Until then, here's a poem of mine that's just up at The Harvard Review site: Captain America.
And this: "...poetry, it's easy/ And impossible--like stealing from yourself." -- Paul Violi
Finally: reckless = 1. marked by lack of proper caution : careless of consequences 2. In law: characterized by the creation of a substantial and unjustifiable risk to the lives, safety, or rights of others and by a conscious and sometimes wanton and willful disregard for or indifference to that risk that is a gross deviation from the standard of care a reasonable person would exercise in like circumstances. Now, how to relate this to poetry...
In poetry, one has to be open, willing, and able to fail every second. One has to court it, failure. Something's at stake. And this has nothing to do with objectivity, standards, or anything remotely crafty. Rather it's about tuning into the music in the making and the making in the music--to a certain way of paying attention.
3 comments:
Hey, Matt, great poem in Harvard Review! But ... HR posted the same poem twice: once as "Captain America" and once as "Wallace Stevens Must Die." Was this intentional? Both titles could fit the poem! I kind of like the idea of publishing a book of 50 identical poems with 50 different titles ... Cheers!
Robert,
Wow! thanks for alerting me to two things: 1) I didn't know that "Wallace Stevens Must Die" was up at all and 2) that its body had been mysteriously swapped out for that of "Captain America". That was, in fact, a mistake. I contacted the editor, and she said she'd fix it on Monday.
As for publishing a book of one poem with, say, 50 different titles, that's brillant! I've been wanting to do an entire book of Japanese Death poems where every poem is called Japanese Death Poem, and the book is called Japanese Death Poems by Matt Hart (which makes no sense at all of course and would be funny only to me). Your idea is far superior.
Try this on for size: what if we took some old (or new) anonymously written poem and then republished it as an anthology of one poem (printed over and over again) with titles by different contemporary poets?
We could be co-editors...
Thanks for being in touch.
Yr pal,
Matt
Sounds like a great idea! (I sent you an email hehe.)
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