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Close Readings by Andrew Shields
Andrew Shields Lest they get lost in the increasingly abundant comment stream flowing from my previous post, let me bring to the top the four close readings of individual poems Andrew Shields mentioned in that stream. They deal with poems by Rae Armantrout, Adrienne Rich, Kit Robinson, and John Agard. These are four different as different can be poets, and Andrew’s readings are fine indeed.Read More
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Do You Want To Be Illiterate?
Carol Muske-Dukes Yesterday or the day before I posted a comment to a contentious but, from my point of view, on target essay by Carol Muske-Dukes on Huffington Post. In it, she rather neatly flays Ange Mlinko for her essay on Adrienne Rich, in which Mlinko uses the release of Rich’s Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012 to “reevaluate” the poet. My comment on Muske-Dukes’s essay was a bit terse: One only has to read Ange Mlinko’s poetry to understand her antipathy toward Rich. Insubstantial artists always detest substantial ones.Read More
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The Best 10 Poetry Books of 2012
I’m talking, of course, about the books that came across my desk—a limiting factor because I almost never receive a “review copy.” (They’re always welcome, though!) I buy all but a handful of the books I read, so my reading is skewed by my own interests right up front. This unprofessional status frees me from the angst suffered by professional critics, according to Stephen Burt and Marjorie Perloff, as they fight to stay atop the wave of new poetry books that maliciously seeks to drown them.Read More
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Daggett on Rich
Lyle Daggett has a moving remembrance if Adrienne Rich here.Read More
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Adios, Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich,Early and Late How many thousands pass on every day? How many poets? I don’t have the math skills to figure that one out. All I can say is that many more move “on to the next” without comment from me because, simply put, I don’t know them or their work. Mourning would feel disingenuous. The loss of Adrienne Rich is different. Although I never had the opportunity to meet her, her passing feels personal.Read More
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MacNeice Contemplates the 99 Percent
Louis MacNeice It was something of shock to encounter the 99 percent—not the phrase, but the demographic—deeply considered in the third section of Louis MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal (see Katy Evans-Bush’s excellent essay about it here), published in 1938. I had read the poem in my callow youth, but my ignorance of Britain between the wars was like a featureless river stone upon which the poem could simply not get a firm grip. I remembered it mostly for its tone—personal, notational, meditative, acerbic and humorous by turns—and didn’t appreciate exactly what MacNeice was trying to tell me.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 4
This continues my posting of poetry by poets on Ron Silliman’s “School of Quietude” list, which you can find in this previous post. Today’s poet is Adrienne Rich, who long ago made my personal list of poets who should get the Nobel Prize. It’s hard, I must add, to represent the scope, subtlety and power of her work, in part because she is formally adventurous, and in part because she has increasingly worked in long sequences—and it felt unfair to compare those to Mark Young’s minimalist poems, which Adam Fieled put forward as representative of strong post-avant writing.Read More
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Linh Dinh on a Roll…
Linh Dinh is on a roll at his blog, Detainees. First, there’s this very rich post on the anima, alchemy, animism, and Betty Boop (including a classic BB cartoon with Cab Calloway singing the chorus to “St. James Infirmary Blues”). Next, there are three related articles (I recommend starting here and reading them in order) all dealing with Israel’s itch to attack Iran. One of the many things I admire about Dinh is his openness to every current out there—aesthetic, political, social, psychological, ecological, economic and more.Read More
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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
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Pick Up the Phone!
Just finished reading Adrienne Rich’s excellent new collection, Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (if you know of a better book title from the past year, I’d like to hear about it). Here’s an insightful review that gets to the heart of what makes this book, and Rich’s work overall, continually powerful and refreshing. Her sympathies reach far beyond feminism or politics in the narrow sense, and in the process produce a kind of poetry that seems to move beyond the subjective/objective, interior/exterior dichotomy by bearing witness to our historical/existential moment.Read More