Word: poems
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...Marc Smith spearheaded the evolution of slam poetry by encouraging friends to battle it out Sunday nights at Chicago's Green Mill. After the evening's feature and open mike cleared the stage, judges were selected from the audience and given scorecards, and "rival" poets went head to head, poem by poem, for the approval of the bar. What was great on paper wasn't always a crowd-pleaser. To win, a poem had to have more than literary merit--it had to wrench the words from their passivity on the page...
...verbal form, an object made out of words, as compensation for urgent, but amorphous dilemmas: the "mess" of remembering joy amidst sorrow or of loving the wrong person or of grief. Of course it knows that its kind of compensation is immensely limited and circumscribed, that no mere poem will bring back childhood or a dead friend; such knowledge forces it back, time and again, on the only trick it knows: namely, constructing a gorgeous verbal contraption. The mystery is how such a contraption could ever work: but it does work, at least for the brief span of its operations...
However, many of his poems, perhaps his strongest ones, manage to tap into some universality. He expresses fears and insecurities with which all people can relate yet which are rarely expressed. In his poem "Creak," he voices the insecurities of writing a love letter. "I wrote a note to her/That splattered into rhyme against my wishes./So I scrunched it up and said if it hits the bin/There's going to be a relationship." Later in his poem titled "The Room," he verbally paints the image of a room, once occupied by a son, which is now left empty...
GIRLS ON THE RUN: A POEM By John Ashbery Farrar, Straus and Giroux...
...long poem with Edenic ambitions, Ashbery's latest work is based on a 19,000 page illustrated novel by the late recluse Henry Darger. By the time he died in 1972, Darger had produced an opus of lolli-comic girls, The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, in which Peggy and friends are chased about by storms and sundry tormenters. These girls reappear in Girls on the Run, running about with a most coherant inexplicability...