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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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Parsing the Pointless
I can’t resist pointing this blog’s readers to today’s entry on Silliman’s blog, wherein he lavish roughly 2,800 words on a book whose aim he characterizes thusly: “[I]t wants to place conceptual writing — including flarf & more than a few kinds of appropriative techniques — into a historical context that renders all that has come before obsolete & irrelevant.” In other words, the authors use history in order to render history meaningless. In true intellectualoid fashion, Silliman parses the pointlessness of this effort in a way that foregrounds not only his own poe(li)tical obsessions but his shirt size.Read More
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Pith and Gist
Mairi, one of the contributors over at The Plumbline School, posed this question in response to one of my comments: ” I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share your personal poetics? Or anyone else who possesses such a thing, for that matter? Nothing long and elaborate. Just pith and gist….” Well, my “pith and gist” proved longer than the 4,096 character limit Blogger imposes on comments. So I posted a partial version and linked back to this post for the complete response…. Mairi, you set me back on my heels a bit with this request.Read More
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A Blogger’s Notebook 8
THE PH.D.Read More
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Slow Return…
A few of you noticed my recent hiatus, which happened to coincide with a visit to Mexico, from which I returned dog sick (not pig sick, I assure you). I mention this only to explain my slow return, and to let you know that I’ll have a few words about my reading experiences in my version of Paradise over the next several posts. In the meantime, I want to recommend this essay by Mark Edmundson, published in the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.Read More
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A New Type of Creativity
I kid you not…. “The old type of creativity really isn’t very interesting,” Goldsmith said. “So by being uncreative, you form a new type of creativity.” […] [Kenneth] Goldsmith is the author of 10 books of poetry. His most recent work is unofficially titled American Trilogy. It consists of “The Weather, Traffic and Sports,” which are respective transcriptions of a year’s worth of radio weather reports, a 24-hour traffic cycle and the radio broadcast of a Yankees game with the ads included.Read More
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Nicholas Hughes, Individual
We finally have a fairly lengthy portrait of Nicholas Hughes from his good friend, Joe Saxton. It’s a welcome resurrection of Nick Hughes the man from the mausoleum of his role, so fanatically designed by the literary Death Eaters, as the Tragic Victim of his parents’ marriage, his mother’s depression, his father’s infidelity, his genetic heritage, or some combination of all or some of these elements. The Tragic Victim makes a perfect figure for the Death Eaters’ favorite narrative; but Hughes’s real life story is more significant than these cannibal fantasies.Read More
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Göransson and Blatny and Tics, Oh My!
Back on March 22 Johannes Göransson posted a poem by Ivan Blatny*, a Czech poet who defected to the West when the communists took over in 1948. Blatny lived from then on in England, until his death in 1990. Göransson posted the Blatny poem by way of recommending The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny, issued in 2007 by Ugly Duckling Presse; he declared the poem an example of the poet’s “greatness.” I read the poem and couldn’t fathom by what standard it could be called “great,” and said so.Read More
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Adios, Nicholas Hughes … Hello, Death Eaters
I’ve felt mysteriously shaken by the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. In part it’s because I remember with such affection the tenderness in Ted Hughes’s letters to and about Nicholas, whose deep knowledge of the natural world Hughes loved and admired. But part of my feeling involves the dread of Death Eaters; not those demonic Harry Potter wizards and witches, but their literati equivalents: critics, biographers, opinion page hacks and the like.Read More
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The Greatness Debate
This is a reply to Adam Fieled’s excellent post, in which he responds to Amy King’s challenge to define “greatness.” Her post, I have to add, was occasioned by a New York Times essay by David Orr, “The Great(ness) Game”—a laughable piece of pseudo-intellectual drivel. Orr’s essay has succeeded, however, in spurring all sorts of commentary among poetry bloggers. It just happens that Fieled’s and King’s got my head buzzing like a late spring hive. So, by addressing Adam here, I’m also addressing Amy and David Orr and anybody else who’s been pondering the issue of poetic greatness.Read More