return on word

Today we are releasing PoemTalk #29. In this episode, Linh Dinh, Rae Armantrout and Tom Devaney talk with me about Kit Robinson's 1999 poem, "Return on Word." Click here for a link to the audio and much more.

Poe and madmen

Poet, critic, teacher, reviewer and former Writers House program coordinator Tom Devaney has a good piece on Poe (in time for Halloween) in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

new invisible cities

Tom Devaney has now made available a video presentation of the puppet show he and his students put together last spring. Inspired by Italo Calvino's dream-like masterpiece Invisible Cities, they enacted their own new invisible cities through this puppet theater production. The performance was created in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art and Beth Nixon's Ramshackle Enterprises.

PoemTalk #15 released

Episode #15 of PoemTalk is being released today. It's 25 minutes of talk about a single poem - this time, a poem by Lyn Hejinian and the talkers are Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Tom Devaney and myself. Take a look at the PoemTalk blog entry and find all the links you'll need, including, of course, to the show itself.

"school of quietude" genealogy

Tom Devaney is publishing a short essay on Poe for an exhibit catalogue accompanying a Poe show at the Philadelphia Free Library (the show is up through February '09, titled "Quoth the raven"). Tom has long had a keen interest in Poe, and so I read the proofs of this essay with pleasure. And came upon this footnote:

The phrase the “school of quietude,” which is attributed to Poe, has been used and amplified by Ron Silliman on his blog “Silliman’s Blog.” There is no direct citation where Poe uses the exact phrase, yet the general point is correct. The phrase first appears in Claude Richard’s article “Arrant Bubbles: Poe’s ‘The Angel of the Odd’,” Poe Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 3, October 1969, pp. 46-48. According to Richard: “Poe took an active part in the squabble between the ‘Young Americans,’ who were the proponents of a muscular and popular literature, and the Boston poets, who were attached to a more genteel, more traditional, more quiet conception of literature.”

small boxes

Back on September 26 Tom Devaney was celebrated at the Writers House on the occasion of his new book, A Series of Small Boxes. The reading was recorded for PennSound. Here is an mp3 of the whole reading. The final poem in the new book is one Tom wrote for my 50th birthday. Oh man, I'm hitting clean-up. MORE...

Below: Randall Couch happily chatting with Jessica Lowenthal at the party after the reading.