"Hey Archambeau — you made me bite my cereal spoon!" Those were the words with which I was greeted as I walked into my English Lit seminar yesterday. One of my students, it seems, had been sitting down to a perfectly innocent breakfast and, glancing at the local newspaper, had been confronted with my face staring out of the pages. Yeah, I know what you're thinking ("What kind of horrible scandal has Archambeau entangled in himself this time?") but for I change I haven't been caught outing Valerie Plame, conducting illegal wiretapping, firing government lawyers for political purposes, or authorizing torture at secret prison sites in crumbling eastern European republics. Nope. I'd been tapped to say a few words on poetry and the teaching of poetry for a string of Chicagoland suburban papers. What's that? You need to read my comments right now? Aw, gosh, really? Well, okay, if you must. But the online version lacks the spoon-damaging picture of me, aptly described by my student as "sort of creepy."
Those of you jonesing for a bigger dose of me shamelessly opining about poetry (both of you?) might want to check out the
latest installment in Adam Fieled's "Waxing Hot: Poetics Dialogue" series over at P.F.S. Post (Adam is pictured here in his best Ezra Pound beard). He and I tossed the poetics football back and forth for a while, jawing about such topics as the real-or-imagined rise of the book-length poetic sequence, transparency vs. opacity, what's up in Chicago poetry, and the secret resemblance of the Norton Anthology of English Literature to a portside bordello. Ahoy!
