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Pleasure and Intrigue
Today Jonathan Mayhew posted this handy list of four reading categories on his ¡Bemsha SWING! blog. He attributes them to the poet Guillermo Carnero and gives them in Spanish, which I’ll translate here: I like it and it interests me.I like it but I’m not interested.I don’t like it but it interests me.I neither like it nor am I interested. What makes these categories useful, I think, is that they are both comprehensive and subjective.Read More
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A World Outside
Seth Abramson has bravely taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Ron Silliman re: defining “School of Quietude,” though his lawyerly training has produced a rhetorical mishmash, I think, in this second of his two-part response. I bring this up because I’d hate for the folderol in Part Two to distract from the brilliant essay with which he ends Part I (click here and scroll down until you find the title “On Rhetoric, Hybrid Poetics, and the Intersection of Immanent and Transcendent Meaning”).Read More
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The Motto that Guides My Poetry Practice
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Poetry and the Mystery of Performance
Anselm Berrigan has two Harriet posts (here and here) that present a letter from his late stepfather, the British poet and novelist Douglas Oliver. The letter nutshells Oliver’s analysis of the profound relationship between prosody and voicing in poetry and how that relationship affects each reader’s understanding of a given poem. I had attempted to get at something like this many years ago in a very rudimentary essay, but I had—and still have—neither the training nor the temperament, nor (needless to say) the insight, to do what Oliver does in his all too brief letter.Read More