Erica's Blog

Sharks Have Everything to Do with Poetry

Teaser: I set out for the Met, ostensibly to see those much talked of tapestries, but really I just want to see the shark: that is, Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," a title that is nearly in iambic pentameter (the first ten syllables scan perfectly) and represents a seven-foot long shark encased in formaldehyde.

I am impatient for the visceral experience sure to accompany such a piece, a modern incarnation of the sublime. When I arrive, I walk right up to the gaping mouth and peer in. A woman peering beside me says cheerfully, "It certainly makes you curious." I smile and nod politely, though I have no idea what she means. Curious about what exactly?

Full text, HERE, at Guernica.

Press for Guernica Mag

Editors-in-Chief Michael Archer and Joel Whitney talk up Guernica to Rachel Deahl in Publishers Weekly, here. 

Music in Chelsea

On the Sunday-slow train downtown today, I realized that I should have announced the concert I was on my way to see: the Matrix Music Collaborators performed at Music in Chelsea. It was a winds-heavy program, featuring piano and wind music by Mozart, Poulenc, Carter, and Schumann. The group was founded by pianist Sheryl Lee with a mission to encourage collaboration between the arts. This noble goal is aided by the exceptionally talented musicians Sheryl wrangled into the group. Performing today:

Justin Berrie, flute
Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet
Caia LaCour, french horn
Adrian Morejon, bassoon
Sarah Schram, oboe
Sheryl Lee, piano

I'll announce the next concert in advance...

New Guernica Poem

'struth by Christopher Mulrooney

Teaser: it’s a fine American laggard sea found Haitian / with a boatload sinking under the precipice there / fallen into the new sink / in the new kitchen

Carnage?

Another reason to be glad you're a poet, as not discussed in Carole Cadwalladr's Guardian piece on the Frankfurt Book Fair. Twenty-six years after Martin Amis, no less.

Andrew Motion on Poetry and Power

You probably already know that I'm a sucker for grand statements, especially if they sound true and moreover if they sound true after I've mulled them over. England's poet laureate, Andrew Motion, made a few doozies during a recent Poet in the City event at the House of Commons (reprinted here, in the Guardian). He defined poetry as "among other things, a way of making us visit parts of ourselves and our world that are new to us, or of making us see familiar things in a new way, rather than a means of confirming what we already know." He also listed writers who "manifest a distinguished and honourable tradition of frontal poetic assault." And he boldly suggested "that's why tyrants fear poets: they convert particular truths into general truths, and broadcast them." This final suggestion doesn't quite make it through round three of my unscientific evaluation process. I wish but don't believe that tyrants are shaking in their boots over poems. However, the bit about making the particular seem general sounds right and could explain why we think of poems about hearts and sunsets as bad. We already know broken hearts hurt, and we know sunsets are pretty. (They are, aren't they?) We don't know (or didn't until James Wright told us) that in Martins Ferry, Ohio, high school football players "grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning of October, / And gallop terribly against each other's bodies" (from "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio"). I'm more of a baseball fan, but it's nice to know those boys are out there practicing nonetheless. Happy October.

Mambo Cinema

A slick new poem by Barbara Hamby here, at Guernica.

Teaser:
"Last night at the mambo cinema, with its wide screen / diamond sheen, my medulla oblongata / was knocked back to the Stone Age, primal scream / rising as I took my seat like a black sheep, Red Queen, / a two-ton gorilla of white light on the noir scene, / my kundalini shaking like the late-night shriek / of a wino in the middle of Tennessee Street, sick / of the sky and its deluge of thunder and sun."