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Bacon Flavored Erasure Poetics
I’m sitting in bed at the moment next to my lovely wife, who’s reading a holiday catalog. She is fixated on a spread peddling bacon-themed gifts. Bacon-strip ties. Tee shirts imprinted with images of bacon. Bacon Christmas ornaments. No shit. She remarks, “This is the most moronic thing I’ve ever seen. Who is this stuff aimed at?” I don’t answer because I’m engaged in something even more idiotic. I’m reading about a book called Gentle Reader!. It is a product generated by three contemporary poets through a process of erasing passages from certain works of Romantic-era writers.Read More
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Friday Notebook 03.23.12
[From A Treatise on Poetry, by Czesław Miłosz (tr. Robert Hass):] If it’s all a dream, let’s dream it to the bottom. * … [A] poet without communityRustles in the wind like dry grasses in December.Read More
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Friday Notebook 11.04.11
There is little in my notebook this week beyond a few stray quotes drawn from my reading and a raw reaction to one of Conrad DiDiodato’s most intriguing blog posts, which needs fleshing out. Let me post my notes on Conrad first: I reread Frank Samperi’s trilogy a few months ago, and it produced a kind of seething in my mind which I recognize in Conrad. His post suffers from a conflation of Language poetry (in the person of Silliman) and the Occupy Movement.Read More
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Cattywampus
Just want to encourage you all to swing by the new Pemmican, where you’ll find some fine new poems by Lyle Daggett (here and here). In one of my favorites, “road song and annunciation,” you’ll get to walk with Tom McGrath on Whitman’s open road and see wonderful sights like these: … a gap in the fence where a spring colt canters off cattywampus the tack and yammer of a one-eyed crow from a lone pine hallooing down the small rain… Any poem with “cattywampus” in it is bound to be good.Read More
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Mastery
Several remarkable items in this morning’s online reading… This interview in Guernica Magazine with the inimitable Arundhati Roy Conrad DiDiodato’s trenchant meditation on certain observations by Donald Hall and their relevance to Canadian poetry and the avant-garde at large Jonathan Mayhew’s comments on writing about María Zambrano (more on this below) A tantalizing report on some scientific progress regarding the Voynich manuscript Among all these wonderful irruptions of insight, the one that made me jump up and ruffle my hair (as Nabokov said certain readers of Invitation to a Beheading would do) was Jonathan Mayhew’s: “I actually like learning more…Read More
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Whitman’s Blog
Sometimes I get sick of “creative writing.” But I never tire of Creative Reading. It’s one of the few things that justify the existence of literary blogs–which reminds me that I need to do more creative reading here! But this isn’t a mea culpa. It’s an occasion to recommend one of the finest examples of creative reading out there: Whitman’s Blog from Open Letters Monthly, where the entries consist of extracts from Specimen Days that are hauntingly appropriate to our national life today.Read More
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Whitman Would Be Amazed…
Congratulations to Poets House on their new digs! Guess I have a place to hang out if I ever make it to NYC….Read More
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Re: The Plumbline School
I was a bit surprised to receive an email from Henry Gould of The Plumbline School, inviting me (at the suggestion of Plumbline fellow Joseph Duemer) to join their circle. My response was essentially a reaction to the School’s self-definition, to wit: “Plumbline poetry” is provisionally defined here as poetry which exhibits a stylistic “mean between extremes”: understated, transparent, inclusive, objective. It avoids extremes of both the ponderous and the superficial; it shuns mannerism and facile ornamentation, on behalf of clarity and simplicity of presentation. It strives for mimesis rather than pantomime.Read More
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There there, Ron; there there….
In his blog post today, Ron Silliman offers up some wonderful insights about writing, only to go off the rails when he boards his favorite train of thought, which concerns (of course) his tribe (small, evolved, super-intelligent, “outsiders” all) vs. the imagined Other Tribe (vast, beetle-browed, witless, “insiders” all).Read More