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Rejecting the Personal
The tireless Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover are mounting an experimental seminar they’re calling “The 95 Cent Skool.” (Details here.) Part of their description asserts the following: Our concerns in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. “Social poetics” is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision.Read More
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Neophobia
An especially piquant post today from Bill Knott re: Ron Silliman’s neophobia. Neophobia is a word brandished by Captain Ron (see here and here) to scare us all into liking the poetry he likes—or even better, to submit to his characterization of the tribes available for poets to choose their “heritage” from. As a Scotch/Irish/English/German mutt, I have little instinct for “heritage” of any kind, and feel a special antipathy to being told that I need to choose a tribe, much less being told what tribe I belong to.Read More
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More on The Poem in Its Skin
I mentioned Paul Carroll’s The Poem in Its Skin in the previous post but forgot to scan the cover. So here it is. I have to scan it because it’s out of print, along with all of the books from Carroll’s Follett Books imprint, Big Table Books. Via Big Table Carroll published the fat and important anthology The Young American Poets (1968), as well as the first collection of W. S.Read More
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Dismissive
Comment streams on blogs are often where the action is, but sometimes it’s where the posturing is, where authoritative-sounding voices make cryptic and/or designedly outrageous statements, without fear of being asked to … well, support their views. Case in point: a commentator named Iain Keenan wrote this in reply to Silliman’s post today: “Robert Bly did a lot more damage to the European and Latin poets he advocated than the ones he criticized.” This in the context of some sort of defense of Surrealism. In the hope of figuring out exactly what Mr.Read More
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Silliman Tips His Hat to Thomas Rain Crowe
A few posts back I reviewed the latest, lovely publication by Ce Rosenow, proprietress of Mountains and Rivers Press. One of her press’s publications, Thomas Rain Crowe’s The Blue Rose of Venice, is reviewed today by Ron Silliman on his blog. Here’s hoping the exposure brings many more readers to her site! I’ll let Silliman’s review speak for itself, but do want to point out one element he missed in the poem he quotes by Crowe.Read More
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Literary Poseur Alert #1
If you haven’t run across The Daily Dish you will not have seen any of Andrew Sullivan‘s “poseur alerts.” A poseur, of course, is “a person who acts in an affected manner in order to impress others,” and Sullivan’s alerts are all the funnier for allowing their subjects to hang themselves by the noose of their own affectations. He has alerted readers to numerous poseurs, from Cornel West to Bono. Sullivan is a conservative at heart (although he recently “resigned” from the conservative movement as currently constituted), and his poseur choices have generally reflected his philosophical bent.Read More
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The Decade in Poetry
An interesting article entitled “2000-2009: The Decade in Poetry” is online now at The Poetry Foundation site. Nine poets, nine points of view–all intriguing. Most notable for Perpetual Bird readers may be the fact that I find myself in total agreement with one of the nine, Ron Silliman, whose take on the impact of new publishing technologies (online and print) deserves to be fleshed out by someone (not me–maybe Ron himself?).Read More
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For Whom Do Poets Speak?
Linh Dinh is right, of course, in this powerful brief statement on poetics, which takes as its touchstone a powerful stanza by Czeslaw Milosz. The question is why. Why do we (poets, yes, but citizens as well of a system—there are no nations, really, not anymore—designed to maintain the hegemony of a mendacious, thieving elite) … why do we tolerate and even promote poetry that is superficial, trite, and purposely “uncreative,” utterly lacking in scope and depth? Why do we write about what we wish rather than what we know? I’m not talking about politics, per se.Read More
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For Against the Day
Herewith one of the most insightful commentaries on one of the GBs (no, you Rachel Ray fans, not “garbage bowls”) of the past half century*, Thomas Pynchon‘s Against the Day. By whom? By someone from whom I did not expect it.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
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. 
