Laureate du Jour

You know who's a good poet? Stephen Fowler. That's who.

Not Dead: Giving a Reading

What? No! Wrong again, ruffianos! I haven't died (though last Sunday I had a run-in with a bad burrito, the less said of which the better). Nope. Not dead. Nor have I been swept off to Gitmo with my head in a sack courtesy of Homeland Security (although I bet I'm on their list of 8 million "unfriendly" Americans, to be detained during "national emergency"). I've been writing a bunch of stuff under deadline, but now that I've emerged from my cave, I'm clearing my throat and hefting my megaphone to announce an addition to the Archambeau World Tour '08: a reading at Kate the Great's in Chicago's Andersonville.

I'll be there with Adam Fieled (whom I like because he cares about the Romantic poets and the Beatles), Steve Halle (who survived an education under my dubious tutelage), Tim Yu (with whom I've read — what? four times? We should get some kind of legal arrangement drawn up) and Laura Goldstein, whom I'm looking forward to meeting.

So, that's June 20, 7:30 PM, at 5550 North Broadway, Chicago. This is the Swedish 'hood, people, so don't go talking Norwegian unless you want someone to go upside you with a chunk of lutefisk.

Spatial Anxieties

There's a short review of The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century in the Boston Review, in which you may read of my "spatial anxieties." I knew I was afraid of heights, but apparently it's worse than I thought!

Chicago Poetry Symposium 08

Ring the bells and sound the trumpets! Fire up the timpani and sackbutts in celebration: the University of Chicago has finally made a full-on commitment to the poetry of its own city! Yes, it's true. The U of C has, of course, supported poetry in many ways, and the Chicago Review has rarely been as strong as it is now, but the university has often seemed to function as a kind of Island of Laputa out of Gulliver's Travels, floating serenely through the air, wreathed in abstraction, and bound to no place in particular. The institution of a new annual symposium on Chicago Poetry, though, seems to indicate that things have changed, with the university catching a whiff of what's been cooking in the local scene. David Pavelich, who works with the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library, put together the first symposium, bringing Devin Johnston, Michael O'Leary, and Michael Anania to campus to celebrate the library's acquisition of the papers from Anania's Swallow Press years and the archives from Johnston and O'Leary's Flood Editions. The symposium, an afternoon-long series of discussions with a full house in attendance, provided a good occasion to look back on what lies behind the current flurry of poetic activity in our city — and a good occasion, it turned out, for debating the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the city's evolving poetic scene.

The Autonomous Life

Pavelich kicked things off by quoting Kevin Killian's comment about how, when young poets ask him where to go, he tells them "Chicago is the most exciting scene around. Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history." Ruminating on whether the current scene is an unprecedented flowering, or the latest of a series of periodic renaissances, Pavelich seemed to take the latter position, mentioning the Modernist era of Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay; the Henry Rago-Karl Shapiro years, the era of Michael Anania, Ralph Mills, Sterling Plumpp, Lisel Mueller, Haki Madhubuti, and above all Gwendolyn Brooks; the Paul Hoover-Maxine Chernoff-Yellow Press scene, the Paul Carroll circle, the birth of Slam, and much else besides. He then quoted Basil Buntings' observations about Chicago poetry, including the interesting claim that poetry in Chicago had "an autonomous life," unlike the European-inflected literary scene in New York. "If it's an autonomous life," said Pavelich, "it's an autonomy with a history," and with this he introduced Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary, who took the podium to talk about one of the more recent chapters in that history, the rise of Flood Editions.

The Poetry Adventure

Michael and Devin talked about the conditions necessary for Flood to thrive, reflecting on the immensely empowering lack of authority or hierarchy in Chicago's literary scene. But the more I listened to them, the more it seemed to me that the most enabling and empowering thing in the Flood story was the shared sense of friendship and adventure among the core group of poets — Devin, Michael, Michael's brother Peter, John Tipton, and others — affiliated with the press. When Michael talked about the road-trip over a flooded Mississippi River to visit Ronald Johnson in San Francisco, and when Devin talked about a later trip with Michael and Joel Felix to see the aging Johnson and put his papers in order, everything they said (and, most especially, the way they said it) indicated that this wasn't some dry editorial collective, these were the boys and the boys were having a fantastic time, racing around the country on pilgrimages to see forgotten poets, arguing about how to set up a press and make it break even over their plates of cabbage at Scruffy's Irish Diner, and looking to old issues of BLAST, old copies of City Lights books, and to the publications of the Jargon Society for inspiration. "When I read those City Lights books," said Michael at one point, "I had some vague sense that the poets all knew each other, and wrote for each other." When Michael ended with the exhortation to "find a friend and start a press," the thing that came through, more than anything else, was the romance of group endeavor, and specifically of young, male group endeavor, with all its wayward, road-trippy, cocky splendors (long may it wave). Which isn't to say Flood is all about the guys (Lisa Jarnot and Pam Rehm are important for Flood, for example), but the energy seemed very much of a piece with the Guy Debord Situationist crew, say, or with the pile-in-the-car-guys Beat vibe. Or that's the way it sounded at the symposium.

Objection!

Perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise, then, that one of the first questions to follow Devin and Michael's talk came from a woman who seemed concerned about what she took to be the exclusivity of the vision of Chicago poetry being presented. She spoke a kind of grad-student-ese, but presented herself as an outsider, and expressed dissatisfaction with the "particular face" being put on Chicago poetry in the privileged context of a University of Chicago symposium. Though she didn't specify the nature of that particular face, I'm pretty sure she meant the white, male face: perhaps she'd taken her cue from Ron Silliman, who'd pointed out on his blog that none of the three speakers were women. It's not like she was wrong: almost all of the do-it-yourself, entrepreneurial, by-the-bootstraps anecdotage about Flood had been about a group of guys making something great happen on their own, out of the love of the group and the task (and make no mistake: Flood has been a great thing). And this first symposium did feature only white guys as speakers. When David Pavelich assured her that this first symposium wasn't to be the last word on Chicago poetry, she said she found the answer "unsatisfactory." I wish I'd had a chance to talk to her after Michael Anania's talk, though, since the picture he painted of Chicago poetry over the last few decades was one of the greatest possible diversity, in both aesthetic and social terms.

The Scene's Big Shoulders

"The thing about poetry in Chicago," said Michael Anania, "is that it's never where you think it is." With this, he introduced an anecdote about how he, as a promising student poet, was sent up to Chicago from Omaha in 1960 to attend a gala fund-raiser hosted by Poetry magazine. Michael approached W.H. Auden at the black-tie affair, saying "I owe it to the guy I borrowed this suit from to introduce myself." "Poet?" asked Auden. "Yes," replied Michael. "Then why don't you steal some champagne and we'll sneak off," suggested the great man, and sneak off they did, to talk for hours at the Allerton Hotel while the Great Poetry Establishment (consisting then of John Ciardi, X.J. Kennedy, and the anthology editors Louis Untermeyer and Oscar Williams) droned on at the gala. Unknown to both the gala's attendees and escapees, a far more interesting group of relatively unknown poets was meeting downtown under the tutelage of John Logan, a Notre Dame prof who'd come in to teach informal poetry seminars — a group including Bill Knott, Paul Carroll, and Charles Simic, among others.

This sense of multiple scenes, and a city big and broad enough to embrace them, pervaded Michael's story of his years in Chicago. As I listened to Michael talk about A.K. Ramanujan, Ralph Mills, and Lisel Mueller; and about Jennifer Moyer's invention of the Poetry in the Schools Program that supported Angela Jackson; and about the Obasi Workshop that launched the careers of so many African-American poets (notably Carolyn Rogers and Haki Madhubuti); and about the founding of Tia Chucha Press; and about the night Robert Bly was pelted with eggs by Evanston-based Trotskyite Surrealists (who were then counter-attacked by the Stone Soup crowd), and about Gwendolyn Brooks' integration of the white and black reading scenes, I got a real sense of the complexity, diversity, and depth of the scene over the decades.

Maybe it was the rarefied air of Hyde Park, but I left with a head full of Hegelianism, thinking about how the symposium I'd just left was not only a continuation of the city's poetic tradition, but also a kind of rising to self-consciousness of a scene that too often has had too little of a sense of its own history.

The &NOW Awards and the the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize

After much work, with the kind help of the administration at Lake Forest College, and with the generous support of friends of the college, I and my colleagues Davis Schneiderman and Josh Corey are happy to unveil some new literary awards, and a new press. &NOW Books, an imprint of the just-founded Lake Forest College Press, will be publishing a series of anthologies called The &NOW Awards (affiliated with the &NOW Festival), and will also publish books of poetry and prose. In addition, Lake Forest's new Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize is a truly fantastic opportunity: two months to write, $10,000, and publication of a first book.

Soon Davis will be whisked off to this year's &NOW Festival in California to make the official announcements, but fret not if you can't be there for his stirring speech — here are the details as they'll appear in various print ads, and on our website.

&NOW Books (an imprint of Lake Forest College Press) and the &NOW Awards

The newly formed Lake Forest College Press is pleased to announce the formation of its imprint, &NOW Books. Every two years, &NOW Books will publish The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing — a collection of the most provocative, hardest-hitting, deadly serious, patently absurd, cutting-edge, avant-everything-and-nothing work. Distribution of &NOW books will be through Northwestern University Press.

Attendees at &NOW 2009 (Fall, SUNY Buffalo) will receive a complementary copy of the debut anthology, but writers need not attend &NOW to be included in the collection.

The contents of the &NOW Awards will be chosen through a nomination process and we need your help. Attendees of the &NOW conference, and friends of the organization, can send up to four nominations of published creative pieces (print or online) to andnow@lakeforest.edu with the subject line: “&NOW Nominations.” Please briefly tell us why we should consider a particular piece, and, whenever possible, send us relevant author bibliography and/or web links. Nominated works must have been published since 2004 (the year of the first &NOW conference), and the first anthology will cover the period from 2004 through 2009.

We’ll send email notification of this process after this year’s conference.

&NOW/Lake Forest College the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize

Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival of Innovative Writing and Art, invites applications for an emerging writer under forty years old, with no major book publication (chapbooks and the like excepted), to spend two months (February-March or March-April 2009) in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shores of Lake Michigan. There are no formal teaching duties attached to the residency. Time is to be spent completing a manuscript, participating in the Lake Forest Literary Festival, and giving two public presentations.

After the residency, the completed manuscript will be published, upon approval, by the new Lake Forest College Press &NOW Books imprint. The stipend is $10,000, with a housing suite and campus meals provided by the college. The position will be offered on alternate years to writers of prose and poetry, with the 2009 residency going to a poet. Hybrid genre and non-classifiable applications are welcome during either year. Send curriculum vita, manuscript in progress, and a statement of plans for the completion of the manuscript to Plonsker Residency, Department of English Lake Forest College, 555 N. Sheridan Road, Lake Forest, IL 60045. Review of manuscripts by judges Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey will begin May 15, 2008 and continue until the position is filled.


I don't have an exterior picture of the Glen Rowan House handy, but lest you think we're planning on putting the visiting writer up in some dingy room, here are a couple of shots of the place — one of the library, and one of the view over the main terrace. It's the Lake Forest College guest house, and the visiting writer will have a suite of rooms there.




Since we have a lot of our visiting speakers stay there, there should be plenty of opportunities to meet interesting people as they pass through.

Reading with Barbara Goldberg

What's that you say? You want to hear about Raymond Federman's triumphant reading at the Lake Forest Literary Festival? I'd love to tell all, people, but I'm off to the dentist, and only have time to give you a last-minute head's up about the Archambeau/Barbara Goldberg reading tonight at 7:00 p.m. at The Book Stall at Chestnut Court (811 Elm Street, in Winnetka IL 60093). Winnetka's a short ride up from the city of Chicago, just north of Evanston. I know some city dwellers in Chicago think of the north shore suburbs as about as accessible as Alaska, but Google Maps will show you how short a trip it is, and it's only a block or two from the Metra train station on the Metra.

Here's the official scoop on Barbara Goldberg, with whom I'm stoked to be reading:

Barbara Goldberg, a senior speechwriter for a large, nonprofit organization in D.C., is the recipient of many grants and awards, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and four Maryland State Arts Council grants. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently the prize-winning Marvelous Pursuits (Snake Nation Press, 1995). She is translator, along with Israeli poet Moshe Dor, of The Fire Stays in Red: Poems by Ronny Someck (University of Wisconsin/Dryad Press, 2002), and After the First Rain: Israeli Poems on War and Peace (University of Syracuse/Dryad Press, 1997). Her work appears in such magazines as Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, and Poetry. She lives in Chevy Chase, MD.

Here's a poem and short profile from her reading at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee.

Pleiades and Reginald Shepherd

In a better world, you'd have been awoken this morning by the shouts of MFA students moonlighting as early-twentieth-century style knickerbockered newsboys and roaming the steets hawking copies of the new issue of Pleiades (vol. 28 no.1). But in the current sad state of affairs, you'll have to haul yourself down to the local bookstore and grab a copy off the obscure shelf where literary journals are hidden (let's blame the Bush administration, or the real estate bubble, or the academy, or Ron Silliman: you know, the usual fall-guys).

Anyway, the issue is as laden as ever with good stuff. I was particularly glad to see new work by poets I follow (Albert Goldbarth, Steve Burt) and a solid review of a poet I root for (Piotr Gwiazda). Mike Theune, who seems to have become a regular contributor of long critical essays, is here too, with an essay called "Writing Degree ∞," which continues Pleiades' tradition of running not only reviews but essays about larger issues.

Rubbing shoulders with this distinguished company is your present humble blogger: my retrospective treatment of Reginald Shepherd's poetic career hulks around in the back pages. Here's how it starts:

A Portrait of Reginald Shepherd as Philoctetes

on Reginald Shepherd’s Some are Drowning, Angel, Interrupted, Wrong, Otherhood, and Fata Morgana


Philoctetes, sadly, has never been a favorite character of Greek legend. He gets only a brief mention in the Iliad, and missed his chance for greater acclaim when the last manuscript of Proclus’ Little Iliad, where he may have played a greater role, was lost to history. The Greek tragedians liked him — he’s the subject of a play by Aeschylus and another by Euripedes, and two by Sophocles — but their audiences didn’t fall in love with any of these plays, and history has been unkind to the manuscripts: only one full Sophoclean script remains, along with a few lines of the other. The Aeschylus and Euripedes have fared even worse: neither has been preserved, even in fragment. When Edmund Wilson surveyed the history of the Philoctetes story in The Wound and the Bow, he found it left surprisingly little trace in literary history: a bungled seventeenth-century French play by Chateaubrun, a chapter of Fénelon’s Télémaque, an analysis by Lessing, a sonnet by Wordsworth, a John Jay Chapman adaptation, and a version by André Gide. The six decades since Wilson’s survey have added little to this short list: mentions in Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, and a few short poems by Michael Ondaatje are the only distinguished examples.

This is a shame, in that the Philoctetes story seems remarkably suited to our times. It is, after all, a story of othering, or (to steal one of Reginald Shepherd’s words) of otherhood. An archer equipped with a bow that never missed its mark, Philoctetes suffered a wound to his foot so distasteful to his fellow Greeks that they stranded him on an island en route to Troy. Ten years into their fruitless war, the Greeks learn that without the skills of the man they’ve wronged, they cannot win. They coax the understandably outraged Philoctetes to join them, which he does, distinguishing himself in battle. Edmund Wilson saw the story in a Romantic light, treating it as a myth of the alienated artist whose skill is somehow connected to his isolation. But we can see the story in more contemporary terms, too, as a myth of social disenfranchisement and the damage it causes. Seen this way, the real wounds aren’t physical at all. They are, rather, the social and psychological burdens placed on those othered, and the losses to society caused by its failure to embrace the human potential of all of its members. It is no accident that the three poets to pick up the story after Wilson are all postcolonials.

Reginald Shepherd’s poetic career mirrors the Philoctetes story in both its contemporary and Wilsonian versions. The contemporary version of the story fits in that being born gay, black, and poor in America — as Shepherd was — is to be triply othered, to be shunned and devalued for one’s sexuality, race, and class. It isn’t that gayness, blackness, and poverty are wounds in themselves: it is that America treats these things in a wounding way, much as the Greeks treated Philoctetes. Just as the Greeks’ cause at Troy suffered because of their failure to embrace Philoctetes, America suffers from its othering of people like Shepherd. The Wilsonian version of the myth also applies to Shepherd, in that Shepherd’s poetic genius is intimately connected to his otherness in American society: his work returns, again and again, to the particulars of his outsider status. Shepherd’s poems also return to the same solutions to the dilemma of otherhood, seeking solace in never-quite-trusted yearnings for beauty and interracial erotic fulfillment.

If your big-box bookseller doesn't have copies, hold your breath until they cave in and get them. Or just wait for the newsboys to make it to your street. Your call.

**

In other news, Patrick Durgin (my co-conspirator in putting together the Chicago MLA off-site poetry marathon) has interesting things to say about Rachel Blau DuPlessis. His comments are in the online-only Jacket Magazine, though, so the newsboys on the corner will be of no use to you, unless you're churlish enough to wrest the laptops from their urchinlike hands. Which I don't put past you, really. For shame!

Archambeau World Tour, Spring-Summer 2008

I'm sort of lying low this season, as far as readings and conferences go — I've agreed to write too many things for print to take on a real roadshow. But here are two gigs I'm definitely going to do in the months ahead:

A poetry reading with Barbara Goldberg at the Bookstall at Chestnut Court, 811 Elm Street, Winnetka, Illinois (that's in the north shore 'burbs of Chicago) at 7 pm on April 7th.

A paper called "Public Faces in Private Spaces: Notes on Cambridge Poetry," about J.H. Prynne and others. This will be part of the Conference on English Poetry from 1950-2000 at the Université de Paris IV — Sorbonne. It will be delivered wither on June 27th or 28th (details to follow).

Lake Forest Literary Festival '08

I can hardly believe we're already into our fourth year of the Lake Forest Literary Festival, but the time is nigh, people. This year's LFLF will kick off March 25th with Raymond Federman working some Beckett mojo, and continue through several days of literary splendor. Everything is free and open to the public, and well worth the drive up from Chicago. If you're coming, let me know. We'll grab a beer.

Note that this year we're also colonizing the city of Chicago, or at least a corner of it, and holding an LFLF reading at Powell's North Bookstore on the evening of March 27th. Excelsior!

Here's the schedule of main events (you can get more detailed info by clicking on the picture of the poster, above):

Tuesday, March 25

4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
Raymond Federman / Scenes from Samuel Beckett's Endgame
Meyer Auditorium, Lake Forest College

7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Reading: Lidia Yuknavitch and Stacey Levine
Meyer Auditorium, Lake Forest College

Wednesday, March 26

7:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Raymond Federman Keynote reading (reception to follow)
Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel, Lake Forest College


Thursday, March 27

Noon
Reading by poet Christina Pugh
Center for Chicago Programs, Lake Forest College

7:00 p.m.
Reading and dialogue
with Stacey Levine and others
Powell's North Bookstore, 2850 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago IL

Art and Life from Aestheticism to Langpo

So check it out: Kelly Comfort, an amazing polymath who knows about Latin American modernism, Cuban writing, and German literature, has cooked up a collection of essays called Art and Life in Aestheticism: De-Humanizing and Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Aesthetic Receptor. The second part of the title may be a bit of a mouthfull, but it does its job, giving as it does a shout-out to José Ortega y Gasset's 1925 treatise The Dehumanization of Art, which examined with a skeptical (but not a dismissive) eye the emerging emphasis on formalism in the art of the twentieth century. The essays in Kelly's book tackle ideas of formalism and the aesthetic as they intersect with, or eschew, lived experience, the social, and the political. The emphasis of the book is on the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century, but the essays reach further back in time, and forward as well, as far as the present day, with a notes in one essay (by, uh, me) on Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and company.

Here's what Kelly came up with when the good people at Palgrave MacMillan had her sum the whole project up in a couple of sentences:

Art for art's sake addresses the relationship between art and life, between the aesthetic and the social, and promotes the former term over the latter one in each instance. Although it has long been argued that aestheticism aims to de-humanize art, this volume seeks to consider the counterclaim that such de-humanization can also lead to re-humanization, to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large and between the artistic receptor and his or her human existence.

The book gathers together essays on a surprising range of authors: Baudelaire, Rossetti, Huysmans, Wilde, Nietzsche, André Breton, Nabokov, Adorno, Barthes and many more. Here's the opening of my own contribution, an essay called "The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics, Autonomous Aesthetics, and the Idea of Politics":

If you are personally acquainted with any significant number of poets, you will perhaps not be surprised to find that the thesis of this essay is as follows: poets want to have their cake and eat it too. The particulars of the argument, though, go beyond the intuitive and the obvious, or so I hope. What I want to say is this: since the nineteenth century, poets have faced a dilemma. On the one hand, many poets have felt the allure of the radical freedoms of an entirely autonomous art, an art not in the heteronomous service of any religious function, ideological formation, moral system, cause, or institution, an art that exists for art’s sake alone. On the other hand, poets have faced the anxieties that such autonomy seems, inevitably, to create: fears of losing their readerships, their social roles, and their political utility. Many poets of the twentieth century, especially those affiliated with avant-garde movements, have been haunted by such anxieties, and have sought to assuage them by claiming that a commitment to aesthetic autonomy can, in and of itself, be a form of political action. Such an identification does not bridge the chasm between a belief in autonomous art and a belief in the kind of heteronomous art that serves a cause. Rather, it denies the existence of such a gap, and asserts that the disinterested pursuit of art for its own sake is also, by its very nature, politically efficacious.

Positions of this kind are by their nature fraught with contradictions, and raise many a question. Can withdrawal from political engagement be anything other than quietism? What are the politics of audience, when the art speaks neither to the disempowered classes nor to a significant element of the power elite? Can a political art still be autonomous, or does it bend its craft to a political end? Indeed, the attempt to work through such questions has been the driving force behind many an avant-garde polemic. Despite the difficulty of maintaining the identity of aesthetic autonomy and political utility, though, this dream of the poets has endured for the better part of a century.

Two groups of poets who attempt to identify aesthetic autonomy with the political — the surrealists and the language poets — are of particular interest because of the different forms of politics to which they to link autonomous aesthetics. Starting in the 1920s, the surrealists, under the general guidance of André Breton, sought a link between the radical imaginative freedom of their movement and the project of Communist revolution. Later, beginning in the 1970s, the American language poets sought to identify aesthetic freedom with a kind of negative politics — a politics of critique and resistance, rather than one conducted with a specific revolutionary utopia in mind. Whatever the form of politics, though, the enduring nature of the poet’s anxiety about reconciling aesthetic autonomy and political efficacy indicates that we may have reached a point in the history of poetics in which what I am calling the aesthetic anxiety (that is, the anxiety about the apparent political and social inutility of autonomous art) isn’t so much a passing crisis as it is a lasting condition of poetic production. Whether the solution to this anxiety proposed by the avant-garde poets can survive is, of course, another question, and one to which the answer, increasingly, seems to be “no.”

Langpo fundamentalists will probably want to punch me, but I'm hoping they'll get bored by my turgid academic prose half-way through the essay, and I'll be able to sneak off to my escape while they snore.

Anyway. You can pre-order the book now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Shop early! It makes a great gift!

New Books by Old Friends

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking my friends are probably a bunch of stooges and degenerates. A plausible guess! I mean, just look at these guys:

Okay. So that's me on the left, and the blameless Ben Goluboff in the middle. But Stefan (on the right, visiting from Norway) — he's the one you think is sketchy, right?

And then there's this guy, also on the right, next to Sarah Conner (who illustrated the Kafka Sutra). Yep. It's none other than the deeply-suspect Dave Park:

But think of them what you will, these degenerate yos with whom I hang managed to rouse themselves from eating Funyons off the couch cushions long enough to finish their books, both of which appeared this week: Stefan Holander's Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language and Dave Park's History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories. All thinking people are instructed to purchase copies forthwith!

Laureate Du Jour

You know who's a good poet? Robyn Schiff. That's who.

I dropped in on Robyn's reading up at Lake Forest yesterday, and really liked her new poems. The poems I most admired were versions of odes, though I don't know if she thinks of them that way. There they were, though: poems addressed to an object or an image, poems working through various meditative reactions to their subjects. From listening to Robyn read, I'm even willing to bet that some of her newer poems follow the strophe-antistrophe-epode meditative structure of the ode. There's a fair bit of elliptical disjunction and jump-cutting involved — elements of Our Period Style — but the meditative impulse and the consistency of the object addressed tie things together more thoroughly than in most post-avant poems, which can, at their worst, seem more like wind-chimes than compositions. What I really enjoy in her new work is the way the poems are about something in particular: they refer to cultural icons (Ralph Lauren, say) or historical events, often with a kind of moral conundrum tucked into them (as with the love & violence issues Robyn gets at by writing about the wedding of the inventor of the Colt revolver). Worth is out from Kuhl House, and I hear the new book's coming soon.