Rebecca Wolff

Name That Goon

It took me about two seconds to name the unexpected speaking voice of poet/critic/professor Joshua Clover as I flicked past the NPR station. I flicked back. He was being interviewed because today he’s going on strike! Or at least walking out. We wish him well.

09.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (14)

Rebecca Wolff

Cleve-Land

Back from reading at Cleveland State University on Thursday. It was hard to follow Kate Greenstreet–she has the most ingratiatingly nearsighted stage presence. You really feel as though she is speaking to you–Because she is! In various deft registers of notation and declamation and preoccupation. She’s on this massive, amazing, awe-inspiring reading tour. Please go see her if she’s coming to a venue near you and I bet she is.

09.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Rebecca Wolff

Meds

Went to see a band last night in the nearby town of Hudson, New York, called The Akron Family. They all sing together and have a very collective, trance-y, barn-dance vibe. The kids are so positive these days! (The kids who don’t write poetry, that is.) I’ve always thought a band called Meds would be great, but maybe now this moniker sounds too cynical or snarky.

09.15.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Rebecca Wolff

I need your help

I’ve recently been asked this question: Do you think poetry should manifestly take place outside of the mind of the maker? Or is “place” just one more construction?

And I feel like I don’t understand the terms of the debate, or discourse. I said, so far: “You know, I think this is one I don’t have much of interest to say about. I feel like my poems all take place in some kind of figmented limboland, but I would never proscribe or prescribe this to anyone. I can see how “place” is political (because it’s social; because it’s personal) but I’m not sure how to articulate anything about that.”

Can anyone articulate anything about this? If I just google “place” I’m lost. Does this question come under the purview of ecopoetics?

09.11.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (15)

Rebecca Wolff

anxiety of

Been reading piles and piles of poetry manuscripts, and noticing an interesting trend in what I assume are books by younger poets–very young poets, like under 25. The piles are anonymous, but after a certain age one can kind of smell youth. The trend is toward a quite direct mode of speech, plainspeech, and within that a lot of expression of anxiety about being involved in “poetry world.” Programs, conferences, teaching, publishing. Lines like (I’m making these up) “I hate being a poet./ Poets stink./ Who judges these contests?/ I just want to fry potatoes without fear.” I think everyone’s reading Chelsey Minnis?

09.04.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (19)

Rebecca Wolff

Before I left Truro

I started reading this old novel on the bookshelf next to my bed, a hardback of the kind that is picked up in a thrift shop and left for summer tenants to bring to the beach. It is by the prolific R.V. Cassill, a former neighbor of mine in Truro, now dead. He was, I’m almost positive, though Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know it, the founder of the Associated Writing Programs!

The novel is very interesting to me for several reasons. First, you can see from the start why no one reads it anymore. It was published in 1983 but feels like a novel of the early 60s, in terms of its attitudes toward women (it concerns a married, failed novelist, the protagonist, on summer vacation on the Cape, who’s having an affair with a much younger woman–who quite literally worships his prick!–in the midwest where he travels for his job). It’s all going along like a derivation of Updike when the interesting part starts and the young woman in Cincinnati starts speaking in tongues out of her hoo-ha. It’s very sexual, as I remember novels in the 70s being. The failed novelist’s wife is a former dancer with two kids who’s very pragmatic, and here’s where my ears pricked up: I think that character is based on my mother! (I’m enjoying writing about something that could only possibly be of real interest to me.) At one point when I was about nine or ten we, my mother and brother and I, started going down the road to visit this old novelist quite often. Then stopped.

Of most interest to anyone in this episode will be how sad it is to read a novel with actually very rich and worked prose that just fails fails fails because you can see, for various reasons, that it’s too close to the source material. It’s undigested? Or unmined? Unprocessed, unflagellated, unfiltered? Is there a name for this, in literary critical terminology? If so, does it apply to poems too? And if not, what’s it doing on this blog.

08.31.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (21)

Rebecca Wolff

Dispatch from Truro

I’ve been in a beautiful place the past week or so. Every time I try to write something about where I am I think of all the possible misconstruals of it. Or that maybe from a certain perspective it could all be seen to be true.

\\\\\\\\\ This last was typed by Myshka, who is with us on the Cape, otherwise known as Cape Cod–specifically in Truro. We can’t let her outside because of the mangy, starved-looking coyotes, who now trot up to the screen door in full daylight to nab chipmunks off the patio. Patio, deck, porch–which sounds least like I am John Cheever?

08.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Rebecca Wolff

On the Road

I met my neighbor on the road this morning, a childhood friend I haven’t seen since childhood, except on Facebook, which is where he saw the news of my new book. “Selling lots of copies?” he inquired cheerfully, and when I mentioned that books of poems don’t really figure in that way in the American consciousness he and I then shared a few moments laughingly comparing the obscurity of our respective art forms: He is an opera singer, it turns out, though from his Facebook friends I had construed him as an architect. But this is not a post about Facebook.

08.22.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)