Crimes Against Poetry Readings

 Our intrepid hosts investigate poetry reading cliches and surmise which poets of the past (and present) would have committed these heinous crimes -- and in broad daylight, too!

Poets we mention include:

1) Read a fabulous essay by Emily Wilson on Sappho here. 

2) Many of (Sagittarius) William Blake's artworks can be viewed online through the National Gallery of Victoria here.

3)  Catullus's manuscripts are viewable online here; you'll need to be able to read Latin.

4)  Aaron references James Wright's "The Sumac in Ohio," which ends:

"Before June begins, the sap and coal smoke and soot from Wheeling steel, wafted down the Ohio by some curious gentleness in the Appalachians, will gather all over the trunk. The skin will turn aside hatchets and knife blades. You cannot even carve a girl's name on the sumac. It is viciously determined to live and die alone, and you can go straight to hell." Wright was a Sagittarius.

 5) The poem we reference by Maxine Kumin about wearing the clothes she traded with Anne Sexton can be found here (navigate to the poem on the left side of the website). Kumin is a June 6 Gemini (like Aaron).

 6)  H.D. (Virgo) is primarily a poet, but she also wrote prose and translated from the Greek. 

 7) Go watch Louise Glück talk about making poems here, particularly about her poem "Landscape" in Averno (first published in Threepenny Review). You'll thank me for showing this to you. Glück is a Taurus.

 8) Terrance Hayes is a Scorpio. Visit his website here.

 9)  The National Portrait Gallery had a terrific show on Gertrude Stein (Aquarius) in 2011. You can view much of the show online here. And of course there's a story that Anne Carson recounts in her book, Glass, Irony and Godabout why Hemingway friend-broke-up with Stein (in the essay "The Gender of Sound") that we recommend. (The story will not improve anyone's opinion of Hemingway.) 

 10) Joyce Carol Oates (Gemini) issued an apology after railing against the use of singular they/them pronouns. You can read a recap of the ugly mess here.

 11)  Ezra Pound was a Scorpio as well as a poet, translator, and critic. His "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" is instructive advice for poets.  Louis Menand wrote an essay for the New Yorker about Pound's rabid antisemitism ("The Pound Error," June 16, 2008).

 12) Allen Ginsberg was a Gemini. You can read a collaborative poem called "Pull My Daisy" here. Kerouac adapted that into a film starring Ginsberg and others in their circle; Pull My Daisy can be watched here.

 13)  Read more about Christina Rossetti on the Victorian Web, one of the best online resources about writers in the long 19th century. Rossetti is a Sagittarius.

 14)  More about John Keats can be found here. Aaron and James also recommend Anahid Nersessian's terrific book Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse.&