-
In Key with the Times
Donald Hall Seth Abramson One can only feel grateful for Seth Abramson’s “myth-busting” posts at The Huffington Post (see here and here). They constitute a reply to Donald Hall and his statements about “the McPoem,” set forth in his influential essay “Poetry and Ambition” (1983). “The workshop schools us to produce the McPoem,” Hall wrote, “which is ‘a mold in plaster, / Made with no loss of time,’ with no waste of effort, with no strenuous questioning as to merit.” This is false, according to my own experience, but that doesn’t matter.Read More
-
A World Outside
Seth Abramson has bravely taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Ron Silliman re: defining “School of Quietude,” though his lawyerly training has produced a rhetorical mishmash, I think, in this second of his two-part response. I bring this up because I’d hate for the folderol in Part Two to distract from the brilliant essay with which he ends Part I (click here and scroll down until you find the title “On Rhetoric, Hybrid Poetics, and the Intersection of Immanent and Transcendent Meaning”).Read More
-
A Blogger’s Notebook 12
The following found poem stitches together 19 headlines from ads for MFA programs published in the January / February 2010 issue of Poets and Writers—an issue focused on “inspiration.” Each discreet sentence is a headline; those presented as parenthetical statements are, of course, not in parentheses in the ads themselves. The headlines appear in the same order as the ads appear in the publication. To Writing Programs: A Canticle This way, that way, that way, this, Here and there a fresh love is.Read More
-
Reluctantly
I wasn’t planning to get into Derek Walcott’s Big Adventure with the gossip brigade, which was so loudly trumpeted in this country by Seth Abramson on his blog—see here and here. Seth got his panties so much in a wad over the fact that blog readers disagreed with his position that he finally disabled comments on the latter entry. But here I am, bringing it all up—reluctantly….Read More
-
Against the Binary
I’ve been reading, off and on, Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, and it’s made me realize just how trapped we’ve become (me, too) in the structure of the debates over poetry that began with the rise of Modernism. Harrington quotes Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom in particular to show that promoters of Modernism sought to exclude “public interest” from poetry and focus instead on “form and style.” Writers like William Rose Benét and all-but-forgotten regional writers like Gene Stratton-Porter bemoaned Modernism’s elitist spurning of the common reader.Read More
-
An Ordinary Reader Contra Jargon
I was going to post this as a response in the comment stream, but though it might be worth its own post. It’s a response to Seth’s comment on my earlier post below. Hello, Seth— Maybe I’m just oversensitive to theoretical language, so much so that I find the odor of it everywhere. You do, in fact, deliver a fairly jargon-free discussion of 7 lines from Joshua Beckman‘s Shake, but let me examine just one key sentence of it in the hope that I can clarify why I smell jargon there.Read More
-
Dissenting from My Dissent
Well, I tried to dissent from the debate, but now Seth Abramson has yet another lengthy and thought-provoking entry on his blog, to which I want to steer this blog’s readers, in part because I generally agree with his analysis. I have two dissents, though.Read More
-
Revelation and Relevance in Poetry
Seth Abramson devotes two recent blog posts (here and here) to a single issue: “How to Make Poetry Relevant.” His point of departure is yet another post, this one by K. Silem Mohammed, which Abramson calls “flarfist” (not familiar with Flarf? Oh, benighted soul! See here and here [scroll down to “Feature: Flarf”], if you have the stomach for it). But Mohammed’s post seems pretty straightforward to me, and insightful to boot. For once it’s Abramson, usually so balanced and incisive, who intercepts Mohammed’s pass and takes off down field the wrong way.Read More
-
Poets and Their Audience
Seth Abramson, whose poems I’ve seen here and there and been very impressed by, has a new blog post that extends some previous ruminations on the question of the poet and the audience, although under the rubric of “The State of the Small Presses.” This new post it really doesn’t have much to do with the stated topic, but frankly I think that’s good: we must always begin with the poet/audience equation.Read More
-
Seth Abramson on The School of Quietude
I’ve become addicted to Seth Abramson’s blog The Suburban Ecstasies, in part because he always seems to be thinking out loud, not delivering sermons or condescending rants, and thinking out loud requires openness—a quality I value much more than the closed-circuit pronouncements of the Harold Bloom type.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. 
