Memorable Speech – Page 4 – John Hart’s Poetry Blog

Who is this guy and why is he talking?

November 8, 2020 By John Hart 3 Comments

I write here as someone with two special angles of vision on the poetry world. One comes from twenty-odd years as an editor—and three as sole editor—of the durable West Coast all-poetry magazine Blue Unicorn. This job entails constantly sampling, and choosing from, a hefty stream of submitted verse. The second is a lifetime of immersion in the critical ideas and teaching methods of Lawrence Hart, mentor of the so-called Activist Group of poets, and my father, who died in 1996. For a quarter century now I have been documenting, applying, and I hope extending these methods.

[Read more…]

John Hart champions approaches to poetry—its writing and reading—opened up by his father Lawrence Hart, mentor of the so-called Activist Group and a gadfly in Twentieth Century literary debates. John edits the all-poetry magazine Blue Unicorn and teaches and lectures in several settings. He’s won the James D. Phelan Award in poetry (plus numerous honors for nonfiction). His poetry collections are The Climbers (Pitt Poetry Series, 1978) and Storm Camp (Sugartown Publishing 2017). He’s at work on anthologies of the Activist poets and the critical writings of Lawrence Hart and his associates.