Archive for April, 2007
Kwame Dawes
I’m Okay, I’m Just Floundering
A snippet of a quite engaging and sensitively written review by Conor O’Callaghan on Louise MacNeice called, quite badly, “His Master’s Voice” in Poetry, posited a curious idea that has been riding me since. Here is O’Callaghan’s statement:
“The received thinking has long been that MacNeice hit a drab spell during the late forties and early fifties. Apart from those odd bright spots, it is true. Most good poets recognize the corked wine and fall silent. MacNeice was one of those who, floundering, write more than ever. Autumn Sequel, the most commonly cited example, is a jaded updating of its earlier, more energetic cousin. Never less than competent but seldom more than terminally dull, it is probably the kind of overworked, underinspired landfill Hopkins had in mind when he used the term ‘Parnassian.’”
Poetry Foundation
Shall I nail thee to a summer’s day?
Stephen Colbert challenges Sean Penn to a Meta-free-phor-all, with Robert Pinsky presiding.
(Via Betsy and Jimmy)
Emily Warn
Poetry is Dangerous via Kazim Ali
This story came to our attention via the NYU listserv. Kazim thought it was a good idea to post it here, too.
“On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white beetle and carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.
A young man from ROTC was watching me…..”
Kenneth Goldsmith
Open Thread #1: Art & Commerce
Kenneth sed: (referring to this post)
Kwame, It’s clear to me why you feel the way you do: you’re getting paid to blog here. As Brian Eno says, “Art is everything we don’t need to do.” Blogging here is something you must do (at least for three months), hence it ain’t art. — Kenneth
Kwame sez:
Kenneth, you have to be wrong, I think. The day getting paid for art someone disqualified art is the day we will have to dismiss most of the great works of art of western civilization. Anyway, I am not blogging for the money–let’s not forget, the amount can’t come even close to the word count of my obsessive output. Not sure about you, but I NEED to do art.
Eno is wrong, even if he is clever and even if his work on Paul Simon’s new album was a touch of brilliance that has given Simon yet another life. He is wrong about art if that is what he really thinks about art. After all, by that definition, spitting on the sidewalk or pissing in public would be art. You see the problem?
You [dear readers] say:
Kwame Dawes
More Translation Matters
So while plowing through a recent translation edition of Poetry, I began to underline a few interesting phrases and sentences that struck me as a useful addendum to my other posts on translation. I am intrigued by most of these statements because they are so rich with cliché and tautology, and yet they have this quality of contriteness and apology that seems to reflect a wonderfully refreshing level of care, concern and tenderness for the work of the poets they are translating, as well as a kind of fatalistic hopelessness about the capacity for us to reach across the divide of language and culture. Babel’s aftermath, I suppose, worked. All efforts to rebuild the tower are fittingly quixotic.
A very Oxford-like self-deprecating snootiness (only the Oxbridge crowd can manage this) pervades this disclaimer by Reynolds Price.
An early result of reading her [Enid Starkie] life of the poet [Arthur Rimbaud]—and my attempt to read all the boy’s poems in French—was the effort to translate a few of them into compelling and at least partially brilliant English. I failed, of course, but then so have all the English language translations known to me, however valiant and useful their tries. But I have never stopped trying–Reynolds Price
Emily Warn
Responding to Violent Poems in the Classroom
When I taught creative writing at Lynchburg College in Virginia, I discovered, like many creative writing teachers, that violence pervaded the lives of many undergraduates students. After receiving several poems about assaults, suicide, and abuse, I conducted an unscientific survey. I asked students to anonymously list violence they, their families, or friends had experienced. All but fifteen of my 50 students were victims or had a close friend who had experienced one of the following: abuse, murder, suicide, assault, or rape.
Emily Warn
Book Notes: D. Revell and C.D. Wright
Book Notes
Is Kenneth Goldsmith the lost triplet of Henry Thoreau and Ronald Johnson? Donald Revell called the latter two “twinned visionaries” in his new book of essays Invisible Green (Omnidawn). They both drank from the same arrowhead he hypothesizes–by which he means their writing depends on “facts found as they are.” Their art is to register “sense as revelation.” As a result, their work proposes “a heroic unoriginality.” If that doesn’t sound like Kenneth’s notion of uncreative writing, how about: “The garden is always already there when the gardener arrives.” (Well, maybe that sounds more like Peter Sellers.) By “garden” Revell means both literary works and woodlots. Most of the other essays in this book also untangle the links between writing and reading: “Poetry is the fate of reading…”
Another pairing: C.D Wright and Lorine Niedecker…..
Kwame Dawes
Does He Not Have a First Name?
So here is my take on the Imus matter. Might as well get it out here before it decides it wants to be a poem or something. Wouldn’t want to devote my poetic reserves on something that has already gone past its “sell-by-date” in the media market-place. (I am being ironic, people).
I have watched Imus without regularity but with enough frequency to know that at some point something like this was going to happen. Imus, like Howard Stern and many others has created a persona that seeks to push the envelope on daring speech. He presents a a casual everyman persona that is impatient with preciousness, political correctness and insincerity. He never struck me as a “loose canon” in the way that Stern can be–he always seemed interested in the people he spoke to on his show, and he seemed quite proud of his juice–the friends he talked about who were clearly in high places. But in his banter with his producer or side-kick (I was never sure what the official role of this guy was) the banter would turn to jokes about people, elliptical comments about situations, and that now common practice of radio show hosts of talking an issue to death through these seemingly sudden and unexpected returns to the topic when we least expect it. I have not watched the clip of his comments about the Rutger’s basketball team, but I know that my reactions may help me to understand what all of this can mean to me.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Honoring the poet inside?
A few months ago I asked some of my students: what are you doing to honor the poet inside you? Now I will turn a version of the question towards myself.
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