Comments on: What I Learned Blogging for Harriet (after Alan Gilbert)

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:06:13 +0000

I learned that I liked reading Forrest. No, wait, I knew that already!
I liked all those propositions except… for the one that echoes oppen Oppen: I’m more and more out of sympathy with the division he claims to find between the seriousness of poetry as he wanted to practice it and the not-seriousness of the things he wanted to banish from it. Niedecker and Neruda and O’Hara (and Hank Williams Sr) all knew better. I now think that poetry isn’t not-entertainment, but rather never-only-entertainment, just as it’s never-only-information: it’s language-that-does-something-else. (Whatever it does, it always does something else.)
Of course, you may only mean that poetry can’t be part of an industry. There I’d want to know what “industry” means. (Some poets are industrious, some not: whatever works.)
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By: Mairead

Mairead — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:38:15 +0000

Thank you so much for this post, and all your others. That “collaboration with silence,” I think, is not threatened but deepened by the conversation each reader-writer is able to have with words like yours, which inform and augment us like the poetry they discuss.
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By: Eric Bourland

Eric Bourland — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 05:24:26 +0000

>>>>That some poets are a lot more interesting in their poetry than they are in their commentaries.
Word.
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By: Cathy Park Hong

Cathy Park Hong — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:21:59 +0000

Dear Forrest,
Wait, does this mean this is the tail-end of your posts? I loved your reviews. They really introduced me to books that I wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to.
Cathy
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By: Tim Kahl

Tim Kahl — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:01:02 +0000

That as usual, Oppen speaks for me when he says “I think of literature not as a part of the entertainment industry, but as a process of thought.”
I hope that you and Oppen are right, but I fear you are not. In any case, could there be room for both at once? But if,
our brains are being rewired by our interaction with technology, that if our attention spans are diminishing or subdividing to host multiple, simultaneous channels of information, that if the paradigm for intellection and imagination is dramatically shifting its modality from text to image, that if our cultural productions are narrowing into so many variations on spectacle, poetry’s delivery systems will change, but its collaboration with silence will continue to offer a transformative summons.
won’t the contemplative space that is cordoned off be riddled with the white noise of our lives’ detritus or will it be ? How must this space be rendered in public? Or is it meant only for our own private internet?
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By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:46:16 +0000

Thank you for these inside perspectives.
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By: Linda Lee Harper

Linda Lee Harper — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:26:01 +0000

I’m so happy I found this discussion. Since I heard you in South Carolina (Forrest) talk about eco-poetry and the essentiality of American poets opening their eyes to their own, hermetic perspectives which often preclude writers outside our own language circle, I’m seeking out foreign writers. Thanks for helping me to see more, and also not to quite so willingly accept all translations as necessarily the best just because they made it into print. As a reader with limited foreign language facility, this was a wake-up call that I need to hone, at the least, my rickety Spanish skills and dive in myself, even at this late stage of the game. Anybody else have this happen to you? Cheers, Linda Lee Harper
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