Archive for the ‘Criticism’ Category
Edwin Torres
Señor Smith to you.
Write what you know. But I don’t know! The floor creaks when I walk up the steps, even when I’m not there. I am facing a national personality triage. The nation is not america but poesie, the personality is not body but name.
Anselm Berrigan
Steel Nests, pt. II
Some further thoughts coming out of Alison Collins’ series of nests:
The show began with one hundred nests, but I think there were closer to eighty by the time the show closed. Collins was, as I understand it, giving them away here or there, perhaps selling a few. There were neither prices nor even a catalog of any kind at the installation.
Abigail Deutsch
Poetry is dead! Long live poetry!
Writers keep writing about the end of writing.
The English department is declining. Comparative literature has died. Book reviews? Print journalism? Poetry?
There’s just one problem: no one gets into details. I want to know exactly when and why literature, and poetry in particular, will croak. Will it happen in bed or on the street? Will poetry die in peace, or in the throes of a guilty conscience?
And so, in the style of the solemn journalism covering this crisis, I offer a few speculative reports for a nonexistent newspaper (call it my personal musepaper).
Joel Brouwer
Back to Skool
“The folklorist Vladimir Propp thought he was accomplishing something worthwhile by identifying in Russian folktales thirty-one functions and 151 elements, with a mathematical symbol assigned to each.” — Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge
Eileen Myles
Political Economy
I’ve really taken my time having a go at Sean Patrick Hill’s review in Rain Taxi of State of the Union, the political anthology published by wave books. I know there’s been a tempest here about nepotism in the poetry world which I think is exactly as serious as nepotism anywhere else. But who is Nepot. Why do we name a vice after him.
Joel Brouwer
Recent books by Rick Barot, Chris Martin, and Karen Volkman
Hi, Harriet. I’m going to do some more recycling! I wrote this review for some peeps and they never published it. I thought this was a bummer, not only because I’d spent time working on it, but also because I thought these books deserved some notice. I cut-n-paste the review here on Harriet for those reasons, plus the reason of needing things to blawg about from a contractual point of view, plus to say nyah nyah to the aforementioned review-not-printing peeps, plus to satisfy a certain meta-curiosity I’ve been feeling, namely, whether/how/why my writer-writing differs — in tone, substance, form, content, etc. — from my blogger-writing. But ugh, don’t bother yourself too much about that last bit if it’s of no interest; it’s only slightly so to me. Instead read these reviews and let me know a) whether/why you do/n’t find my comments about these books valuable and/or enticing and/or whatever, and b) if you already knew about these books, what did you think of them?
Joel Brouwer
What Is a Poet?
Participants in the "What Is a Poet?" symposium at The University of Alabama, October 1984. L-R: Bernstein, Vendler, Jay, Perloff, Altieri, Stern, Ignatow, Simpson, Lazer, Levertov, Burke. Photo by Gay Chow.
No, no, don’t expect an answer from me; I’m just using my Harriet soapbox here to commemorate the 25th anniversary of a unique event in American poetry. In October of 1984, my friend and colleague Hank Lazer gathered together here in Tuscaloosa a sparkling group of poetry and poetics all-stars (Charles Altieri, Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Burke, Donald Hall, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Marjorie Perloff, Louis Simpson, Gerald Stern, and Helen Vendler) for three days of conversations and lectures concerning the aforementioned question. (The lasting result of this meeting was a terrific collection of essays with the same title as this post.) As you might expect, there were disagreements among the symposium participants regarding the nature and function of the poetic act.
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.
Camille Dungy
Not finished yet
Harvey Milk Plaza, San Francisco, 6/28/09 (photo: C. Dungy)
The street sweepers have passed, and the crowd control fences have been carried away. Pride, for some, is over and done. But for many, the persistent resistance that Pride weekend celebrates still thrives. Thank goodness. In honor of Pride and, moreover, in honor of the spirit of resistance and persistence of the Stonewall rebellion and the movements it spawned, (and also in a sort of answer to a question Catherine Halley posed some time ago), I’m going to share a few poems by a small sample of writers from the West Coast LBGT community.
Linh Dinh
Ann Lauterbach on Wealth, Fame and Power:
Art is not entertainment, and it is not decor. It is one of the rude fallacies of our time to want to reduce all art forms, and in particular literary arts, to their most facile and elemental role, and so deny their potential to awaken, provoke and elicit our glee at being agents in the construction of meaning. As Martha Nussbaum points out, “We are accustomed by now to think of literature as optional: as great, valuable, entertaining, excellent, but something that exists off to one side of political and economic and legal thought, in another university department, ancillary rather than competitive.” We have, she adds, “narrowly hedonistic theories of literary value.” Our world—late twentieth century America — is relentless in its desire to dictate to us what we desire; it wants to assign and to determine how we construct and construe meaning in our lives, it wants to tell us from where our pleasures come. It wants us to believe that only Wealth, Fame and Power (WFP), in some combination or another, are worthwhile goals, because only WFP can confer —what?— celebrity.
Celebrity: the modern, secular form of martyrdom, where individuals are cast into the riotous blast of an eviscerating, obliterating light. How many personal disasters of every conceivable kind — suicide, homicide, divorce, addiction — before it is understood that celebrities are victims? “Their divorce was more predictable than their marriage.”
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
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Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres
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Michael Marcinkowski
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Fred Sasaki
Don Share
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Señor Smith to you. (1)
Vladimir, Ron, and Gregori (4)
dubious poetry: the palin comparison (3)
To Vaya in the Viva of Time (2)
Indie Publishing: Two Questions, Many More... (5)
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