In "Hallelujah Boys," I was thinking about ritual, appetite, and disillusionment—how even sacred acts can curdle into performance. The poem's imagery holds tension between hunger and horror, reverence and rot. I wanted to write something that asked, at its core: what are we really consuming when we eat at certain tables?
Brian Gyamfi on "Hallelujah Boys" |
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In Memoriam: Alice Notley
“'The signature of her work is a restless reinvention and a distrust of groupthink that remains true to her forebear’s directive: to not give a damn,' David S. Wallace wrote in The New Yorker in 2020. As Ms. Notley herself said in a 2010 essay, 'It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against....everything.' She wrote without restraint, saying that she never edited or revised her work. And she largely shunned academia; poetry, she said in a 2009 interview with The Kenyon Review, 'should feel hugely uncomfortable in the academy.'”
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Nathan Spoon on Life in Public
"I hoped for this poem to expand beyond the realm of the scholarly, outward in a serious way relating to societal circumstances we are in together at present—and by societal I mean the global society of human beings sharing a planet, one tragically in a vortex of cascading concerns including war, surging debt and inflation, climate crisis, resource depletion and the crossing of planetary boundaries, growing inequality, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, and the backsliding of democracy.” |
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