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Legitimization Factories
Lyle Daggett has a recent post at A Burning Patience with a tantalizing excerpt from an interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes. She discusses English departments, but what she says applies to cultural support institutions like the Pew Center or the Poetry Foundation as well. Of English departments, she says, “We are working in this legitimization factory.” Think about that…. And how does legitimization come about? What are the forces that create and distributes legitimization from the “factory”? Lorna Dee puts it this way: “I’m saying look at the conditions of power.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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Poetry News from Harriet and PennSound
Charles Bernstein hails a cab, or perhaps cusses out a cabbiefor failing to stop in response to his hailing. This is a still fromBernstein’s film-in-progress, Hailing a Cab, or How I Learnedto Stop Worrying and Love the Post-Avant. The kind of crap that passes for “poetry news” when you’ve been handed about a billion dollars to promote poetry.Read More
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Kent Johnson and the Pros from Dover
I’ve already posted a number of times about Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara (see all my posts dealing with Kent here). I haven’t gotten my act together to write intelligently about his book itself, though I will say—in the way of a news broadcast teaser—that it’s a remarkable book that has been overlooked even by those who have discussed it, because there’s a good deal more to it than the O’Hara-Koch controversy.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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The Poe(li)tics of Reality
Robert P. Baird at 3 Quarks Daily draws a fascinating parallel between the motivations and methods of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and those of the Language poets. He compares Assange’s hatred of secrecy—which he (Assange) views as the essential strategy all authoritarian governments use to maintain their power—with the Language poets’ hatred of “the rules for the ‘clear’ and ‘orderly’ functioning of language” (Charles Bernstein), which they see as similarly essential to maintaining “the capitalist project.” Certainly the paranoia-tinged views of Assange do mirror Langpo’s paranoid fear of “official verse culture” (Bernstein), a.k.a. “the School of Quietude” (Ron Silliman).Read More
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Walking the Doggerel
Today’s Poem-A-Day poem from The Academy of American Poets is Charles Bernstein’s “All the Whiskey in Heaven”. Bernstein is famous for co-founding both the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E back in the ’70s and The Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo in 1995, but for me he’ll always be the Woody Allen of poetry (I’m a big Woody Allen fan, in spite of everything); Bernstein’s funny even when he’s being serious—or especially when—and people find brilliancies in his work that are really just the sparkle of his highly polished shtick.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
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Reading Into and the Avant-Garde
Jacket Magazine has published a peculiarly passive-aggressive 4,000-plus word response by Jeffrey Side to a 193 word statement by Seamus Heaney, quoted from Heaney’s interview with Dennis O’Driscoll as published in Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. (The interview is no longer available online, alas.) Here is the Heaney excerpt; his initial “it” refers to the term “avant-garde”: It’s an old-fashioned term by now. In literature, nobody can cause bother any more. John Ashbery was a kind of avant-garde poet certainly and now he’s become a mainstream voice.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. 
