Yes, Lebanon does fill me with some trepidation, more for the safety of my kids than my own person. (See the article on Beirut by the estimable Michelle Orange in the current Virginia Quarterly Review — most of it is up on the VQR website.

But above all, my sojourn in Morocco a decade ago left me with the sense that experiment in poetry, at least the Ashberian experiment, is very culture-bound. It checked my cherished belief in the infinite plasticity of logopoeia. I can’t say more here, but it did resonate with what you had to say about poetry and expatriation in an earlier post. Thanks for your posts here on Harriet. I enjoyed them!

Thanks so much for giving us the news on Rusty Morrison’s book from Ahsahta Press. I’ve read the section you quoted over and over and find it haunting, economical and bled to the essential. The formal apparatus too, on the basis of this one passage, compels. In your comment above you ponder “the arrogance of standing outside” … I think that’s the way you put it. That is a powerful issue, cleanly stated. I said, in my comment to Ange above, that this perspective (her word for it) is not something that should be used as a criterion, but simply as a fact. Your framing it as a potential form of “arrogance” extends even more deftly what I was trying to say. There is a danger in assuming some sort of special knowledge when really what we are speaking about is, as Ange said, perspective – a different angle of view should not be considered commensurate to some sort of extra wisdom. That, as you intimate, surely would be a form of arrogance.

Martin

Obviously, I’m not talking about:

“My girlfriend Becky’s daughter Susannah’s kindergarten teacher was Kevin Bacon’s mother.”

(Also, I’m not impressed: I acted in a musical with an actress who was in ‘Animal House,’ so my Bacon number is ‘1.’)

This, however, is useful:

“I’ve known Gary Snyder for forty years, and he blurbed my book.”

and

“I studied as an undergraduate with Daniel Hoffman. I had a baby with the pioneering feminist poet Alta. Ron Silliman used to read at the open readings Richard Krech and I organized in Berkeley in the late sixties. The very radical and invisible, at least to the mainstream, Northwest poet Charles Potts has been my close buddy and collaborator for four decades. Charlie was a student of Ed Dorn’s, which bounces right to Olson.”

So, thanks, John. This, for good or bad, helps me aeshetically peg you–whether you like being pegged, or not.

And it reveals why you would, of course, howl at my critique of Modernism.

No surprise there.

I’m not sure what Catullus has to do with it.

Annie, thanks for playing. Who was your mentor at Yale? You’d have to give me more of your direct influences before I could place you, but having conversed with you here on this board, I feel that you might be one of those rare poets who is truly independent, and not attached to a school. We need more of those.

Thomas

Catch up, man. You should learn to Google.

I had a 15-minute fame moment at a Latin American poetry conference where I was the only invitee from north of the border. Everybody loaded me with their self-published chapbooks and such. Before I left the conference I went through the box and tossed about half. I felt a little guilty about it but I was flying a long way home. Those were precious human beings too.

It does offend me a little, though, that you would think I’d write a personal letter in the same way as a silly blog post. Really, dude.

P.S. Lightweight. You should read my books. I take things very seriously. Blogs are for entertainment (preferably when completely snockered).

I’ll try to be more humorless in the future.