the editors suggest. "This magazine does not benefit from being skim read." In high school it's always the stricter teachers that earn the most attention. Ditto magazines: Popshot's refusal to pander demands a level of alertness that the contemporary magazine-reader is perhaps unaccustomed to giving. Happily, the alertness is earned.

For the second issue, just released and with an "Us & Them" theme, the poems–24 of them–are energetic and smart. A précis follows each one, a patient addendum to illuminate a poet's intentions. If the poems tend to overshadow the illustrations, it is only because this reader happens to be drawn to words over forms (which tend to have a more supportive role here anyway; the poems are selected first, and are then sent to illustrators). Small enough to fit in to a coat pocket, Popshot is a reminder that poetry thrives in the 21st century, if perhaps in unexpected forms, if perhaps in unexpected forms.  read more »

I have always been unclear about where the emphasis in "Keats House" is meant to fall. The neat white cottage is famously where John Keats spent two of the most incandescent years of his starburst career--allegedly composing "Ode to a Nightingale" under a plum tree in its roomy garden and pursuing a destructive passion for his neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Yet the glaring absence of apostrophe, the English Heritage-robustness of the name, reminds us that this is a House first, separate from the fleeting glory of a former inhabitant.

Of course, this former inhabitant is what procured the building its £424,000 ($763,000) refurbishment grant from the National Lottery in 2004. The house had been stumbling along as a museum, its furnishings gradually tiring, after having passed through various hands since Keats left for Rome in 1820. The two-storey, 19th-century house reopened this summer after its painstaking restoration, and is now brimming with displays of Keats memorabilia.  read more »

To call any art form 'accessible' conjures up the worst: framed posters of Monet's water lilies and ice in your pinot. But when it comes to poetry, accessibility is a way in. Billy Collins, former poet laureate and champion of accessible poetry, is a master at this. He locates the reader, providing a surface much like our familiar everyday world, and then manipulates plain speech and quotidian images and observations. Like the disorientation of waking up at the end of a long car trip, you bring your eyes up from the page, confused and in another town, with everything sadder, deeper or more refracted.

While Katha Pollitt is not quite so ready and beguiling as Collins, her plain speech and razor-sharp observations are what make "The Mind-Body Problem", her second book of poems, sing. A columnist at the Nation, she brings the columnist's role of insightful friend and confidant into her verse. Her poems reveal something worth seeing--about her, or the world, or both. Take the titular poem:

It seems unfair, somehow, that my body has to suffer
because I, by which I mean my mind, was saddled
with certain unfortunate high-minded notions
that made me tyrannize it and patronize it
like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious
English-professor husband ashamed of his wife--
her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles
and regional vowels.  read more »

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• Books
• Poetry
• Publishing

Ah April, that glorious month when the weather is erratic and poetry gains a few more hours in the spotlight. National Poetry Month invariably prompts a flurry (or steady trickle) of articles and musings about whether poetry is a dying art form, or even if it has a place in modern society at all.

In Newsweek Marc Bain cited a study by the NEA that found that in 2008 just 8.3% of adults had read any poetry in the preceding year. "That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent...the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years."

It sounds bad, sure, but Bain suggests we needn't ring the alarm just yet. Such studies often lean towards Chicken Little alarmism, as "poetry has been supposedly dying now for several generations". He writes:

In 1934, Edmund Wilson published an essay called "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Fifty-four years later, Joseph Epstein chimed in with "Who Killed Poetry?" and former NEA chairman Gioia gained fame with a 1991 piece titled "Can Poetry Matter?" In answering their titular questions, all three to some degree concluded that poetry's concentration in the hands of specialists and the halls of academia was bad for the art form's health.

Former poet laureate [Donald] Hall, who published an essay called "Death to the Death of Poetry" in 1989, has heard it all before. "I'm 80 years old," he says. "[For] 60 years I've been reading about poetry losing its audience.  read more »

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• Poetry
• SCIENCE

I had a feeling it was National Poetry Month. The unusual amount of poetry programmes on public radio must've tipped me off. Of course there is always some hand-wringing over the necessity of a federally sponsored marketing drive for poetry. I for one come am against it. We would be living in a dangerous country if a love of poetry could be properly mandated from the top.

Dick Allen's "The Litany of Disparagement" is the poem I turn to most often. I memorised Part II so that I could have access to it at all times. (Allen's poem rhymes, conveniently)

...Pray, for the willows must shake.
Ripples must die in the lake.
I am the life I forsake...

I don't go around reciting it, but I do visit it occasionally, usually not in the best of times.  read more »

My inauguration flu has finally faded (having paid my tribute in the cold). Every last port-a-potty has long been removed from the Mall. Still, I want to talk about the inaugural poem,
Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day". It is only now that I know what I think about it.

An inaugural poem is a curious thing. Our national character is rarely celebrated or defined by poets, and little of the American experience has been etched in verse lately. Our poet laureate, Kay Ryan, doesn't read at the start of a new congressional session. I bet few people even know who she is.

Poems are usually enjoyed in small gatherings, or beneath the fluorescent lights of a university library. We experience them personally, by and for ourselves. As Jim Fischer said in Salon:

When we read poetry to ourselves, the occasion of a great poem is an internal event, organizing the perceptions and determining the material. When that occasion is a point in time and place, the work is more likely to be...partial, responsible, contemporary, rarely timeless.

Poets rarely read at inaugurations. Elizabeth Alexander was only the fourth given the task of creating a work that speaks to America, a poem that reflects the national soul with images sharp and simple. I looked forward to it much like an over-anxious, hyper-conscious parent might anticipate a child's school play. Excited by America's new president and anxious to see poetry re-enter the national spotlight at the hands of someone so capable, I was tense with expectation.  read more »

It seems the financial crisis has created some odd hiccups of creativity. Without the distractions that come from shopping, gallivanting or, you know, working, we all have far more time to compose doggerel--about cost-cutting, perhaps, or about our new-found fondness for Depression-era cuisine. A friend just sent this little ditty my way (with the attached picture):

The Dow is in the shitter.
Raw parsnips are so bitter!
But it ain't so bad,
Barrack ain't no fad,
Eat soup, breakfast lunch and dinner!
~JC
 

Such economy of language! And what a time to economise. I was so impressed I thought I would share. Inspired by one of my favourite websites, Crying While Eating, I invite you to share your own poetry (limericks, sonnets, haiku) about recessionary changes in your diet.

I'll offer a haiku of my own:

I had no idea
Oatmeal was so flexible
Savoury to sweet.

~ EMILY BOBROW

It may have escaped the attention of even More Intelligent Life's most eagle-eyed readers that Economist.com, our sister site, daily publishes a short briefing produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit--yet another sister. For example: "The tiger tamed: Ireland's economy faces three years of declining output". These briefings are often interesting, always true and rarely artsy.

When the duty to announce each day's publication of a new EIU briefing falls on one Josie Delap, Economist.com's editor of Country Briefings, she makes the most of this apparently dry work. (A lover of the desert, Josie is an accomplished Arabist and traveller across arid lands.) Patient, curious and some say brilliant, she is also a budding poet who specialises in making do with what she finds, often marking the arrival of the latest EIUism with a rhyming couplet or, on a good day, a sonnet. It was an exceptional day in this office when, posed with a challenge, Josie undertook to bring us the news in the form of a sestina. Behold:

An Economistina

I sit shivering at my desk today
Wondering what The Economist
Wants me to publish,
What searing piece of intelligence,
What distilled unit
Of insight will be next to tantalise.

Will South Africa’s troubles tantalise
The editors today
As they ponder over which unit
Of Economist content, all comparable
In their appeal to the intelligence
Of our readers, to publish?

 read more »

I was reading an essay today on Poetry Magazine online--"Information Thy Nemesis is Reverie"--and was particularly struck by the way Ange Mlinko describes Linda Gregg's newish collection of poems "All of it singing":

And so with her language: compressed but unadorned, it recedes into the horizon of what can be called prosody. Almost always ending on a fade rather than a bang, her poems insist on tranquility and evanescence, on instinct over intellect. Seldom does a line or image call attention to itself. You could say, in Gregg's aesthetic, the materiality of words is to be resisted.

Mlinko draws particular attention to the atmospheric "Summer in a Small Town", in which each small word in the poem hangs together to create a languid and lonely sense of place.

When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it’s Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is grey, the air hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.

As Mlinko observed, the poem's lack of materiality gives it a seamless quality. Gregg has rendered an image so clear you can smell it, even have that sense of something welling up in your chest. Some good poems work like this: they capture little feelings in a jar.
   read more »