Literary Magazines and Your Ideas – Poll

Hi Beautiful Readers! As writers, literary hangers-on, and readers, we all know that the esteemed literary magazine is the pillar, the bulwark, of the literary scene. We know that there are more literary magazines than there are readers, but not as many as there are writers. We know that literary magazines have problems and solutions in this day and age of digital accessibility.

I want to run a quick poll about your ideas of the current Lit Mag landscape. I have my own opinions, and I will be posting on that when this poll is over in a week.

Thanks for participating!

What I have Missed

Right now, I am missing my books. They are all boxed up, you see. So all of the listings under “Upcoming Reviews and Reflections” are on hold. At least most of them are. I do have a couple of those with me. Strike that, I have none of those with me. But I do have the following books, which I’ll be adding to the list: Continue reading →

Ha Ha! I’m Back!

Over the past year, most of my posts appeared either here or here. But now, I think, it is time to return to Poetic Idealism.

I would like to revisit the purpose behind Poetic Idealism. As I write on the about page,

 criticism, reflection, and etc. about reading and writing poetry; sometimes social commentary creeps in; and every once in a while, I’ll post a (or part of a) poem here

and I think that covers the major purposes. Maybe I’ll begin posting rants here…

Continue reading →

Letter to the Next President

Dear Mr. President,

Some things to do in your first couple of months:

  1. Call the Governors in for a Round Table Discussion:
    1. End Militarization of Local Police Forces.
    2. End Drone Flights Over US.
  2. Call a Full Session of Congress:
    1. Whip Their Asses into Shape re: Running the Country, not Their Own Personal Beliefs.
    2. Passing Wall Street Regulation.
    3. Passing Real Energy Reform.
    4. Passing Real Economic Recovery Steps. (Look to the Great Depression for ideas. Those actually worked.)
  3. Address the Nation re: Market Forces & Fuel Prices.
  4. Prosecute & Break Up the “Too Big to Fail” Corporations.
  5. Equal Rights Amendment for LGBT.

The US is a country which has led the world in every endeavor. Make it so again.

Thanks,

Eric

Cross-Post with Wallace Stevens Encounters

As I previously wrote here, I intend to follow up on the ideas I wrote about in the Introduction to Wallace Stevens Encounters. This is that post.

In that post, I mentioned that Pattiann Rogers expands Stevens’ ideas in her essay “Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation”; however, although her ideas line up and extend Stevens’, she does not specifically mention his name. Perhaps Stevens’ theory has become so ingrained as to be an accepted part of the modern condition of humanity; in Rogers’ words, a piece of our contemporary cosmology.

To Continue, Read Here

A New Blog – Poetry Thesis Musings

I know not everyone cares about hearing someone else talk about their thesis – that was so twenty years ago. So, I forked off a new blog, Poetry Thesis Musings, in which I’ll talk about everything thesis related as it occurs to me. I did want to note the first reflective entry on Pattiann Rogers’ essay “Twentieth-Century Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation,” which has an interesting segment related to the Wallace Stevens Encounters project. It has to do with Stevens’ conception of pressure as a measure of history. More on that to come.

Introduction

As Part of a class in my MFA program titled Literature for Writers, Professor Janet Peery asked for a final project interrogating our semester-long study of our choice of writer. At the beginning of the seminar, I chose Wallace Stevens as a poet I should probably know more about, as my encounters with him have been few and far between.

After attempting several different projects, including a couple of essays, I decided to go a little more playful: bring Stevens into contemporary America and see what happens. The posts included under this category are the results.

Continue reading →