Monty Python's Poet Sketches

Tip of the hat to the inimitable Ernest Hilbert for posting these at the wonderful E-Verse Radio blog.

Kalogeris at the Grolier, September 2012

George Kalogeris reads from his new collection, Dialogos (Antilever Press), at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, on September 13, 2012. Video by Mark Schorr.

Ben Mazer reads "The King" in July 2012

As recorded at the launch of a new issue of Spirited at the Fourth Wall Project gallery, July 29, 2012. In that issue can be found a version of Mazer's long poem "The King" appears, accompanied by illustrations by Vanessa Barnard. Video via YouTube, courtesy Allison Vanouse.

The text also appears in the first issue of The Battersea Review. Diana Jones-Ellis on Ben's reading in the video: "Brilliant! ... The dimensionality in the work and the reading is absolutely riveting." Below, a leaf from the illustrated stanzas of "The King" as it appears in Spirited.

"GOD LIQUORS LOOSE EACH ASHEN TONGUE"

Below, and at the Boston Review website, Gregory Pardlo reads his poem "Palling Around":

This video is part of BR's special package celebrating National Poetry Month. The rich jangle of noun phrases Pardlo is using here is rather like what Lucy Brock-Broido was writing in her dense poems of the eighties; for example, these lines from "I Wish You Love" [from AGNI 27, 1988, pg. 11]:

Like Josef's skull ascending from Brazilian soil
On a twine, she rises from her famous white bed,
Exhumed by morning. I am hunted into daylight
When I wake like that, god-hungry, startled.
Now that my father is gone, he has gone
Luminous. I wish him love.

SLOW POETRY DEFENDED

John Armstrong has issued a manifesto for Slow Poetry [read: Dense Verse]. Along these lines, readers might enjoy the poetry of Ted Richer, a poet living in Scituate. His poems often show a perfection of slowness via repetition; for example his poem "Secrets" at Public Republic. Below, a video of Richer reading several short poems (he starts at 38:11), the first of which was finished on the morning of the reading.

FARRELL, HOPKINS, BURTON, HILL

At this week's graveside service for Elizabeth Taylor, the actor Colin Farrell read a poem in her memory: Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo." Farrell is is rumored to be portraying Sir Richard Burton in an upcoming biopic; though I am ignorant of the reason this poem is associated with Burton, here in any case is a YouTube recording of the great actor (Burton, that is) reading the poem aloud [I found this via Hugh Fitzgerald's post at The Iconoclast blog].

Following the advice of users who were recommending in the comments that follow that video, here is Geoffrey Hill reading the same poem.  [via Eric Vondy's http://unnaturaleye.blogspot.com/2011/03/leaden-echo-and-golden-echo.html].

Hill for many years was on the faculty here at Boston University; he is currently serving as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in England. Bonus: at this video, you can hear Hill read Shakespeare's Sonnet LXVI, my favorite: "Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry."

Nadejda Mandelstam thought that this, Sonnet LXVI, was the one moment in his sonnets where William Shakespeare is 'fully revealed' (see her letter to Arthur Miller in 7 i 68, as reproduced in Russian Review V.61, No.4).