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Thomas and Uncle Dan
I want to draw your attention to this extraordinary post about poetry and politics on Thomas R. Smith’s blog. Note as well that Thomas’s new book, The Foot of the Rainbow, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press.Read More
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Don’t You Love Farce? (Pace, Stephen Sondheim…)
The powerful Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, in is book-length meditation Another Beauty, offers these observations: Linguistic definitions of poetry, and of literature generally, predominate in our age. This means that in defining literature–incidentally, why do we need to define literature, anyway? who bothers to define rain?–the first move is sticking out your tongue. This approach links thinkers as diverse as the structuralists, on the one hand, and Joseph Brodsky, on the other, a great poet closer to metaphysics than to science. It’s a tricky problem, and an immensely important question.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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It’s Academic
Over at his Cosmopoetica blog, Chris quotes Stephen Dunn on John Ashbery: “Poets who defy making sense and do it deliberately and often brilliantly (as Ashbery can) are making a kind of sense, and may be extending the range of what poetry can do, though they ensure that poetry’s audience will be small and chiefly academic: i.e., composed of people inclined to equate a puzzle with that which is meaningful.” This spurred me to respond in the blog’s comment stream, but I since my reply ended up to be rather lengthy and maybe useful to Perpetual Birders, I’m repeating it…Read More
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Who Speaks to You?
I’m rereading Thomas McGrath’s magnificent Letter to an Imaginary Friend, in which he several times mentions Don Gordon. Don Gordon? A poet, it turns out, one of the many I’d never heard of until some other reader (usually another poet—in this case McGrath) brings them to my attention. Now I’ve discovered Don Gordon’s Collected Poems and am waiting for a check or two to clear so I can buy it.Read More
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Onion Poetics
Chris Lott at Cosmopoetica has been doing a great job reading his way through the latest Best American Poetry volume, edited by David Wagoner. I was so taken with his close reading of the Terrance Hayes‘s poem “A House is not a Home” that I dove into the comment stream with this observation: I have to be honest: the first two sentences of your post led me to expect a close reading of a single poem—and sure enough, you delivered! No thumping of this or that Theory drum, just a thoughtful response to the words on the page.Read More
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Can Poetry Respond to History as it Happens?
I wonder if the massive uprising going on right now in Iran will find its way into American poetry any time soon. Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard about it: especially if you typically turn to cable news, you’ll have seen precious little about it.Read More
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The Decade in Poetry
An interesting article entitled “2000-2009: The Decade in Poetry” is online now at The Poetry Foundation site. Nine poets, nine points of view–all intriguing. Most notable for Perpetual Bird readers may be the fact that I find myself in total agreement with one of the nine, Ron Silliman, whose take on the impact of new publishing technologies (online and print) deserves to be fleshed out by someone (not me–maybe Ron himself?).Read More
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Neglect
I’ve been pondering a statement made sometime back in a blog post by Bill Knott: “I don’t believe there are any unjustly forgotten 20th Century USAPO—the myth of the unjustly forgotten dead poet.” I love Knott’s contrarianism but wonder about this notion, especially today when I’ve run across a lovely glimpse into one of William Blake’s notebooks, housed at the British Library. The Library’s introduction notes, “William Blake is famous today as an imaginative and original poet, painter, engraver, and mystic.Read More
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Poetic Expectations
Al Filreis recently posted a quotation from George Hartley’s book Textual Politics and the Language Poets. He also posted a link to a larger excerpt from that book, which is one of the most illuminating pieces I’ve seen on the subject. In the excerpt, Hartley explains that Language poets are united by their “rejection of the dominant model for poetic production and reception today—the so-called voice poem.Read More