Mississippians Love To Look for Poems

Mississippi has some poetry-loving citizens, according to a Yahoo! announcement that state residents conduct more online searches for poems than any other. It also turns out that Mississippians search for more love poems than any other states.

New Mexico ranked second. To find out who made it in the top 10, click here.

--AB

Tynes Reviewed in GutCult

Jim Toweill writes: "Jen Tynes' book-length poem The End of Rude Handles explores a gothic world of spatial binaries, mediations between interior and exterior experiences, of networks of becoming that inhabit ambulatory flesh."

Read Toweill's entire review in a recent issue of GutCult.

To buy the book, visit the Red Morning Press website.

--AB

Poetic Journeys at UConn

The Poetic Journeys program at UConn has been going on since 2000 and allows students' work to be displayed on placards installed on buses. To read about it, click here.

--AB

David Halberstam on Poetry

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David Hablerstam died yesterday in a car crash. He's best known for his reporting on the Vietnam War, but he also happened to be very interested in poetry. Right before he died, Halberstam attended the Poetry & the Creative Mind benefit, which raises money for National Poetry Month. The Daily Intelligencer has an interview with him from that night that includes his thoughts on poetry. To read it, click here.

--AB

Body Blazon Poetry

Two writers combined dissection and poetry into a play called Corpus Delicti: Just Desserts. You can read about the play and the history of body blazons (poems that focus on specific parts of the body) by clicking here.

The article cites this poem as an example of a body blazon:

Mary's Ghost
by Thomas Hood

T'was in the middle of the night
To sleep young William tried
When Mary's ghost came stealing in
And stood by his bedside

Oh William dear, oh William dear,
My rest eternal ceases
For alas my everlasting peace
Is broken into pieces.

I thought the end of all my cares
would end with my last minute
But when I came to my last home
I didn't stay long in it

The body snatchers they have come
and made a snatch of me
Oh it's very hard those kind of men
won't let a body be.

The arm that used to take your arm
Is took by Dr. Weiss
And both my legs have gone
To walk the hospital at Guys.

As for my feet, my little feet
You used to call so pretty
There's one I know, in Bedford Row
The other's in the city.

I vowed that you should have my hand
and fate gave no denial
You find it there at Dr. Bell's
in spiritus and a vial.

I can't tell where my head is at
but Dr. Carpo can
As for my truck it's all packed up
to go by Pickford's van

I wish you'd go to Mr. P.
and save me such a ride
For I don't half like the outside place
he's picked for my inside.

The cock it crows, I must be gone
Dear William we must part
I'll be yours in death although
Sir Ashley has my heart.

Don't go to weep upon my grave
And think that there I'll be
For they haven't left an atom there
Of my Anatomy.

--AB

Virginia Tech Shootings and Poetry

Nikki Giovanni had Cho Seung-Hui in a creative writing class at Virginia Tech two years before he went on his killing spree. Read about it here.

--AB

Pultizer Goes to Trethewey

The winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry goes to Natasha Trethewey for "Native Guard." Here's a report from the Washington Post:

POETRY: "Native Guard," by Natasha Trethewey.

Trethewey, a creative writing professor at Emory University, imagined the life of a former slave stationed at a fort off the coast of Gulfport, Miss., a former Union prison housing Confederate prisoners. The slave was charged with writing letters home for illiterate POWs and fellow soldiers. Trethewey, a Gulfport native who was a daughter of a black woman and white man, said she used the racial legacy of the Civil War to honor her mother and her personal history.

--AB