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A Diagnosis
I recently came across John Latta’s statement that at age 37 Lyn Hejinian wrote a book called My Life, which consisted of “thirty-seven sections, each thirty-seven sentences long.” And it hit me: the avant-garde (think OULIPO, think Goldsmith) is afflicted with and obsessive-compulsive disorder.Read More
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Spoiled Children
John Latta mines the visual art and thought of Patrick Swift to reveal the muddy-headedness of certain trends in our current verse. Funny that what seems so clear when we talk about art becomes so cloudy when we talk about poetry.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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Music and Listening
Don’t miss John Latta’s musings on sound in poetry. Example: He lifts this Roman Jakobson quote from The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound: “Poetry is not the only area where sound symbolism makes itself felt, but it is a province where the internal nexus between sound and meaning changes from latent into patent and manifests itself most palpably and intensely.” One could walk around inside that idea for days.Read More
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Koala Tea
I stole the idea for this from the indefatigable John Latta and offer my own version of it here because I thought his set-up was too offhand. A traveler who prides himself on making “local discoveries” is touring Australia and happens to stop for breakfast in a dusty Queensland backwater by the name of Murcie. The café is small but crowded—a good omen, he tells himself—so he takes a stool at the long zinc counter and begins to study the menu mounted high on the wall.Read More