-
Sucking Up (My Morning Vitriol)
“The Contradiction” (by David Spear) Why am I not surprised that Michael Robbins, in “reviewing” Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and My Life in the Nineties, begins with a truth (that Language poetry is boring), then accurately characterizes Hejinian’s approach: “writing as a paradoxically polished automatism.” Robbins is obviously a bright guy. Of course, calling Hejinian’s approach paradoxical doesn’t explain or justify it; in fact, it unmasks it as an exercise in cynicism: polish gives the lie to the writing’s ersatz automatism.Read More
-
China Doorknobs
Anthony Madrid is by far the most rewarding-to-read blogger on Harriet these days. One feels like each of his posts is a full bucket pulled up from a pouring brook: the taste is good and complex and one can’t forget that the brook is flowing on as one reads—that the bucketful is merely a sample. In this post, Madrid offers a wonderful quote from H. L. Mencken; I only wish he’d documented where it came from: The old-time poet did not bother with theories.Read More
-
The Creepy Pseudo-Thought of Languish Poetry
“[E]xperimentalism is often suspicious of formally conservative notions like ‘ear’ and the essentialist values they evoke. Language poetry in particular is in large part predicated on the rejection of the illusion of presence promoted by the privileging of speech and voice.” —K.Read More
-
Bök to the Future
The latest collection of “poetry” by Christian Bök. From a fascinating article in Seed Magazine: On May 16 the Zoological Society of London released a report suggesting that since contemporary environmentalism emerged with the declaration of the first Earth Day in 1970, close to one-third of all the wild species on Earth have disappeared. Language conservationists have fared no better: Of the world’s roughly 6,800 languages, fully half — though some experts say closer to 90 percent — are expected to disappear before the end of the century.Read More
-
Flying the Flag
Reading this, it struck me that watching Kenny Goldsmith try to think is like watching Keanu Reeves try to act. The lack of basic skills is no bar to either man making a tidy income, because each has stumbled into a style of performance that requires no talent—a value-free type of entertainment that speaks both to the canny cynicism of their self-presentation and to the low expectations of their audience.Read More
-
Legitimization Factories
Lyle Daggett has a recent post at A Burning Patience with a tantalizing excerpt from an interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes. She discusses English departments, but what she says applies to cultural support institutions like the Pew Center or the Poetry Foundation as well. Of English departments, she says, “We are working in this legitimization factory.” Think about that…. And how does legitimization come about? What are the forces that create and distributes legitimization from the “factory”? Lorna Dee puts it this way: “I’m saying look at the conditions of power.Read More
-
A Life-Altering Friendship: Dale Jacobson on Thomas McGrath
Dale Jacobson I can’t thank Lyle Daggett enough for posting on his blog this link to a long, powerful memoir by poet Dale Jacobson about his friend and mentor, Thomas McGrath. It’s exciting to have this essay for several reasons. One, McGrath deserves to be more of a presence on our cultural radar, if only because his work has been severely undervalued and almost certainly suppressed—not by some conspiracy of nefarious political opponents, but (worse) by a pernicious aesthetic correctness, according to which poetry that embodies a profound systemic political critique is somehow not “first order” poetry.Read More
-
Friday Notebook 11.04.11
There is little in my notebook this week beyond a few stray quotes drawn from my reading and a raw reaction to one of Conrad DiDiodato’s most intriguing blog posts, which needs fleshing out. Let me post my notes on Conrad first: I reread Frank Samperi’s trilogy a few months ago, and it produced a kind of seething in my mind which I recognize in Conrad. His post suffers from a conflation of Language poetry (in the person of Silliman) and the Occupy Movement.Read More
-
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
-
Kvetchy
Don Share’s a bright guy and a fine poet. And I have a lingering cold that’s made me kvetchy—tired and irritable; not too tired to kvetch, but too tired to go on at length.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
