The Biplane Houses has immediacy too, but of a different sort: here, as so often in Murray’s work, you feel yourself to be getting close to the actual living element of language itself. “Luminous electric grist/brushed over the night world:/White Korea, Dark Korea,/tofu detailing all Japan. . . . ” (“Bright Lights on Earth”). The words are so fresh, they seem to have just formed themselves, effortlessly, like a Van Halen solo, out of some germinal ground of polyphonic gibberish. This is Murray’s special gift: flitting between styles with a fat man’s supernatural grace — and in The Biplane Houses he is a gnome, an aphorist, a composer of haiku, a national conscience and a godawful punster (“King Henry had a marital block”) — he always seems to be uttering at least one or two of poetry’s first syllables. Beginnings obsess him: “Right in that house over there/an atom of sharp spilled my sanctum/and I was extruded, brain cuff,/in my terror, in my soap” (“Birthplace”). Books of real poetry by living poets are a privilege — by poets as alive as this, they’re a blessing. We should thank (to channel Hughes for a moment) our lucky stars that he is our contemporary.
Related:
Sweet fallout, All poetry is local, Lyrical gangstas, More 
- Sweet fallout
Philip Whalen (1923–2002) is a great American poet.
- All poetry is local
The poems achieved are graspable physical objects, not “infinite,” but so wide and so deep, and solid.
- Lyrical gangstas
In 1997, David Riley and four other Tenants Harbor poets decided to become what he calls “ambassadors for poetry in a prose-laden world.”
- News to me
Notwithstanding the occasional university-press finalist (this year: David Kirby), the National Book Award for poetry is generally open to only a few American poets.
- Frank Carlberg | The American Dream
Other jazz musicians have set the poetry of Robert Creeley to music. Here poetry takes on the form of incantation in the repetition of Creeley's short, oblique verses.
- Portland Music News: April 10, 2009
We have a tentative street date for cheek-metal purveyors PIGBOAT 's new album, Float: April 21, with a release show later that week, April 25, at Geno's
- Review: Bright Star
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art." That's the first line of a sonnet that John Keats did or did not write for Fanny Brawne, who was in either case the love of his brief life.
- Demon daze
Hart Crane roared through his short, tormented, and doomed life.
- Medicine men
What if a poem had the power to heal loneliness?
- Ghazal Fine Indian Cuisine
Years ago, I brought a date to Boston's oldest Indian restaurant (the bygone Kebab-n-Kurry), promising, "The food's great, but the servers are the surliest bunch you've ever seen — so sullen it's hilarious!"
- Giving good gimmick
To sustain a literary magazine over decades it pays to have a gimmick.
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Books
, Media, Sylvia Plath, Poetry, More
, Media, Sylvia Plath, Poetry, Van Halen, John Howard, Les Murray, Ted Hughes, Less
