A Paradise of Poets

I missed poetry monday...sorry!  It's been a little busy in the lead-up to year-end to say the least, but if poetry doesn't happen I get grumpy so here is a Thursday dose, and we'll get back to our regular scheduled monday poem next week.  I've been taking my own advice and listening to Poem Talk, and have just come across the marvellously succinct (called it 'condensed' if you like) poem "A Paradise of Poets" by Jerome Rothenberg. You can read the full text of the poem, which isn't long, here. The Poem Talk episode is here.  In the Poem Talk episode, Al Filreis is joined by Bob Holman, Jessica Lowenthal and Randall Couch, and their often funny discussion about the poem is well worth a listen, as is Rothenberg's excellent reading, which you can also hear in the episode. "A Paradise of Poets" manages to bring together so many threads - the history of poetry itself from Dante onwards, and the whole nature of poetic creation - in so few words. I see Rothenberg's Limbo as a positive place - a place of camaraderie where the poet mingles and performs and waits ("sitting here in limbo") for the poems to be birthed anew each time it's read, before moving back to the point of creation - that cyclical quality that Bob Holman speaks of in the Poem Talk episode. That private moment of conception (in the silent space of creation) is always solipsistic, but it opens out in the limbo space, and then back to creation again.

Just by way of a little promo, next Monday we'll be featuring Jennifer Maiden's Liquid Nitrogen.  The book cover alone, a picture of the Eta Carinae nebula, was enough to draw my attention, but the poems...oh just you wait.