Not a true blog entry here so much as an attempt at auxiliary crowdsourcing: other than the ghazal, what poetic forms-- oral or written-- from non-European languages feature prominent repeated stanzas, "choruses," or refrains?

(If the post title baffles you, click here.)

When you read much of the poetry that comes out now--- when you try hard to read as much as you can, to figure out fast what's going to seem original, what's going to stick in people's heads years down the road-- when you do this and, at the same time, remember and reread and think about the poetry of the past-- the so-called canonical writers, the cult figures, and the people who would be influential were there much more justice in this world--

When you do all those things, and when you get to know the good, hardworking people who decide what to publish, you can get very happy at how some good poets are treated, but very frustrated, too, by the way in which other good poets, especially dead ones (who can't tour the globe giving readings from their work), don't get noticed at all.

With a dead poet whose only claim on us is the quality of her or his verse, it's sad but understandable if it takes a while-- and takes several critics and poets, shouting together-- before the poet's work comes back into print, or shows up at all very far from where that poet lived.

But what about a dead poet who was not only one of the century's great language-users, one of its great inventors of new lines and forms, a reinventor (e.g.) of such traditional forms as couplets and sonnets, but also a man who changed the culture of his country, a great (if also extreme and disturbing) example to future countercultures, an activist on behalf of indigenous people-- more committed to such issues than any white artist of equal talent in the United States has ever been? What if the dead poet in question became, more or less, his nation's answer to Whitman, to Allen Ginsberg, and to Robert Lowell, all at once? What if the story of his life would have made a superb feature film, even were he not (as in fact he was) a major poet judged simply on the invention in the verse?

What-- to put it simply-- has to happen, how many stars have to fall from the sky, before some American publisher-- either Oxford or somebody else-- decides to give a serious boost in the United States to the amazing work of James K. Baxter (1926-1972), who in his mid-twenties got hailed (rightly) as the best new talent in New Zealand, and who, after his early death from exhaustion (and periodic drinking), was mourned by banner headlines in national newspapers, identifying him simply as "HEMI," the Maori version of his first name?

Like most of the other folks around here, I've just come back from the pneumonia-generating crowds and rainstorms professional event for writers and critics that was the annual conference of AWP, this time in New York. (Don't worry, I'll quote some poems in a moment.) This time, the big event had me thinking about-- sometimes frowning on, sometimes making excuses for-- the "professional" dimensions of writing now, the ways in which poetry (far more than prose fiction, and much like the rest of the academic humanities) has become part of what Al Gore's favorite book called "the drama of the gifted child": young writers may feel stifled by their own need for approval from authorities of various sorts, but find it hard to write at all without that approval (not just practically; emotionally, too).

That's not a new problem (Keats had it with the Hunt circle), it's not confined to "creative writing," and it's not a problem you can avoid entirely by joining an avant-garde, nor by calling the circle whose approval you seek a community rather than an institution, although there's certainly something to be said for caring most about readers farthest from institutions on whom your material well-being depends. Those of us who might be called "midcareer" writers (poets, critics, whatever) go to large professional events and find ourselves in the odd position of being both approval-bestowers and approval-seekers, willy-nilly.

We might also-- I did, this time-- come away (a) excited by the huge spread of promising or enthusiastic work available at AWP (the most exciting place, and the most daunting, is always the bookroom), and (b) eager to learn, to read about, to make some imaginative connection to, places and pursuits far from the institutions of creative writing, and far from cultural centers like New York.

Pursuits such as political campaigns; places such as Greensboro, North Carolina, or rural Ohio, or pre- and post-hurrricane New Orleans. Poems and poets of each below the fold.

The classroom next to my office has been booming all morning in Russian, a language I don't speak at all: I recognize it when the students respond to the teacher, in unison, by shouting "Spasibo!," though the other frequent shoutouts wouldn't be phonologically possible in any of the (too few) languages I read: one of them sounds like "Ktonk!" and the other like "Adgno!"

The din not only made me wish I had a true gift for learning foreign languages (especially for learning ones relatively remote from English), rather than just for scrounging up facts about them (you can see new features of English-language poetry, for example, if you learn about aspect, a.k.a. the distinction between completed and ongoing action). It also made me take another look at the enormous new anthology of contemporary Russian poetry, out now from Dalkey Archive, whose facing-page versions remind me of how much I'm missing-- while making available, to my mild surprise, a number of poems that seem to work in English. Examples below the fold...

I've been reading part five of The Grand Piano, the serial self-mythologizing nostalgia 1970s scene report "collective autobiography" of ten poets and critics who lived in the Bay Area during the 1970s, participated in (some also directed) a reading series at the eponymous café, and later became known as Language Poets. Since one of the ten is one of my favorite living poets, I'd be following this series even if I had no interest in any of the other poets involved, nor in the way we think about literary history and literary scenes; since I do, and I do, I've been hooked.

Part five (whose keyword is "friendship," I think, unless it's "community"-- for each part there's a semi-secret noun to which all ten entries relate) confirms three senses I get whenever I read the prose Language Poets (or former Language Poets, or so-called Language Poets) write about their own endeavors:

1. It's about as useful to describe Language Poetry as if it were one thing with shared principles as to describe the Decadents of the 1890s, or the "school of Auden" in the 1930s, as if those groups of poets and poems were one thing. About as useful, but no more so.

2. All these writers (the ones whose poems I admire and the ones whose poems, not so much) thought constantly about how to get around, disable, or replace the constraints (notionally fixed reference, Gricean appropriateness, the authority or lack of authority we attribute to a given speaker) which enable most prose to make prose sense. But the degree to which those writers succeeded in doing so, and the degree to which they wanted to do so, do not indicate the depth, or subtlety, or interest, in the poems.

3. As with the deeply Christian, deeply undemocratic, or deeply democratic, poets of the past, we don't need to subscribe to the poets' principles in order to admire, enjoy, or learn from their poems; we should, though, try to learn what those principles are. Even if they seem, to us, self-contradictory, or implausible, or overtaken by events.

4. As with all other avant-garde movements in poetry (though perhaps not in the visual arts), no matter how often some of these writers (and, more shrilly, some of their interpreters) go on about the radical break (with something--- with what?) involved in modernism (whatever we take "modernism" to mean), their practice at its most interesting always links up with a literary past, one that goes back more than 150 years.

You're free to tell me that in saying something like that I haven't said anything about Language Poets, but only shown what I consider interesting. In response I refer you to Bob Perelman's entry in the new GP, in which he discusses Catullus' Odi et amo, lines that poets of apparently opposite tendencies seem to find ripe for translation, if not stuck in their heads. What poets, how, why? You know where to click...

I warned you about it last month, and now it's happened: this week I think I did more writing than reading, and in the rush of finishing up other sorts of prose about poets and poetry, I plumb ran out of new poetry-related discoveries of the sort that one would blog. I hope to bring back a few from what looks to be a very crowded AWP, but at least I've recovered enough to use the blog for what I've decided (in a literary context) fits blogs best: ideas & connections too unlicked to make confident essays, too chatty or too critical for poems, and too personal or spontaneous to become reviews. More Scots, Scotland, and Scottish poets again, and the telephonic origins of "Hello!"-- plus previews of upcoming interests-- as usual, below the fold.

Poetry is a kind of naming-- the Rilke of the Duino Elegies certainly thought so, and Wallace Stevens, in the wonderful late poem "Local Objects," said that he wanted to give the things in his poetry fresh names, "to keep them from perishing."

Naming is a kind of poetry too: or so the news around these parts suggests... examples, elaborations, partial dissents, a journey to A'Quonesia, and some rock music await below the fold.

We knew that the continuing malaise among independent bookstores (despite success stories in North Carolina, in Minnesota, and elsewhere) has long spelled trouble for literary fiction, which relies on in-store events, loyal customers, and local buzz to move the books that never become bestsellers. Now comes word via an expert in the field that the decline of the independent bookstore evens spells trouble for well-written porn.

Fiction of all kinds-- even the kinds you might think have a built-in, durable market-- is on its way, I suspect, to the status that American poetry already occupies: you can devote your life and your spare time to it, you can find steady work and even a rewarding career track by doing something connected to it, but almost nobody will make a living through being paid, directly, to write books of it. Some consequences-- and some news from Scotland (the kind that stays news) below.

As some of you know, I write-- indeed, I promise various editors that I will write-- reviews and essays about other people's poetry with an almost depressing frequency. When I started trying to do that sort of thing I would visit this wonderful bookshop, pick up an armload of poetry books, and try to review them. At this point I'm lucky enough to get books in the mail-- lots of books, though surely not as many books as Douglas gets records, more books of some interest than I can review under a byline or at any length.

And as a few of you know, my spouse runs this neat blog, which offers posts from authors and journalists on many a Tuesday through Friday and the occasional Sunday, and, on many a Monday, a roundup of links and brief descriptions of material that couldn't be covered at length.

I'm going to emulate it, and her, and try to do justice to cool things that came in the mail. Discussed below: the mind-body split, Joyelle McSweeney, Jenny Browne, Stephen Oliver, Kevin Carollo, a couple of litmags, rock and roll, and the mysteries of made-up words...

Arts-oriented blogs like this one may resemble collections of essays and reviews-- written in haste, perhaps, and repented at leisure-- but they can also draw on other sorts of forms far older than HTML. One such form is the so-called diary-- not the book of daily entries Americans think of when they think of the term, so much as the periodic excerpts from journals or diaries by literary figures which have long run in some British literary magazines. These excerpts have the spontaneous feel of good blogging, and the further distinction of not requiring arguments-- they're not supposed to be about anything in particular, other than the moment-to-moment or week-to-week impressions the world gives their authors (and vice versa).

I think here in particular of the journal excerpts by the English poet R. F. Langley, whose poems are sometimes quite spiky and demanding but whose sinuous prose journals, viewable in many issues of PN Review, are also smart, and easier to follow: they show him, often enough, just walking around, reflecting on flora, reading, local architecture, food, telephones, familiar quotations... there's a published book of them now, which I'm not sure I even want to read cover to cover, because these prose paragraphs-- more a style of attention than anything that attention might generate for some later use-- work so well a page at a time, as brief encounters with the weather of the world-- encounters, one might say, with Helphenstine.

Who's Helphenstine? All told below the fold.

I warned you-all that I'd take a few more inches of space around here to describe, and recommend, the printed matter I brought home from the MLA, and which turned out to be the best, or at least the most durable, reward of going thither. First, though, a nod to Rigoberto, who had the good fortune to attend Prageeta Sharma's book party. I didn't get there, but I have been enjoying her book-- did you know that her publisher now has its own blog?-- in any case, Prageeta's book keeps raising, for me, questions of how young poets today assimilate, get into, and then get beyond the set of moves invented by John Ashbery, or (maybe it's better to put it this way) how to adapt that set of moves to very different personalities and stages of life (since Ashbery so often, now, writes about old age). Some of the best parts so far have a quiet post-Ashbery, neo-elegiac feel, e.g. the end of "Finitude":

This is the trouble
with intention it's hollow. It's
personal too, it commemorates
itself-- the self is finitude and the self is getting popular, drafted,
like architects who design funeral lamps more becoming than the last batch.

I didn't pick that book up in Chicago (it's been in our house for longer than that). I did, though, pick up a few more good examples of prose about poetry, described below the fold.

Blogging the MLA convention, held last week in Chicago-- for the third of what might be three or maybe four entries: if I was disappointed by some of the panels, and let down by the weather (brrrrrrr), and happy to see people whose gossip I won't bore you with (nor violate by making public), I was delighted all weekend by two things, or rather categories of things.

One was the category "songs on the new Youth Group album." Start with "Forever Young" or, if you're feeling quiet, "Start Today Tomorrow." And yes, the former is an Alphaville cover.

The other was the category "books and periodicals I picked up," many of which I have now taken home and read. I'm pretty sure I found more books and periodicals I liked-- most of them, as you'd expect, lit-crit and cultural-criticism, rather than books of poetry or fiction-- at this MLA than at any other recent lit-crit gathering. Below the fold, if you're still with me, I describe a few.

More on the MLA, the off-site unofficial marathon reading, and neat things about individual poems or books of poems, caught at the few panels I could see in their entirety...

The big format of the big reading confirmed Michael Fried's still very important argument of forty years ago that the condition of theater (like it or not) is what lies between, or surrounds, the various arts-- and that behavior which draws in the audience and calls attention to the circumstances the work shares with the audience will attract attention when attention can't be directed, or isn't directed, to the moving parts in the work of art as such.

The more flattering way to say that is to say that non-poems, performances that would not have worked as poems on a page, fit the occasion: Kristin Prevallet reading "The Day Lady Died" backwards, for example, or the (very considerable) poet and editor Susan Schultz holding up signs that said things like FASCISM -> SAFETY.

And yet the bits that I most wanted to remember (as opposed to the bits I found easiest to remember without writing down) were lines from poems: Chuck Stebeldon, who also helps run the world-renowned Woodland Pattern poetry bookstore and art-space in Milwaukee, read a poem that contained the wonderful shoreline line "Cattails haptic when fashion is thick in the skin" (at least I think that's what it said); Tony Triviglio's Rumsfeld poem explained, "Like anyone, he is shaped by childhood events."

And then there were some professors and graduate students who talked about poems by other people. Several of those said memorable things (memorable to me, at least; admittedly they were also a bit academic)-- such things are outlined or at least mentioned below the fold.

The annual convention of the Modern Language Association is the Death Star of literary conferences: with its cast of tens of thousands of academics and critics, many of whom are there for job interviews, and many of whom (just as on the real Death Star) wear interchangeable black formal clothing, the MLA can feel at once huge, impersonal, institutional, and possessed of great destructive force.

It's also a place where you can, if you try, learn some neat things about poems and poets you like. I did. More details below the fold (and in a future post).

Either today or tomorrow is the shortest day of the year: before the calendar reforms of the sixteenth century, that day would have been December 13, which is why that day, and not this day, remains Saint Lucy's Day. While many people of Scandinavian descent have already celebrated St. Lucy herself by letting small children walk around with electric lights on their heads (thus supplanting an older custom that would today be seen as a crazy fire hazard), many others will notice the solstice and look up poems appropriate for the shortest day, of which three below the fold.

Big in Britain just now, though unknown in America (that should change soon): David Morley's book The Invisible Kings, which I'm halfway through at the moment and entirely happy about. Big British reviews include Tim Liardet's in the Guardian, Jane Yeh's in the TLS (no web version of that review, alas), and Jane Holland's on her blog.

Morley's poems explore (pick one, any one) (a) his Romani (Roma or Gypsy) heritage (b) macaronic tactics, interpolating Romani (Gypsy) language into English sentences and lines (c) the afterlife of the Romance (poetic, symbolic adventure) tale in a Romani (Gypsy) context (d) the vividly un-"English" metres partly created, and mostly (alas) abandoned, by the Les Murray of the 1980s, the Murray of "The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle" (Murray blurbs and has supported the book), and (e) the resources of the very short lyric, with some whole poems comprising juxtaposed couplets, and others made up after patterns from handicrafts.

One of those "others" happens to be a patterned (partly visual) poem: you'll find that one below the fold.

We had an enormous snowstorm yesterday in the greater Boston area. We I didn't handle it perfectly, but our family got home safely in the end-- and our little guy, while still no fan of snow, may even have ceased to hate his new, cute snowsuit.

The storm also got me thinking about the representation, in poems recent and not-so-recent, of really bad weather in general, and of snow and snowstorms in particular. Does it go back to antiquity? What's the first poem in English, or in some other European language, to describe, or celebrate, a snowstorm? What are the best?

Inconclusive, underinformed musings, suggestions for further reading, and snippets from favorites, below the fold.

Normally critics, scholars and reviewers (even those who are also poets, such as [coughs] me) are supposed to spend more time reading than they do writing: you read a book, you read it again if you like it enough, you read some books about the book or maybe (if it's a "popular" piece) some author interviews and background articles, and then you start to write.

The danger in blogging, for critics, scholars and reviewers (though not perhaps for other kinds of writers, who have the "notebook" form as an excuse) is that you'll spend more time writing than you do reading, bringing all too close the dreadful day when you realize you've run out of things you've recently read about which you want to write (or at least about which you have something to say). It's a risk on Harriet, just as it's a risk-- in theory-- for such good general book-critic blogs as the NBCC's, and the Valve, and Jenny, though in practice Jenny never runs out of things to say.

Now that day hasn't come for me, though I occasionally fear that it's coming soon (if it seems truly imminent, I'll stop blogging). A related day, however, has come: the day when, rather than pursuing one extended polemic or heartfelt Internet-only paean here, I mention some things I've been reading for writing elsewhere, raise some questions I've had to ask myself, and implore you-all, Gentle Readers, for suggestions, related works and answers. Linkage and open-ended questions, as you might expect, below the fold.

The critic, essayist, novelist and editor Elizabeth Hardwick died last week at the age of 91. Most of the memorial writing about her will emphasize either her founding role at the New York Review of Books, or her marriage to Robert Lowell--- but she should be remembered for more than that.

I promised on Monday to say more this week about that exchange on poetry, poetry-publishing, and gender in the Chicago Review, and now I'm going to say it: I'll start with some objections to both sides.

Jennifer Ashton, if you'll remember back that far, started a brouhaha about gender and poetry publishing by alleging that folks who still made gender an issue (in, for example, intros to anthologies) were being essentialist. She's still making that allegation, and she's still saying that critics in general, and anthologists in particular, who "insist on the importance of the poems are women's poems transformed the contingent relation between the sex of the authors and the forms of their poems into a necessary one." (That's a quotation from her response to Young and Spahr in the Chicago Review rather than from her original essay in ALH.)

To which I respond (this paragraph and the next two rewritten to avoid mistakes in earlier version): that may be true in the philosophical sense of "necessary," by which my knowing English, for example, and my ability to access the Internet, are necessary but not sufficient conditions for me to write the sentence you are now reading. If Ashton is arguing that even such obviously (to me) gender-marked experimental works as Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day could plausibly have been written by men writing as men (by men who grew up in our society aware of their maleness) then Ashton and I just read this set of poets very differently. (The matter of persona-poems, whose speakers have different gender from their implied authors or from the human beings who really wrote them, would be a distraction here, since these are not persona poems we're debating: I'll happily take that up in another post if anyone wants.)

I think, though, that Ashton gets a good deal of force from the overlap between necessary in the philosophical sense and necessary in other vernacular senses-- that she takes feminist anthologists to argue (and she argues against) the proposition that gender causes, in some stronger sense, experimental women writers to write as they do--- against the proposition that gender is almost a sufficient condition, rather than simply a necessary one, for certain writers (given certain other necessary conditions, e.g., perhaps, having read Gertrude Stein) to write as they do.

That's why I had the sense, after reading Ashton's most recent part in this controversy, that she's taking on a straw person. Thinkers and poets such as Elizabeth Treadwell (whom Spahr and Young mention) find the relation between their poems and their gender (and between other "innovative" women poets' poems and those women's gender) interesting enough to talk about, I think, without positing a strong causal connection: without, that is, saying that gender "made them write that way"--- though they may say that no man could have written a particular poem (that gender is a necessary condition, in the philosophical sense, but nowhere near a sufficient condition for the kind of consciousness the poems record).

Just a few weeks after the controversy broke (has it died down?), I've now got something to say about the controversy over poetry-in-general, self-consciously experimental poetry in particular, and the gender of particular poets, as articulated by Jennifer Ashton's controversial book review last year, Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young's even more controversial, statistics-driven response in the current Chicago Review, the CR editors' additional stat-tracking, and Ashton's brief reply. (More blogospheric discussion has followed since, and not only on this site.)

The first thing to say is that Ashton and Spahr/Young are partly talking past one another, since Ashton is first concerned to attack essentialism (the idea that a kind of poetry bears some intrinsic, logically necessary relation to the gender of its author) and Spahr and Young are first concerned to attack the persistence of sexism (it's still harder, they imply, for women to get their experimental poetry noticed than for men who might write the same sort of poem, whatever "the same sort" would here mean). But Ashton repeatedly implies (without quite saying) that we should stop paying attention to the gender of living poets for any reason—that the people most concerned to pay such attention now are all guilty of implicit essentialism—and Spahr and Young are understandably taken aback by that implication: that's why there's an argument at all.

Our toddler invented this spring, and still occasionally uses, the made-up and entirely apropos word "No-yes": he uses it when he's feeling independent, when we ask him whether he wants to do something (eat a banana, put on his shoes), and when his first instinct is to resist our suggestion, but his second-- once he realizes what he's being asked to do-- is to accept it, since it's something (banana, shoe-wearing) he actually wants and likes.

I thought of No-yes when I received, this week, the new issue of No: a Journal of the Arts, not only because I enjoy saying yes to No (it's a journal I've enjoyed since issue one) but because its centerpiece, for this sixth issue, is the long text of the very contrarian-- really, overtly hostile-- final film by the Situationist thinker Guy Debord, whose instinct is to say "No" to everything, who wanted a "revolution of everyday life" (see Lipstick Traces for the proto-punk rock details) that would set aside all the regularities and deferred gratifications by which people in bourgeois society take care of one another, learn professions, enrich corporations, plan their lives, and learn their crafts-- including, it may be, the craft of writing poems....

All week I've been teaching Richard Powers' great novel Galatea 2.2, a book about computers and fiction-writing and lovelornness that does as much as almost any prose work ever written to explain why and where we want to read poems. Some of that explanation takes place over the course of the plot, or in the manifold quotations within the narrator's thoughts. Some of it gets condensed near the end into this paragraph, worth hanging on someone's wall-- it's enunciated not by the author, nor by the character also named Richard Powers who stands in for him, but by the computer program whom the "Richard Powers" within the novel has been teaching how to read:

"'Every poem loves something. Or each wants something in love. Something loves power. Or money. Or honor. Something loves country.' On what catalog [Powers asks] could she be drawing? 'I hear about something in love with comfort. Or with God. Someone loves beauty. Someone death. Or some poem always is in love with another lover. Or another poem.'"

It's all true. What new poems might somebody love today? Go below the fold to see...

...as Major says below. Sometimes the kids, especially if they're still in school, just want more time to read: today at the Beacon blog education writer Chris Mercagliano has more on that depressing NEA report about how much young people do and don't read. (I had something about Adrienne Rich at the Beacon blog myself last week; if you are a Rich fan, let me know what you think.)

And sometimes the kids, especially if they're, you know, grown-ups, or pretend to be grown-ups all day, and if (as I do) they write or teach for a living, want less chat about poems and more, you know, poems. Below the fold: a couple of poems from books a few years old, whose authors are by no means well-known (one is a domestic violence prevention worker in remote Native Alaska, the other late-career scholar of medieval manuscripts in Wales). Elsewhere I've tried to say why and how much I like them; today, I'm just going to offer the poems, along with a couple of phrases of gloss and assistance.

What do these three things have to do with one another?

1. Lat week I gave a reading in a black box theater on the campus of a great university in a small state. I liked the students a lot-- I even liked all their questions (Q&A periods are inherently flattering to the answerer). One student wanted to know (I paraphrase) whether I considered myself a performance poet, or felt any connection to slam conventions, since (she thought) I read with such drama and verve. I told her I was flattered-- and I was-- but I didn't think of my own work as connected to performance poetry at all. Why do I remember that particular question?

2. I received this weekend a new book of poetry by a Michigan writer who also writes essays and stories: the new book of poetry has to do with becoming a stepmom in a blended family-- I recommend it highly to anyone with a particular interest in that topic-- but the accompanying material revealed that the author is also at work on a book about living with prosopagnosia, the medical condition in which patients-- whose vision and cognition are otherwise fine-- cannot recognize people by their faces. Why does this strike me as an appropriate disorder for a poet to have?

3. It's Thanksgiving! My wife and my son and I (but not our cats) are at my parents' house, where, by nightfall, we will have met a few dozen of our relatives, including some people we see once a year at most, and perhaps some people I've never seen. What does that have to do with poetry? What does a black-box theater have to do with a prosopagnosia memoir-in-progress? And what do they all have to do with Martin Buber? Read on and find out...

Yesterday I learned-- from Wesley Kort's Space and Place in Modern Fiction-- the architectural term SLOIP, an acronym that stands for Space Left Over In Planning, i.e. the odd-shaped bits of lawn, sidewalk, or lot, or analogous interior space, you get when you put one shape (the building or buildings whose outline you created) on top of another (the lot or lots or open interior space that was there before).

This morning I learned, from the Boston Globe, that teens and twenty-somethings are reading fewer books (per person) than ever.

Are these discoveries related? Read on...

The search for cyberpunk poetry, begun last week, has turned up a good candidate: Jasper Bernes' Starsdown. I may have a lot more to say about it elsewhere, so for now and right here I'll just say that it's the poetry the world of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash would include if that world could include really good poetry (and I'm not sure it could). Bernes' book is (like Stephenson's) a Pacific Rim work too-- it's all about Los Angeles-- and its closest analog within the poetry world is probably Joshua Clover's last book; it has, I should add, very little in common with the science fiction poetry promoted by Suzette Hayden Elgin and others, though if you are looking for intersections between the genres you might also look there too.

Bernes has a blog, and the blog has some neat questions...

Last week I finally started reading, or reading through-- no one intended that they be read at a sitting!-- the new 800-page edition of the Notebooks of Robert Frost, ably edited and appropriately annotated by Robert Faggen (more media attention here; David Orr's paean to Frost as a thinker here). If you haven't heard, these are the 48 notebooks in which Frost made lists, drafted poems, and recorded thoughts over the last several decades of his life (though some have entries from the 1890s); he preserved them carefully and seems to have expected a scholar or ten to publish them after his death. Since Faggen's edition removes the drafts of poems Frost completed, what we're left with is some false starts in verse, some stretches of work that seems intended to go into longer late poems, lists of titles for work not necessarily created, and lots, and lots, and lots, and lots, of thoughts, aphorisms, sentences meant to be memorable on their own, to contain some ironic twist on expected wisdom, or to react to the tenor of Frost's times. I expected something like the other books of aphorisms I've recently enjoyed-- James Richardson's new ones, or G. C. Lichtenberg's old ones-- along with some thoughts on the composition of poetry or the nature of art. What I've found so far is both less and more...

I haven't been linking much here to Silliman's blog, because regular readers of this site likely know about it already and because if I tried to respond to every substantial post there I certainly wouldn't be able to blog anything else. But today's visual poetry challenge poses especially worthwhile conundrums-- and no, I don't think it should be conundra-- for our readers. Click the link, then click back and go below the fold.

From today's reading:

Maram Al-Massri's A Red Cherry on a White Tile Floor, Khaled Mattawa's brisk translation from Arabic of a Syrian poet living in France-- her first US publication, but a book that appeared in Britain years ago (check out this flamethrowing negative review). These are short, rough poems that remind me more of Catullus than of other modern poetry from Arabic in translation: most of them are about sex or about sexism, and some of the best are about both. It's not something I expected to find memorable, especially not since most of the sound patterns from inherited Arabic forms appear to have been eliminated (perhaps inevitably) in the scoured surfaces and sharp edges of Mattawa's translations. And yet it turns out that they work. I'll post a poem Monday if I can; in the meantime, here's a revealing interview with the author (beware: ugly web page, at least if you're using a Mac). Two more recent readings, with queries, below the fold.

Some other memorable pieces of poetry-criticism, poetry-describing, and poetry-introducing from last week's conference in Long Beach: why Russians usually avoid free verse; what Robert Creeley has to do with English in China; George Oppen and vertiginous pictures of buildings; and Exile (not the punk band), all explained below the fold.

It's neat to see someone you know is a very sharp critic give a smart talk (or to see someone whose poems you expect to like read new, good poems), but it's even neater in some ways to come across truly informative arguments from a critic you've never encountered at all. The best paper I heard in Long Beach by a critic whose name I'd never before seen was also one of the best, and most ambitious, arguments about poetry I've heard all year: the critic was Eve Sorum, and the argument had to do with the poetry of Thomas Hardy, the late-Victorian practice of cartography, and the debate about how to read English metres which was taking place while Hardy wrote his poems. Which poems? What debate? What maps? Huh? More below the fold.

I go away for a weekend-- to a big literary conference, moreover-- and this place explodes with controversy. About the Chicago Review, statistical analysis, and feminism, right now the only sentiment I know I hold is that there should be more of all three. I do think Alicia is absolutely right when she says that arts foundations ought to give grants for child care, and when she says that new dads are expected both to delight in their babies and to march off to work, where they (we) get applauded for slightly reducing our hours, whereas new moms are expected to make a Big, Unfair Choice.

And now, the Modernist Studies Association, from whose annual conference in Long Beach I just got back: I stayed on a famous boat! Following in Ange's footsteps, I shall blog the best of the poetry criticism I heard there-- beginning with a startling revelation about the real subject of Auden's most famous love poem.

No earthshaking thoughts this morning about poetry and poetics-- alas, I must focus on my upcoming trip to Los Angeles, only the second time ever I've been to that city-- and so, instead, to follow up on Rigoberto's disturbing post from a few days ago (are those silverfish? if not, what?) a couple more cool online journals.

One is Ice Tongue, which says it is "the only literary journal devoted solely to Antartica." These two poems by Claire Benyon might just be as elegant as the photos that come with them-- and since the photos are ice sheets, that's saying a lot!

A few more online journals below the fold.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes words can be replaced, without loss, by any synonym or dictionary defintion. In poetry, though-- and in many cases outside poetry-- connotation matters: the force a word has includes the force of its associations, the emotions and situations we associate with its prior uses, the cloud of light or dust a familiar term, like a comet, trails as it moves.

I was surprised by connotation three times yesterday: once by Canadian words inside a poem, once by an Internet brand war outside any poem, and once by a horrid symbol at the center of a continuing ethical and political mess. More on each below the fold.

Odd encounter at a conference today (not the one Ange's been blogging, but a much smaller one):

Scholar of contemporary culture, film and fiction #1 (pointing at me): "Is he an Americanist?"
Scholar of contemporary culture, film and fiction #2: "He's a poetry person."

Was that a version of "No"? If not, what was it?

Denise Riley isn't for everyone. It's easy to recommend-- though it has very little to do with poems-- her first book, a historical study which asks why Britain cancelled in the 1950s all the cool child-care opportunities created during the 1940s. As you might expect, that book also reflects an interest in gender, in practice and theory-- an interest, that is, in how our abstract beliefs about such big terms as woman, man, mother, father, family, child, adult, citizen and person shape our experience and our decisions, in the kitchen, in the library, on the bus, and in the voting booth.

If you have such an interest-- and I do-- you'll want to read the rest of her poems and her prose; the poems I'll have the rare pleasure of teaching next week, and the prose (and prose is all she's writing now, I'm afraid) I caught up with last night, when I finished her newest set of essays, paradoxically (and typically) entitled Impersonal Passion. More on her new prose-- and a slice of her poetry-- below the fold.

One of my favorite poets, Randall Jarrell, liked libraries more than most of us do or could: he sometimes implied he had spent his whole childhood in them, and wrote more than one poem about the juvenile divisions (today, "children's rooms" and "YA collections") of Nashville's monumental Carnegie Library, 103 years old this month.

Jarrell's most famous poem about a library, "A Girl in a Library," comes near to despair when he realizes that his undergraduates in North Carolina are not using libraries to read for pleasure: instead, they are sleeping, or cramming for exams. Well-loved in its time-- it was Lowell's favorite Jarrell poem, as of 1951-- its sometimes haughty tone and odd gender politics have ambivalent later responses. But its ground bass-- the fear that people younger than the author have ceased to read imaginative literature-- can still be heard in our time.

Fall moving into Boston, and along with the up-and-down ALCS, which has more or less mesmerized our household-- game six is tonight!-- we've had a series of misty days: the weather hasn't changed my reading habits much, but it has helped me pick a poem from Laura Kasischke's new book, on which more below the fold.

Paisley Rekdal, who has written some neat poems herself, says it's a bad idea to drink five bottles of wine a week, and certainly I wouldn't try it. (I prefer n pints of coffee and m pints of beer per week, where 2n>3m. Values of both n and m vary from week to week and are not for public disclosure.)

More seriously, Paisley Rekdal also says it's too hard to read five books of poetry in a week. Which surprised me a bit, since that's something I do, or thought I did, almost every week. Advice-- for her and for you, maybe-- below the fold.

John Keats wrote 64 sonnets, some very famous and rightly admired all over the wide world, and some that wouldn't get, nor deserve, much attention, had their author not been Keats.

And some fall in between: there are good lines in bad poems, startling stanzas next to dully conventional ones, and effects in unfamiliar poems which remember, or echo, the same effects in later, more durable verse.

I'm about to leave town for the weekend to visit the ALSC, which means I'm unlikely to watch much of the ACLS, and when I get back to Massachusetts I'm going to write a letter and send it to the ACLS.

That not-quite-coincidence, together with our little guy's newfound liking for rubber alphabet letters he can sort and assemble in the bath (and with the surprising unavailability online of the best poems by James K. Baxter, which pushes a planned post on him clear into next week) has made me think about anagrams, acrostics and other letter-patterns in poetry: who uses them, and how?

Examples and brief speculations below the fold.

Because Ange nearly demanded it, I offer a list of unjustified and in some cases apparently unmotivated likes and dislikes, compiled, in part, while sitting in Greater Boston Area traffic. Make of it what you will. (There may be more to come, depending on future traffic.)

J'aime (partial list): Game Theory (the band); white stripes (not the band); Jenny Toomey; basketball (even the men's game), baseball, when discussed by ardent fans; the feijoa (still my favorite fruit), and more recently the mamey sapote, the monstera, and the Honeycrisp apple, invented in Minnesota...

Having just posted at length about long critical histories, ways to think about dead people, and completed oeuvres, almost as if poetry were not a living art form, I compensate now with links to a few neat brand-new poems, available in current litmags that just happen to publish their new work on the Web. What poems? What litmags? You guessed it: they're below the fold.

James Merrill once complained, in a very funny poem: "Lives of the Great Composers make it sound/ Too much like cooking..." If that's so, then Alex Ross is the equivalent of the best food writer alive. I've just begun reading The Rest Is Noise, a giant collection of essays on composed music from the twentieth century (more or less-- he starts with Strauss and Mahler) by Ross, the blogger who happens to be the composed-music critic for the New Yorker. I almost always admire Ross's writing, both on the rare occasion when he's writing on a topic I know, and on the far more common occasion when he's not: he's able to link biography, context and the formal elements of the music in a way that-- at least for someone like me, who enjoys modern composed music but will probably spend more time with the last Bloc Party record-- can both delight and instruct.

In fact, Ross seems to be writing, precisely, for someone like me-- an adult with a serious interest, but who doesn't know the field backwards and forwards, who needs technical terms unobtrusively explained. Is there, will there be, can there be, has there been, the same kind of book for modern poets and poems? You'll find my well-hedged answers below the fold-- along with a follow-up question.

I've been trying to figure out whether to say something about the depressing flap around the Poetry Society of America, John Hollander, the Frost medal, and the resignations of directors, partly in response to Rigoberto's salvo a couple of days ago. I have nothing particularly original to contribute (not here and now anyway) to the very hard big questions about how historically white, rich institutions should address legacies of inequity and racism. I don't know whether the PSA has done enough, nor do I know enough details about its programming even to judge what "enough" might mean, for that particular organization. Such arguments aren't likely to end soon.

What I do know is that this story has been badly and inaccurately reported. More below the fold.

It's not clear to me that the Internet is the best medium-- in fact, it's clear that it is not the best medium-- for long-form reflective, evaluative or detailedly analytic criticism of poetry, or of any other art form whose products are both durable and portable.

The youngest and craziest of our three cats, Geno-- who once won a fight with a Kleenex box-- has been jumpy and grumpy lately: with school starting, we've been home less, and he's been transforming his unused playfulness into aggression against his (adopted) older brother and sister kitties.

What to do? Give Geno more attention each weekend, of course, and especially on Caturdays (and no, we didn't make Caturday up; far from it). Right now, though, Geno is nowhere to be found, and so I'll give attention, instead, to some cats in poems. What brings cats into poems? Why are there so many? Do they have anything in common? Why

Zach B at Cultural Society, which is both an online magazine and a book press, has a new issue, or anyway a new salvo of poems, up now. There's a long, casual poem, with a very neat ending, by Amanda Nadelberg, a Minneapolis writer whose ingenuity produced one of my favorite books last year...

I've been looking again at Sherod Santos' slightly controversial volume Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation. A few of you might remember Garry Wills' broadside against it, and Rosanna Warren's response. Wills thought it inaccurate, not really a translation, and hence a betrayal: Warren and others thought the poems, often enough, worked in English, and thought them better than the more literal versions that don't feel like poems.

We don't want our toddler to watch much TV, but we do let him watch some things, and we watch them with him: Meerkat Manor, for example, and WNBA basketball (congratulations to the Mercury!), and, now, a new show called Word World, an animated series designed to teach reading, in which all the characters and most of the sets (a DOG, a SHEEP, a BARN, etc.) are physically made of the letters in their names (so that the dog, for example, has a D for a head, and a tail growing out of his G).

It's one of many ways in which interactions with a young child starting to learn to read can put you in touch with what poetry critics these day are pleased to call "the materiality of language"-- in this case parodically, in the case of Fox in Socks more truly: is there a book of poetry for adults that does more to privilege the signifier-- as we say now-- or to focus on the sounds of words? (How would you stage, or recite, the Fox in Socks Hamlet?)

And yet, of course, there are ways in which we as readers of poetry feel that we might be made out of words, ways that seem not quite appropriate to toddlers, or not quite susceptible of depiction in art aimed at them-- ways in which lyric poems written for adults reveal their authors, if not their readers, as shot through with concepts, animated by abstractions.

Last night Cappie Pondexter's clutch one-on-one play tied the WNBA finals at two games apiece for Detroit and Phoenix. Whoever wins game five this Sunday (4:30pm Eastern on ESPN2) takes the title. It's been a great playoffs so far. Nearly everybody who's been watching and who isn't a Michigan resident wants the Phoenix Mercury to win: they're speedy and offense-oriented, like their home-state NBA counterparts (and completely new to the league finals), while the Detroit Shock are tough athletes and bruisers (and have won two championships already with, more or less, the lineup they have now).

What does this have to do with poetry?

This week I've been fascinated by Elizabeth Mitchell, lately of the pop group Ida, and more recently ascending, slowly and with quiet confidence, to well-deserved fame as a singer of children's songs. Last week we ended up in a car ride with our little guy (he's almost two) and started listening to You Are My Little Bird: I couldn't stop for days. Everything on there is pretty-- even the call-and-response songs, which reach that hard-to-discover intersection of toddler-participation and adult-admiration-- but one song in particular, Mitchell's cover of David Welch and Gillian Rawling's Gillian Welch and David Rawlings' "Winter's Come and Gone," has kept me thinking about a certain effect.

If you don't know the song, go listen (PC users click here) or at least read the lyrics. Then come back-- and we'll see how they bring to mind Shakespeare.