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Friday Notebook 12.02.11
Kenny G. reading at PresidentObama’s”A Celebration of American Poetry” at the WhiteHouse on May 11, 2011. “Do not attempt to adjustthe picture. We are controllingtransmission.“ I really don’t have notebook entries for this week because I’ve been working on a new class for University of Denver’s University College, a “special topics” course on the poetic image. It’s great fun, but like all online classes, especially new ones, the pre-planning is tough.Read More
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Folderol Stew
Ever wonder why even the best American poetry draws so little attention from the public at large? There are lots of reasons, of course, but today’s sermon deals with just one: the dreadful quality of writing about poetry. Compare the 11,000 words Susan M. Schultz lavishes on Charles Bernstein here with the 3,850 words James Salter devotes here to Paul Hendrickson‘s new book on the last 27 years of Ernest Hemingway‘s life. Salter beguiles; he makes me want not only to read Hendrickson but to reread Hemingway.Read More
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Control…
Back from a visit to Taos with an extra day tacked on for prying open the inner fist, only to find why police sirens were whooping in the streets last night. Adios, Bin Laden! On the other hand, there is also Bill Knott’s latest post to keep in mind—an entry reposted from late summer 2008. Lest you think he’s making up this avant-garde-CIA-shill hobnobbery, see here and here. Politics.Read More
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The Interpreted World
Israel Rosenfield, in his review of Oliver Sacks‘s The Mind’s Eye: The creation of a coherent environment out of chaotic stimuli is one of the brain’s primary activities. There are no colors in nature, only electromagnetic radiation of varying wavelengths (the visible spectrum is between 390 and 750 nanometers). If we are aware of our “real” visual worlds we would see constantly changing images of dirty gray, making it difficult for us to recognize forms.Read More
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Stupid Funny*
“Why are so many writers now exploring strategies of copying and appropriation? It’s simple: the computer encourages us to mimic its workings.” The above is from Kenneth Goldsmith’s introduction to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (a free UbuWeb download). Goldsmith, of course, does not explain why writers have not created novels with internal combustion engines in imitation of the way cars work; or anthologies that flush their contents as you read them, in imitation of urinals. Oh … wait….Read More
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Pretentious
Okay. Drop by this post on the Poetry Foundation’s blog Harriet, if you feel like a good laugh.Read More
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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
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Apropos of the Previous Post
Walter Russell Mead touches on the same concerns: In literature, critics and theoreticians erect increasingly complex structures of interpretation and reflection – while the general audience for good literature diminishes from year to year. We are moving towards a society in which a tiny but very well credentialed minority obsessively produces arcane and self referential (but carefully peer reviewed) theory about texts that nobody reads.Read More
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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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Package Words
John Latta today notes: Pound, in 1956, to a BBC interviewer: “You cannot have literature without curiosity, and when a writer’s curiosity dies out he is finished—he can do all the tricks you like, but without curiosity you get no literature with any life in it.” (Pound’s next remark—mandatory reading for the insistently egregious purveyors of dopey labels: “Confusion is caused by package words. You call a man a Manichaean or a Bolshevik, or something or other, and never find out what he is driving at.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. 
