• Carolee read Blameless Mouth by Jessica Fox-Wilson recently as a part of a virtual blog tour and writes about it at her blog, Carolee Sherwood.
• James Bush also participated in the same Blameless Mouth tour, but wrote about a different aspect of the collection at Coyote Mercury.
• Juliet Wilson, AKA Craft Green Poet, recently reviewed Jackie Kay’s new book Fiere for Brighton Blogger’s Book After Book. She also reviewed Mark Doty’s My Alexandria at her Over Forty Shades blog.
• Madeleine Begun Kane says her post and haiku about Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden Of Verses isn’t exactly a review. It’s more of a recollection of a strong childhood memory and influence: A Childhood Shadow.
• Deb Scott read a collective book from four New Zealand poets, including one whose blog you may read, Catherine Flichett. Find Deb’s thoughts at Stoney Moss and consider buying Flap: The Chook Book 2. All proceeds go to New Zealand earthquake relief efforts.

Have you posted about a poetry collection you’re reading? It doesn’t have to be a full-fledged or formal review. Email a link to your post to info@bigtentpoetry.org, or leave it in the comments. We’ll gather up your links and every few weeks or so (not on any particular schedule — remember how laid back we are around here?) plop them into a Big Tent post. We think it will be fun to hear your voices not just in your own poems but in how you react to the poetry of others!

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Since we have a “reviews” heading under the Big Top, why not point you in the direction of recent blog posts from community members about books?

We’ll start it off:

• Carolee read  Rough Honey by Melissa Stein recently and has a few words (and some representative lines) at her blog, Carolee Sherwood.
• Deb read Blameless Mouth by Jessica Fox-Wilson and is stop number two on a virtual blog tour. She shares bits of poems, links to some found online, and provides a Q&A on the question of personal/persona poetry.

Have you posted about a poetry collection you’re reading? It doesn’t have to be a full-fledged or formal review. Email a link to your post to info@bigtentpoetry.org. We’ll gather up your links and every week or so (not on any particular schedule — remember how laid back we are around here?) plop them into a Big Tent post. We think it will be fun to hear your voices not just in your own poems but in how you react to the poetry of others!

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Dave Bonta, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker

Despite the lack of “scruffy poetry bloggers” on the panel of consultants that helped develop the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry, Dave Bonta indicates that, as a first step, he likes most of the conclusions in the document.

He was “especially cheered by the recommendations for epigraphs” but calls the section on remixing (and found poetry) “murky.” He shares with his readers part of the “poetry online” recommendations which “suggests a standard for people who like to blog entire poems from others without explicit permission.” These issues — use of epigraphs, found poetry and quoting poetry — surface fairly regularly here and on other prompt sites, and so we encourage you to read not only Dave’s post but also the standards themselves.

Dave hopes the document at the very least opens a discussion and helps develop a second version of the standards, and a part of him also seems to hope the poetry populus will rise up and define its own standards. He writes,

And nothing prevents a bunch of us hoi polloi from convening ourselves, consulting with some intellectual property experts, and trying to build support for another set of standards via a more open process. Since these initial, suggested community standards are, by the report authors’ own admission, incomplete, maybe that’s indeed what needs to happen next, six months or a year down the road.

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!

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Robert Peake, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker

Robert has captured 17 “creative exercises designed to demonstrate various “tactics” that poets can use to be “sneaky” with themselves in the creative process–to outwit the negative critic and analytical mind, and keep on keeping on in a free, creative space. While none of these ideas are are “new” in any universal sense, they are all tried-and-true techniques that have helped me along in my own creative process.”

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!

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Dave is a contributor for a new poetry site that is all about reading poetry aloud.

Voice Alpha is a “companion site to the audio poetry journal Whale Sound; a repository for thoughts, theories, suggestions, likes and dislikes and anything else related to the art and science of reading poetry aloud for an audience.”

The site is new, and is sure to bring lots of great material to poets. Add it to your reader, or go visit often. Thanks to Nic Sebastian for creating a(nother) terrific resource. Or repository. Either way it is A Good Place.

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Dave weighs in on a very recent essay by David Orr in a New York Times Sunday Book Review on the epigraph. Orr posits the epigraph is used to place the poet within a specific canon of work, and Dave thinks it has a place in modern poetry meant for a general readership. Read them both and see what you think. (Dave links to the Orr piece.)

… I’ve always thought that my most valuable attribute as (ahem!) a thinker is my ability to point out the obvious, so here goes: epigraphs are a convenient shortcut to alterity, a way of letting other voices in. They are sometimes integral to the original inspiration, and at other times simply a by-product of writerly enthusiasm, but in either case, they situate the poem not merely in a tradition but also within a kind of network of shared wonder at similar phenomena, ideas, or linguistic perversities.

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of other Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!

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But don’t you dare just file it! Sage Cohen, one of our sideshow barkers, needs you to submit your poems. Here’s how you can “take your poetry viral:”

Want to see your poetry appear in a poem-a-day iPhone app? Submit up to three, 20-line poems that express the spirit of “the life poetic” to “The Life Poetic iPoem Contest” before November 1. The contest, which is sponsored by Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry and The Productive Writer: Tips and Tools for Writing More, Stressing Less and Creating Success, offers a range of prizes with a total value of more than $400. Visit this post for details!

Check our About page for a list of other Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!

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Sideshow barker Juliet Cook writes about how surviving a health crisis is only the beginning in a series of challenges, which include struggling with words when you used to be prolific, losing people you love and contending with the guilt of not being grateful enough for simply being alive.

Juliet’s article talks about her writing practice before and after her stroke and how words — not always the “right” ones, sometimes even more interesting ones — come.

Here is an excerpt:

I’m very pleased and happy that I am still so passionate about and turned on by poetry.  I’ve always drawn my poetic words from various sources, including product packaging, TV shows, scholarly articles, pop culture, porn and more.  Now, due to my own weirdly, slowly healing brain power, which continues to have a hard time remembering lots of little words without extreme concentration, that extreme concentration seems to be causing big, strange, oddball words and phrases to suddenly blurt out of my head.

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of other Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!

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Another one of our sideshow barkers, Dave Bonta, is currently featured in 10 questions: poetry & technology (an interview series by Nic Sebastian at Very Like a Whale).

“… most of all, I like seeing the generosity with which online poets and other writers link to each other, comment on each other’s work, workshop each other’s poems (the internet is great for that), and form new and I think more resilient networks than we’ve seen in a very long time, especially here in the U.S. where the poetry world is so factionalized.”

One of the neat things about this series at Very Like a Whale is that a number of our Sideshow Barkers are included, as well as other folks we read regularly. Both Ren Powell and January O’Neil have been featured. Be sure to read the entire series.

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of other Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!

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Dave Bonta has a series at his blog, Via Negativa, that focuses on Poetics and Technology. The latest installation is about how to format poetry on the Web (your blog — or your journal for that matter!) if you want to do special things with long lines, indentations, extra spaces or what not. The subtitle to the post is “An Incomplete Guide” and while it may not be exhaustive, the work to compile it was exhausting, and it is a heck of a start to help poets make the art they want to make. Or to play with new tools!

As Dave says, “HTML is not particularly poetry-friendly, and special measures are required to preserve a lot of the formatting which an earlier technology, the typewriter, made all too easy.”

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of other Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!

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