Archive for July, 2009
Joel Brouwer
Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
Last summer, I was asked to write something about Hayden Carruth, and I did, but the folks who had asked me to write the piece never published it. Carruth died in September of last year. He had been an idiosyncratic but pervasive force in American poetry — both as a writer of poems and a critic of poetry — for more than fifty years. Here is a link to his obituary in the New York Times. And below is the appreciation I wrote last summer. It’s lazy of me, recycling old material here, but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to offer this piece for your consideration. Hopefully it will both garner Carruth some new fans and spark good memories for old ones.
Rebecca Wolff
Dirk Does Dallas
Have you yet read Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip? I haven’t, fully, due to the previously mentioned feelings of deep inadequacy my first foray brought up. I picked it up and read umpteen pages, and then skimmed the rest, flipping it like a flip book to see how the texture of the language makes an image rise up, holographically from the pages. I AM going to read it, for real, soon, O reading, posture of stillness and the eyes darting, and the experience of reading it will be much bigger-better-faster-quieter than the experience of talking about it–not so different from theater, really, Joel, I think: to some extent, you have to be there. And maybe there’s the dynamic and distinguished difference between poetry and criticism/response to poetry. Not to say that poetics or writing about poetry or thinking and feeling about poetry is necessarily not describable as poetry, but maybe at least for me there is somehow a qualitative difference in the experience of reading it. Or maybe that’s bull-hockey
Joel Brouwer
Overheard in the hallway
“How are you going to have sex with a carny if you won’t go to the carnival?”
Rebecca Wolff
This is about Jane Austen
I thought I’d share some mature thoughts on Lisa Robertson’s magic powers but instead I’m thinking about Jane Austen. She’s really come down in the world. My parents were watching some PBS bodice-ripper a few months ago, and it took me several minutes to discern that it was a hotted-up Pride & Prejudice. Lots of longing and heavy breathing in between those elegant sentences. (I know I sound Puritanical but I’ve recently realized I am a Puritan.)
Eileen Myles
PMD
Probably it’s because I lost my computer that it’s looming but I had already begun the project in which I transcribed text messages from my cell phone onto my computer. Those are gone so the project feels even more urgent now. Fragmented, incomplete. The practical reason and the sentimental reason meet exactly in
Travis Nichols
A Braille Hoax and Some Rockabilly Cancer
Ed Park peered into the strange world of David Berman’s drawings for last week’s cover story. Park argued that the drawings collected in the newly released Portable February are cut from the same quirky cloth as Berman’s poetry and music. One ‘rawing that particularly caught the writer’s attention: a billboard/projection stating, “Somehow I had offered to deliver bad news to a maniac.”
“You can even imagine Berman’s deadpan, dead-on singing voice delivering that non-punchline punchline on one of his albums with his band, the Silver Jews,” Park says.
Ah yes. The now-defunct Joos. That monotonic punchline machine that is Berman’s singing voice, delivering zingers over some jangly jangles. It’s amazing how much of my life has been spent humming the following:
Martin Earl
The Mulch Shoveler
Walter Earl, age 76, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, shoveling mulch.
This is supposed to be the post in which I sign off, pack up my bags and leave as gracefully as possible.
Rebecca Wolff
Paid to Blog
It seems that the medium of the blog has come full circle or full bloom and one is now solicited, and renumerated, for one’s formerly private or random or sketchy thoughts. In this venue, in the next few weeks, I’ll be publicly thinking about: my new gray kitten, Myshka (that’s Russian-in-English for “little mouse”); the imminent homebirth of my oldest, dearest friend’s first child (a single mom at 42 and I’m going to be the “birth partner,” ie, hand-crusher); Jennifer Moxley’s new book Clampdown; some great private ideas I’ve had over the years; and some of the joys and woes of being a one-woman publishing house—I’m the editor and publisher of Fence, a literary journal, and Fence Books. I’ll start in soon on the woes.
Joel Brouwer
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
“The questions—why there is no poetic drama to-day, how the stage has lost all hold on literary art, why so many poetic plays are written which can only be read, and read, if at all, without pleasure—have become insipid, almost academic.”
So wrote T. S. Eliot in “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama,” published in The Sacred Wood (1922). Some fourscore years on, how has the situation of poetic drama changed?
Well, if there was no poetic drama then, I guess there’s something like less than none now. You could argue that between then and now we’ve seen dramatists whose language has bent more toward the poetical–Beckett’s monologues, the folk songs in Brecht, even the blank verse which lurks beneath much of Mamet’s dialogue–but why are so few poets interested in writing–and not just writing but producing–plays in verse?
I’m sure some will argue that verse drama is very much alive, pointing to Glyn Maxwell, Verse Theater Manhattan, Christopher Logue, and other authors and organizations. All very true; I’m not saying the form is extinct. But even if we postulate for the sake of argument that there are dozens, if not hundreds of verse dramas being written this minute, I think we can still agree that verse drama is not well represented in print or on the stage. When did you last go to see a play? When did you last go to see a verse play? When did you last see a verse play by a living writer?
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Beyond Careerism? (Redistributing Poetic... (31)
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All sides now: a correspondence with Lisa... (4)
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
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Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
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Open Books
213 West Institute Place
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Travis Nichols
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07.16.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (77)