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Friday Notebook 11.04.11
There is little in my notebook this week beyond a few stray quotes drawn from my reading and a raw reaction to one of Conrad DiDiodato’s most intriguing blog posts, which needs fleshing out. Let me post my notes on Conrad first: I reread Frank Samperi’s trilogy a few months ago, and it produced a kind of seething in my mind which I recognize in Conrad. His post suffers from a conflation of Language poetry (in the person of Silliman) and the Occupy Movement.Read More
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Dewdrop Light
Adam Zagajewski is a marvelous poet. I say this although I’m able to read him only in translation. (I can read Dante only in translation, and his genius is likewise recognizable.) Literary types who complain (endlessly and in print) about the terrible limitations of language, including those who argue against translation as some kind of cheat, will encounter some arguments in Zagajewski’s intellectual memoir Another Beauty that I imagine they’ll find difficult to refute, assuming they bother to attempt a refutation. We’ve reached a point, in the U.S.Read More
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An Ordinary Reader Contra Jargon
I was going to post this as a response in the comment stream, but though it might be worth its own post. It’s a response to Seth’s comment on my earlier post below. Hello, Seth— Maybe I’m just oversensitive to theoretical language, so much so that I find the odor of it everywhere. You do, in fact, deliver a fairly jargon-free discussion of 7 lines from Joshua Beckman‘s Shake, but let me examine just one key sentence of it in the hope that I can clarify why I smell jargon there.Read More
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Dissenting from My Dissent
Well, I tried to dissent from the debate, but now Seth Abramson has yet another lengthy and thought-provoking entry on his blog, to which I want to steer this blog’s readers, in part because I generally agree with his analysis. I have two dissents, though.Read More