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Articles by Frank Bidart
The Third Hour of the Night
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The New York Review of Books
The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems by John Berryman, edited and with an introduction by Daniel Swift The Dream Songs by John Berryman, with an introduction by Michael Hofmann 77 Dream Songs by John Berryman, with an introduction by Henri Cole Berryman’s Sonnets by John Berryman, with an introduction by April Bernard
NHPR Reads: April 2024
It’s National Poetry Month! One of my favorite times of the year! With sunny days ahead, why not settle in some grass (or on your porch) with a few of the NHPR staff’s favorite poems? If you’re looking to add a bit more poetry to your life (and let’s be honest, we could all use a bit more poetry), here are a few fun ideas: Sign-up for Poem-a-Day, curated this month by U. S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, and read a poem each morning. Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day podcast. Make a poetry playlist.
Herbert White by Frank Bidart
"When I hit her on the head, it was good, and then I did it to her a couple of times,— but it was funny,—afterwards, it was as if somebody else did it... Everything flat, without sharpness, richness or line. Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay, tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss, hop out and do it to her... The whole buggy of them waiting for me made me feel good; but still, just like I knew all along, she didn't move.
Five Poets Who Find Music in the Personal, the Political or in Music Itself
poetry Nov. 11, 2021, 3:55 p.m. ET HOWDIE-SKELP By Paul Muldoon 179 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27. “Howdie-skelp”: the slap a midwife gives a newborn. Poem-sequences dominate Muldoon’s storm of slaps against piety, prudery, cruelty and greed. “American Standard,” named after a toilet brand, riffs for pages on lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” while churning through contemporary concerns like gerrymandering, immigration, and grotesque politicians and their media platforms.
Virtual Event: Frank Bidart
presenting Against Silence: Poems in conversation with GARTH GREENWELL Date Oct 29 Friday October 29, 2021 5:00 PM ET Location Join our online event (or pre-register) via the link in the event description. Tickets Free - $5 contribution suggested at registration Harvard Book Store's virtual event series is thrilled to welcome Pulitzer Prize–winning poet FRANK BIDART for a discussion of his latest, highly anticipated poetry collection, Against Silence.
Last Best Niche by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson - Poems | Academy of American Poets
found language from Brideshead Revisited When I was seventeen, ecstasy disguised itself as vice: juicy, offensive, and easy— pretty things want to get rough. an impertinent affair of the heart & more than the heart, when I was seventeen. Tipsy virgins viced their pimples when I was seventeen, and transformed pretty things to indecisive cornsilk. When I was seventeen I said I give up, finding no keener pleasure than a dear or unnatural boys in ecstasy.
Harvard Square Poetry Stroll
And wild and sweet The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will to men! The December holidays have traditionally sought to celebrate light in the darkest part of winter. After a particularly challenging year, Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site seeks to share hope and light with the people of Cambridge, Massachusetts through the art form of poetry.
"Inauguration Day"
Arts has moved! You can find new stories here. Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Frank Bidart read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes..
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Woe is blunted not erased by like. Your hands were too full, then empty. At the grave’s lip, secretly you imagine then refuse to imagine a spectre so like what you watched die, the unique soul you loved endures a second death. The dead hate like, bitter when the living with too-small grief replace them. You dread loving again, exhausted by the hungers ineradicable in his presence. You resist strangers until a stranger makes the old hungers brutally wake. We live by symbolic substitution.
The Ghost by Frank Bidart - Poems
The only thing I miss about Los Angeles is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and radio blaring bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard blazing —pimps, surplus stores, footprints of the stars —descending through the city fast as the law would allow through the lights, then rising to the stack out of the city to the stack where lanes are stacked six deep and you on top; the air now clean, for a moment weightless...
Redux: I Struggle to Stay inside Sleep
By The Paris Review March 24, 2020 Redux Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. James Laughlin. Photo courtesy of New Directions. This week at The Paris Review, we’re reading long, multipart selections—all the better with which to stay indoors.
“At The Shore”
All over the earth, elegies for the earth. The shore is in mourning. It mourns what it must soon see, the sea rising— implacable, drowning chunks of the intelligible, familiar world. Creatures of the earth filled with the instinct to wound the earth. We fear that by an act of immense, unconscious will, we have succeeded at last in killing NATURE. Since childhood, you hated the illusion that this green and pleasant land inherently is green or pleasant or for human beings home.
Poetry Friday: 'Keeping Quiet'
It’s the last Friday of 2019 and that means the last installment of Poetry Friday for the year. Today, we hear from the series producer, KNAU’s Gillian Ferris. She highlights some of the most memorable segments of 2019 and shares a poem for everyone who contributed to Poetry Friday during a year of intense news stories and divisive opinions. GF: 13 year old Aeka Joshi was one of the youngest poets this year.
Poetry Friday: Pride
It's National Pride Month, and Flagstaff's Pride in the Pines celebration kicks-off today. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, when police raided the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. It catered to gay patrons at a time when most establishments did not. The raid led to widespread protests, setting in motion the gay liberation movement.
In Memory of Joe Brainard by Frank Bidart
the remnant of a vast, oceanic bruise (wound delivered early and long ago) was in you purity and sweetness self-gathered, CHOSEN • When I tried to find words for the moral sense that unifies and sweetens the country voices in your collage The Friendly Way, you said It's a code.
117: To The Republic
117: To The Republic May 7, 2019 · 4:59 To The Republic by Frank Bidart I dreamt I saw a caravan of the dead start out again from Gettysburg. Close-packed upright in rows on railcar flat- beds in the sun, they soon will stink. Victor and vanquished shoved together, dirt had bleached the blue and gray one color. Risen again from Gettysburg, as if the state were shelter crawled to through blood, risen disconsolate that we now ruin the great work of time, they roll in outrage across America.
Ellen West by Frank Bidart
I love sweets,— heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ... But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl whose body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal; but I WILL NOT ... cannot. Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.” But he is a fool. He married meat, and thought it was a wife. . . . Why am I a girl?
Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger by Frank Bidart
Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed tocenterlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated hismouth, he has mastered to mutilateyou: the Joker's voice, so unlikethe bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar. Once I have the voice
that's
the line
and at
the end
of the line
is a hook
and attached
to that
is the soul.
IN MEMORY OF JOE BRAINARD BY FRANK BIDART
the remnant of a vast, oceanic bruise (wound delivered early and long ago) was in you purity and sweetness self-gathered, CHOSEN • When I tried to find words for the moral sense that unifies and sweetens the country voices in your collage The Friendly Way, you said It's a code.
Golden State by Frank Bidart
To see my fatherlying in pink velvet, a rosarytwined around his hands, rouged,lipsticked, his skin marble ...My mother said, “He looks the way he didthirty years ago, the day we got married,—I’m glad I went;I was afraid: now I can remember himlike that ...”Ruth, your last girlfriend, who wouldn’t sleep with youor marry, because you wanted herto pay half the expenses, and “His drinkingalmost drove me crazy—”Ruth once saw youstaring into a mirror,in your ubiquitous kerchief and cowboy...
'Half-light' By Frank Bidart Just Won The Pulitzer Prize, So You Should Probably Read It This National Poetry Month
If you’re looking for a little something else to add to your TBR pile this National Poetry Month, you might want to consider Frank Bidart. Bidart was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 — announced on April 16 by Pulitzer Administrator Dana Canedy. This isn't the first time the poet, whose debut collection was published in 1973, has been noticed by the Pulitzer Prize board.
Visions at 74 by Frank Bidart
The planet turns there without you, beautiful. lived out and discarded, something crowded inside us always craving to become something glistening outside us, the relentless planet showing itself the logic of what is is to love what is indifferent to you you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful. World that can know itself only by world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars. You are an hypothesis made of flesh.
The Third Hour of the Night by Frank Bidart
When the eye first outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe When the eye first saw that it Before nervous like itself but now Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself first saw that it must die When the eye first Brooding on our origins you ask When and I say driven again and again to dress with fresh heal for the wound that confers existence is mortal what wound is dressed the wound of being Understand that it can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. It...
The Fourth Hour of the Night by Frank Bidart
Because, when you were nine, your father Because the traveler was betrayed by those with whom he had the right to seek Because the universe then allowed a creature to fasten around your neck a thick wooden wheel Because at nine your cunning was not equal Because, stripped of what was his from birth, the slave the universe, tore the wheel from his neck: — carries it still, Scarcity is the mother of being.
Self-Portrait, 1969 by Frank Bidart
He's still young—; thirty, but looks younger— or does he? . . . In the eyes and cheeks, tonight, turning in the mirror, he saw his mother,— puffy; angry; bewildered . . . Many nights now, when he stares there, he gets angry:— something unfulfilled there, something dead to what he once thought he surely could be— Now, just the glamour of habits . . . Once, instead, he thought insight would remake him, he'd reach —what?
10 New Books We Recommend This Week
We’re nearing the season for ghost stories — or, in the case of William Alexander’s new middle-grade novel, “A Properly Unhaunted Place,” un-ghost stories, cautionary tales about what happens when we try too hard to put our history behind us.
Academy of American Poets
Frank Bidart was born in Bakersfield, California on May 27, 1939 and educated at the University of California at Riverside and at Harvard University, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. His first volume of poetry, Golden State (G. Braziller, 1973), was selected by poet Richard Howard for the Braziller Poetry series, but it wasn't until the publication of The Sacrifice (Random House, 1983) that Bidart's poetry began to attract a wider readership.
National Book Foundation Names 2017 NBA Finalists
The National Book Foundation has announced its shortlists, which reveal the 20 finalists for the 2017 National Book Awards for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature. The diverse lists include such established voices as Frank Bidart and Frances FitzGerald and up-and-coming literary favorites including Danez Smith, Carmen Maria Machado, and Ibi Zoboi.
Five Decades of Frank Bidart’s Verse, From Masks to Self-Mythology
“Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves,” Bidart writes in “Advice to the Players,” suggesting that poetry is the means by which he constructs himself — or deconstructs himself, since each new persona replaces an earlier one. Thus poetry for Bidart also represents an extinction of personality, if not quite in the way that T.S. Eliot formulated.
The 2017 National Book Award Longlists
The National Book Foundation has announced its longlists for the 2017 National Book Awards. The five finalists in each category will be named on October 4, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on November 15.
Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
The arrival of Frank Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 is one of this year’s major English-language poetry events. At over 700 pages, the monumental Half-light is nearly three times the size of Bidart’s previous career retrospective, 1990’s In the Western Night. Like that volume, Bidart’s invaluable new collection adopts a complex chronological strategy.
Half-light | Frank Bidart | Macmillan
The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own.
LGBTQ Poetry
“Dear J.” by Kazim Ali It should be a letter … “Honestly,” by John Ashbery we could send you out there … “Lullaby” by W. H.
“Mourning What We Thought We Were”
Content This content can also be viewed on the site it from. Audio: Read by the author. We were born into an amazing experiment. At least we thought we were. We knew there was no escaping human nature: my grandmother taught me that: my own pitiless nature taught me that: but we exist inside an order, I thought, of which history is the mere shadow— Every serious work of art about America has the same theme: America is a great Idea: the reality leaves something to be desired. Bakersfield.
The Poetry Foundation
To see my fatherlying in pink velvet, a rosarytwined around his hands, rouged,lipsticked, his skin marble ...My mother said, “He looks the way he didthirty years ago, the day we got married,—I’m glad I went;I was afraid: now I can remember himlike that ...”Ruth, your last girlfriend, who wouldn’t sleep with youor marry, because you wanted herto pay half the expenses, and “His drinkingalmost drove me crazy—”Ruth once saw youstaring into a mirror,in your ubiquitous kerchief and cowboy...
Half-Light
Content This content can also be viewed on the site it from. Audio: Read by the author. That crazy drunken night I maneuvered you out into a field outside of Coachella—I’d never seen a sky so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives still were sprinkled with glistening white shells from the ancient seabed beneath us that receded long ago. Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows. —That suffocated, fearful look on your face.
Queer by Frank Bidart - Poems
Lie to yourself about this and you will forever lie about everything. Everybody already knows everything so you can lie to them. That's what they want. But lie to yourself, what you will lose is yourself. Then you turn into them. * For each gay kid whose adolescence was America in the forties or fifties the primary, the crucial scenario forever is coming out— or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. * Involuted velleities of self-erasure. * Quickly after my parents died, I came out.
The Yoke
Find and share the perfect poems. don't worry I know you're dead but tonight turn your face again toward me when I hear your voice there is now no direction in which to turn I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and but tonight turn your face again toward me see upon my shoulders is the yoke that is not a yoke don't worry I know you're dead but tonight turn your face again From Desire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Copyright © 1997 by Frank Bidart.
California Plush
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