Ange Mlinko

What Would the Community Think?

Emily Warn asked me to re-post my entry on the Chicago Review articles by Young/Spahr and Ashton so it can appear alongside hers and Alicia’s. I just want to add a caveat: I wrote this post under the assumption that the CR articles to which it refers would be online. They are not. I’m not sure how much sense this post will make to you unless you have read those articles, so please keep that in mind as you read my argument (below the fold) that the avant-garde is more sexist than the mainstream. You can look at the chart, at any rate, to see some evidence for my claim. Thanks for reading.

11.04.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (49)

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?

10.26.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

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.)

10.26.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Ange Mlinko

Panel 2: Aesthetic Lineage and Originality

“Emily Dickinson was one of the three most intelligent people who ever took up writing poetry.”

10.23.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (11)

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.

10.22.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Ange Mlinko

Oskar Pastior

Hearing music sets time free in the ear: the ear produces free time. This insight is the basis of lease-an-ear, a thriving service branch. The free time generated with the help of leased ears can be stored, for instance on tape, which constantly augments the sum of free time because nothing is ever lost. Last year alone, on a world scale, free time reserves of the magnitude of 350,000 music-years were stored — just imagine! The most difficult problems of free time occur when leased free time does not find an ear because the ear that could produce it has already been leased out and is setting free time free elsewhere. Lease your ear to music!

All the talk about anagrams sent me back to one of the two OULIPO poets I truly love, Oscar Pastior. Translations of his work by Harry Mathews (the other OULIPO poet I love), Rosmarie Waldrop, John Yau and Christopher Middleton appear in Many Glove Compartments (Burning Deck). His Anagrammgedichte, alas, is untranslatable, as are many of his palindromes. He says (quoted in the introduction): “[Translation] is the wrong word for a process that does not exist. In a different language you think differently, speak differently, act differently, are different.”

10.16.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Ange Mlinko

Drown the Resume

Rigoberto may be right when he says of The Best American Poetry series that “there’s something for everyone, usually, and like it or not the series is here to stay and to say something about the contemporary poetry scene.” There’s no denying po-biz exists, and this is one yardstick by which to measure the seductive racket.
But I worry, given the market pressures on young poets who invest in MFA’s, that little notches on one’s publishing belt are seen as be-all end-alls of poetry. Your resume and your poetry have no necessary relation to each other. None at all. Here are just three links to poets and poetry that cast a cool eye on the standard poetry career:

10.10.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)