“I don’t mean to sell the poet so long or at such great length, but I do this principally because the world doesn’t esteem the poet very much. They don’t understand where we are coming from. They don’t understand the use for us. They don’t understand if there is any use. We are the masters of the superior secret, not they. Not they. Remember that when you write.”
–James Dickey
Links:
In praise of a guilty genius (from The Observer) –
“Britain has a curious ambivalence towards the poet and critic WH Auden, in part since he ‘abandoned’ England for the US in the 1930s. In the year of his centenary, Katherine Bucknell welcomes the new attention due a rare and questing spirit”
A voice of his own (from The Guardian) –
“‘Poetry makes nothing happen’, wrote WH Auden. He was a reluctant leader of his generation and adopted a deliberately anti-poetic voice. Yet he achieved an ideal that eluded many. James Fenton on the public and private faces of the poet who loved to shock”
Poet W.H. Auden would have been 100 years old today. In honor of his birthday, let’s listen to him reading his poem “The More Loving One.”
The New Yorker has an article online discussing the massive $200 million grant the Poetry Foundation received in 2002 from Ruth Lilly (of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly fame). The Poetry Foundation publishes Poetry magazine.
From the article:
Money is a shocking thing in poetry, and Ruth Lilly’s gift was greeted with a measure of ambivalence. Howard Junker, the editor of the San Francisco journal Zyzzyva, wrote a letter to the Times—after it ran a piece about poetry’s bright days ahead—admitting that “Ruth Lilly’s generosity makes me green with envy.” But, he went on, “A gift this size to such a small organization is bad philanthropy. . . . The struggle for the staff and the board will now be how to spend the money. Sustaining the vision of a venerable little magazine will become an afterthought. Drowning in cash might seem a dream come true; more likely it will turn out to be a nightmare.”
A.D. Winans, who was published in AntiMuse in December 2006, lost his apartment to a fire recently.
“Too tired to go into details just now on progress after fire to my apartment, but it isn’t good news as will not be able to move back in again until maybe 4 months. Still sifting thru mess the fire department made and loss of archive material as well as furniture. I will be off computer for a few days and need to use other outside sources for months, so please bear with me if I do not respond to you.”
Please keep him in your thoughts.
So, I heard that FOX News Channel is launching a daily humor show to compete with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Imagine Gerald Ford performing stand-up during open mic night at the Improv, and you’ll have an inkling of how unfunny the whole endeavor is.
After a brief, yet eventful, hiatus, the AntiBlog is back and ready for some hot blog-on-blog action.