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Poetry Month 2016: David Giannini
[For those of you who may have wondered what happened to the April 18th post, the auto-post feature evidently conflicted with some kind of Wordpress update and failed to post. It appears below.Read More
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School of Humor (not the School of Quietude)
So in all innocence I travel from one of my favorite blogs, 3QuarksDaily, to a linked article called “The Dead Chipmunk: An Interrogation into the Mechanisms of Jokes,” by Chris Bachelder. It opens with a pretty funny story about Bachelder and his (her?)* daughter and a dead chipmunk. But then that dread, dusty, scholastic word “interrogation” flaps down buzzard-like onto the creaky branch of the author’s main argument, and all goes awry. “Jokes are rarely if ever in the first person,” Bachelder writes, presumably with a straight face.Read More
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I’ve been meaning…
… for some time to review Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina but haven’t known what to say, or what intelligent I might say (to be more precise), other than noting that Svalina doesn’t sound like other American poets, except maybe flashes here and there of Russell Edson, the somewhat flat voice masking a manic zaniness, as if Steven Wright had thrown over stand-up comedy for poetry, and in fact there are some Edsonesque turns here, and some moments when I can imagine Svalina rubbing his brow the way Wright does in that puzzled and faintly pained way, as if it hurts…Read More