R, Raindog (R.D. Armstrong) to Jerome Rothenberg

Raindog says he is “doing graduate work in the School of Hard Knocks” and fixes things for a living. He’s the editor of Lummox Journal, an energetic and entertaining LA zine stuffed with reviews, interviews, articles and poems.

Don’t miss the bio, interviews, poems, prose & commentary at Modern American Poetry and Rakosi’s 99th birthday celebration at Kelly Writers House, where you can listen to a recorded conversation with Rakosi & his readings of 10 poems.

Gary Glazner’s slam take-off on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet was the perfect excuse for us to explore the work of the American objectivists, Rakosi among them.

American Language, San Francisco poet/performance artist Alan Reade’s online “book” of performance texts, photos, notes, has everything but the sound of his voice. We nominate “Lazarus” best poem in the book.

The Poet Laureate of rock’n’roll gives a taste of what a poet’s Web page can do (hats off to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders).

Reynolds is an American living abroad who has the wonderful happenstance of his poems being recorded and read by someone else. Read his poem “Deathless” at A Little Poetry.

Adrienne Rich (1929 - 2012) was as much activist and social philosopher as poet, and she was a very great poet, a clear-eyed and eloquent cartographer of women’s lives.

Citizen of Poetry, she mapped the continent we make poems on. Some landmarks: “Calle Visión” at Agni, “Diving Into the Wreck,” “Miracle Ice Cream” & “The Art of Translation” in audio at AAP, her statement on “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts” & a gathering of resources & commentary at Modern American Poetry.

Nottingham Trent University in Great Britain has a substantial Web site devoted to Laura (Riding) Jackson, including brief reviews of most of the books written by and about her, as well as a selection of her poems, the “Poems of Mythical Occasion.” Her papers are archived at the Cornell University Library.

The French Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud was both a prodigy, writing all of his poems within only five years and abandoning poetry entirely before he was 21, and a prodigal, a wandering adventurer, never settled in either his living circumstances or his relationships, and never achieving worldly success during his lifetime. He had a tumultuous relationship with his lover and mentor, Paul Verlaine, and it was Verlaine who published his work posthumously, ensuring his lasting fame and influence.

The Drunken Boat includes its namesake poem among the pages devoted to “childhood . poetry . letters . verlaine . absinthe . books . links . total eclipse . vagabonds . mailing list.” There’s good material here, but since it’s a Tripod site, you have to put up with that annoying popup ad. It’s also the home of the Drunken Boat email list.

Mark Ynys-Môn has created a Web shrine to the notoriously naughty 17th century poet of love & rude satire.

In his relatively short lifetime (1908 - 1963), Theodore Roethke wrote a number of poems that sank deep into people’s consciousness -- two of his are among those chosen at the Favorite Poems Project: “My Papa’s Waltz” & “The Sloth.”

The Rogue Scholars are the baddest new poets in New York & their Web site will zing ya with Rogue-poems & guest-poems. We need more Rogue Scholars!

Start with a poet, I always say. Judith Roitman is that, poet, and she is willing to say it, that she is an experimental poet with ties in The Language School. (Dr. Roitman teaches math at the University of Kansas in her spare time).

Wendy Rose’s poem “Itch Like Crazy: Resistance” was among the first posted at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s site when it returned to the Net in the fall of 1999 after a summer lightning strike fried its modems.

Poet and painter, Pre-Raphaelite, Rossetti brought color and realism into painting and into the poems he buried with his consumptive true-love.

Like William Blake, Rossetti combined painting and poetry in multimedia masterworks which take on marvelous depth and dimension when presented in hypermedia form on the Web. The Rossetti Archive is a complete online presentation of all of Rossetti’s work, pictures and text, poems and prose, translations and correspondence, together with related resources to put his life and work in cultural context.

Jerry Rothenberg: Inventor of “total translation,” accounting for every element in the original language, including the “meaningless” vocables, word distortions and redundancies. His involvement with American Indian poetry and ritual led to Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972). Great performer/poet/translator/anthologist: “He saved us 20 years” — Allen Ginsberg.