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A World of Things
Bill Knott asks some important (to the extent that poetry is important) questions here and here. His focus is Objectivism (the Zukofsky/Williams/Reznikoff/Oppen Objectivism, not the hilariously stupid “philosophy” cooked up by that maven of selfishness, Ayn Rand), one of the root assumptions of which is the notion that content doesn’t matter. In fact, Objectivist poetry exalted a world of things, a world without meaning—except for the significance imposed upon it by the poet.Read More
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In Praise of Intention
Imagine you’re strolling past the bus station in downtown Eugene, Oregon. (Never been to Eugene? Doesn’t matter.) You glimpse something on the ground in a shadowed area near a public trash receptacle and veer toward it for a look. An oblong something, larger than a cell phone, but not readily identifiable. You bend and pick it up. A device of some kind, with a mostly black plastic shell; there are several half-worn-off letters on the shell: GLATSKI.Read More
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I Plan to Make A Bookmark of This Poem
Congratulations to the inimitable Vassilis Zambaras on the acceptance of this wonderful poem in what promises to be a rich anthology of work about Williams.Read More
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A Noiseless Patient Poet
Far be it from me to diss Marjorie Perloff, an often illuminating poetry critic. But when Jerome Rothenberg offered up this extract from her introduction to some German translations of Rae Armantrout‘s poems, a strange feeling crept over me: the sensation that she was slipping, I mean. Perloff, typically precise to a fault, here becomes a slightly vague promoter of a poet she’s a fan of. To wit: [U]nlike Williams (or Levertov), Armantrout was never a poet of concrete particulars: from the first, her minimalist lyrics were breaking the Williams mold.Read More
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Beyond Looking and Seeing
John Latta has a characteristically intelligent post today about William Carlos Williams’s love of “looking and seeing,” which Latta calls “the painterly chore.” There is no doubt that Williams loved looking at the world, especially into overlooked corners of it, but there is more to it for him. Latta notes this but presents it as support for his “looking and seeing” thesis when it’s actually something more.Read More
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Wishing You a Joyful 2010!
It’s instructive at the end of any year to consider how far we have or haven’t come. But a single year is too brief to get a good sense of larger trends. Each of us knows how our own year went, and the media provides their own assessments, distorted by the currents of political partisanship and an overriding interest in ratings.Read More
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The Grave of Western Civ
Psych! But honestly—Steve Halle of the Fluid/Exchange blog says this work by Holms Troelstrup is “exciting” (he doesn’t say why). Maybe Halle is simply depressed and is thus excited by whatever takes the art of poetry further into inanity. Halle is also excited (again he doesn’t say why) by this interesting blog entry by Robert Archambeau. Archambeau writes about poetry vs. prose, conflating “not-poetry” with prose as if Aristotle had never addressed the issue.Read More
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What Poetry Can Be
I wonder if there’s room on a post-avantist’s reading list for this. Are the sample poems SoQ? If so, what would a Silliman or a Goldsmith or a Spahr do with such an irruption of brutality in their lives? More broadly, what would Wallace Stevens or any of the other “High Modernists” have done with it? (Is Williams a “High Modernist”? If so, there’s at least one who could do it.) I don’t put these forward as rhetorical questions: I genuinely wonder if the avant-garde and their acknowledged masters haven’t narrowed rather than expanded what poetry can be.Read More
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Göransson and Blatny and Tics, Oh My!
Back on March 22 Johannes Göransson posted a poem by Ivan Blatny*, a Czech poet who defected to the West when the communists took over in 1948. Blatny lived from then on in England, until his death in 1990. Göransson posted the Blatny poem by way of recommending The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny, issued in 2007 by Ugly Duckling Presse; he declared the poem an example of the poet’s “greatness.” I read the poem and couldn’t fathom by what standard it could be called “great,” and said so.Read More
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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
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. 
