Archive for October, 2007
Ange Mlinko
Panel 4: Drawing from the Past/Breaking from the Past
This late in the day, the panel topic seems too close in nature to the first two. Isn’t it revealing that three out of the four panels dealt with some variation on the topic of influence, lineage, tradition—because the crisis in representation of the canon is so problematic? Because there are so many different poetries that all claim some purchase on the history of poetry in English?
Ange Mlinko
Panel 3: Clarity & Obscurity: The Uses and Misuses
James Tate: Does a poet ever strive for obscurity? I can’t think of one.
Kay Ryan: Who needs more? [laughter]
Carl DennisPhillips: No one is deliberately writing so no one would understand what they’re trying to say. That would be perverse….
We had dawdled over lunch and now we were late. Having missed the opening statements, we arrived in time to see Sven Birkerts interrogate an increasingly uncomfortable Carl Phillips about one of his poems deemed “obscure.” Then he moved on to Kay Ryan, who completely disarmed Birkerts and the audience with her legendary wit. Then when he read a Tate poem that “throws you up against the gap of sense” Tate shot back gruffly: “It doesn’t feel like a whim to me. Feels like it means damn good sense!” (Nota bene: Poets like to talk about poetry, not their own poems.)
Rigoberto González
rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
I was second-guessing including this entry/ anecdote on Elizabeth Bishop, but Alicia’s entry inspired me to go ahead and do it.
Stephen Burt
a round O says I feel
Denise Riley isn’t for everyone. It’s easy to recommend– though it has very little to do with poems– her first book, a historical study which asks why Britain cancelled in the 1950s all the cool child-care opportunities created during the 1940s. As you might expect, that book also reflects an interest in gender, in practice and theory– an interest, that is, in how our abstract beliefs about such big terms as woman, man, mother, father, family, child, adult, citizen and person shape our experience and our decisions, in the kitchen, in the library, on the bus, and in the voting booth.
If you have such an interest– and I do– you’ll want to read the rest of her poems and her prose; the poems I’ll have the rare pleasure of teaching next week, and the prose (and prose is all she’s writing now, I’m afraid) I caught up with last night, when I finished her newest set of essays, paradoxically (and typically) entitled Impersonal Passion. More on her new prose– and a slice of her poetry– below the fold.
A.E. Stallings
Postcard from America: On the Road, Alan Ansen, part one
I started re-reading Keruac’s On the Road during our travels, not so much because we are on the road (travelling in a rented car to hotels with a three-year old is not exactly hitch-hiking, though it has its own challenges), as because of glimpsing a piece in the October 1 New Yorker, and because it got me thinking, again, of our old friend Alan Ansen, who passed away a little more than a year ago.
When I met Alan, he was in his late 70s, and had been housebound in Athens for 15 odd years–visiting him, which involved his passing a key through the difficult-to-reach ground-floor window, was rather like visiting the Onceler. I didn’t know him in his youth, when he was a friend of the Beats, and the model for Rollo Greb in Keruac’s famous novel.
(Alan’s 80th birthday party, with me and Rosemary Donelly. Photo by John Psaropoulos.)
Rigoberto González
Wednesday Shout Out
The aubade is a poem about lovers parting in sorrow at dawn, and it’s a form dating back to the Elizabethan era, though I suspect this universal act of separation must have been commemorated in song long before then. That’s the beauty of this lyrical movement, it is as shapeless and fluid as the untethered emotion it is meant to represent and poets have continued to re-interpret and re-imagine that moment into the twenty-first century. The following is a gorgeous rendition by Oliver de la Paz:
Ange Mlinko
Panel 2: Aesthetic Lineage and Originality
“Emily Dickinson was one of the three most intelligent people who ever took up writing poetry.”
Emily Warn
Harriet Sightings
Should I bring my laptop,” Ange asked. “Sure,” I shot back in email, wondering if it was a Mac or PC? We, like you, first meet Harriet’s bloggers on the web, and then feel that we know them through their posts and comments. Setting eyes on them for the first time always fuzzes my mental picture. Ange doesn’t have black hair as in her author photo (Duh.). The laptop she pulled from her bag to blog the Academy of American Poets Forum last week was a MacBook—I guessed that. What I can never guess is where her or other bloggers’ posts will get picked up on the web.
Ange Mlinko
Poets Forum (Part 1)
At the suggestion of my editor Emily, I attended the Academy of American Poets’ Poets Forum at Marymount College on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. With no traffic, it’s an hour’s drive from my hamlet to the most expensive neighborhood on the globe. In a moment of inattention, I nearly tripped over a teacup-something leashed by a mannequin-like creature dressed to the nines at ten a.m. of a Saturday.
Stephen Burt
libraries (with a thoughtful sigh)
One of my favorite poets, Randall Jarrell, liked libraries more than most of us do or could: he sometimes implied he had spent his whole childhood in them, and wrote more than one poem about the juvenile divisions (today, “children’s rooms” and “YA collections”) of Nashville’s monumental Carnegie Library, 103 years old this month.
Jarrell’s most famous poem about a library, “A Girl in a Library,” comes near to despair when he realizes that his undergraduates in North Carolina are not using libraries to read for pleasure: instead, they are sleeping, or cramming for exams. Well-loved in its time– it was Lowell’s favorite Jarrell poem, as of 1951– its sometimes haughty tone and odd gender politics have ambivalent later responses. But its ground bass– the fear that people younger than the author have ceased to read imaginative literature– can still be heard in our time.
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