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National Poetry Month: Pirates of the Avant Garde

Now, with the web, and the growing number of online archives devoted to (for lack of better words) avant garde and experimental writing movements we are in a new age of access. Some of this work is up through the benevolence of the writer and creator, some of it, must belong to the true heirs of Mayakovsky. Three great resources here…

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National Poetry Month: Poetical Understanding of Reality

To provide some poetical meditation into the nature of reality. Buddhist philosophy is inwardly directed scientific method. Experimentation of the spirit, and as a result there are parallels between long held Buddhist descriptions of reality and some currently accepted physical ones. Metaphor as the essential tool of learning. All knowledge reflecting and scattering off the surface of reality and received and interpreted by the curled consciousness factory of the mind.

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Five things to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald

Synonymous with the Jazz Age of the American 1920s which his novels did so much to define, F. Scott Fitzgerald hardly needs any introduction. Reading The Great Gatsby in school has become as much a rite of passage as first kisses and the furtive adolescent rebellion of drinking alcohol before coming of age. Much of […]

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Crazy Horse and Custer

Fifteen years ago, not long after publishing Anthology of Modern American Poetry with Oxford, I began to receive the typical mix of complimentary and complaining letters. In the latter category, faculty members wanted to know why a favorite poem or poet was left out and some poets who were not included wrote pointed letters to let me know they weren’t happy with the fact. But one poet, William Heyen, took a different approach.

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