Comments on: Editing yourself out… and in.

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:48:58 +0000

Was over at J J Gallaher’s site tonight. He has a response to
Adam Kirsch’s article there, and also a highly interesting and
surprisingly related post on the physicist David Deutsch–but
you need to watch the TED video and then take the link to his
under construction personal site where you need to scroll
down to the “What is your law?” question and take the
answer link to Deutsch’s Law. To me his law and his three
corollaries make this physicist a literary critic.
The comments beneath the Rumsfeld video are also
worth reading.

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:17:46 +0000

Only, why does man trod while woman smiled and/or wept? Though admittedly, they do.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:01:50 +0000

Thanks as always, Brian. I like the John Clare reference.
I Am!
by John Clare
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:08:59 +0000

Mr. Share, I have become obsessed with this post.
Yet each time I come to it, how to respond fails me.
You are right about this Adam Kirsch being arresting.
“. . . messianic age…”; or should it be: messy antic age?
We grant immortality to certain poets “. . . because
they please us with their arrangements of words.”
“. . . literary ambition . . . is a sin.” Yes and maybe.
I am who I am, and who I am is ever changing.
Still, I am more like John Clare than like Ron Silliman.
I first came online in April of 2000, but it wasn’t until
early in 2007 that I seriously began to seek out and
connect with other writers. Even though most of the
poems I have written are online, they are lost in space.
Unlike Bill Knott, who has a crowd of those who admire
his poems and a crowd of those who dis his poems, my
comments (it appears) on other blogs outrank “my sullen
craft and art” things. Then too, from approximately
1987 to 2007 I was more into Number Theory and
Wall Street than poetry.
I would say this In-Formation Age, this Age of High
Capitalism, has had more impact on poets in both
positive and negative ways than is recognized. I,
not being a good salesman, became a happy, idiot
consumer. In each stanza of one of my poems in
which I list specific human attributes as they relate
to me, “I am an almost” appears. In one part of my
epileptic brain I have delusions of grandeur, and in
another part/ mires of self-loathing.

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:04:07 +0000

Our deep history was, at different times, spent in ancient oceans, small streams and savanna plains—and not office buildings, ski slopes or football fields. This extraordinary disconnect between our past and present means that our body falls apart in certain predictable ways. The major bones in human knees, backs and wrists arose in aquatic creatures hundreds of millions of years ago. Is it any surprise, then, that we tear cartilage in our knees and suffer back pain as we walk on two legs or develop carpal tunnel syndrome as we type, knit or write?

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:47:33 +0000

She wants to be seen, of course—but for herself, and not for her yellow hair.
Or, for her witty status-update comments, and not for her shabby workshopped-to-a-ghastly-pallor imitations. Because what is representational about it, when it has been planed so efficiently that it could have been made by anyone.
Now those athletes, though, they aren’t going to like Kirsch’s dismissal of their mere techne one bit. Of course, they probably won’t read his essay, because they’re too busy BEING FAMOUS. Really famous, I mean; not “famous” as in “Simic is a famous poet” as in, me explaining to my sophomores how they should go hear this famous person read when none of them have ever heard of him nor do they own any of his, erm, product.
Thank you (speaking of cultural capital) for juxtaposting these so profitably.
I just have one question—do I really have to decease in order to merit my own personal ancestor-cult? Why can’t we just get the sucker fired up now?