PoetryPolitic: A Blog in 50 Days & State of the Union

You probably already know about this anthology from Wave Books. It is one of the more interesting anthologies I've read in a while, short enough to remain focused & wildly disparate enough to actually make an argument for what a political poem can do for a thinker. I'm in it, so I feel like I can't talk too much about it. But you should check it out, or if you come over to my apartment I'll give you my last contributor copy.

I can't stop thinking about Caroline Knox's poem in the book. It's a great example of a poem that outside of being contextualized as a "political poem" I may not have read the same way, but becomes breathtaking within the conversation of this book. It's also in her new book, which is, uh, also available from Wave Books.

Wave is also running a blog along with the book, www.poetrypolitic.com. The focus is on the the poetics of politics & it will update every day for 50 days.

They reprinted one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets, Lara Glenum a few days back (a poem that originally appeared in Octopus, by the way). It's a poem that is such an intense verbal experience that I fell in love with it before having parsed out its meaning. The first time I read it the clash of sound was such an inviting cacophony that I had to read it over & over again & then like bodies floating up from the cold bottom of an icy river the meaning surfaced.

There is going to be another reading for the anthology in NY soon & I think I'm reading at it.