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News Flash: PoBiz Highly Competitive!
More on Alfred Douglas here The ten most competitive jobs in America based on data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), a U.S. Department of Labor database full of detailed information on occupations. Note where being a poet falls in terms of competitiveness. Of course, the only poets in the U.S. for whom poetry is a job are … oh, yeah: There aren’t any! Though there are jobs out there that one’s standing as a poet depend on. How many? I haven’t found a source for that information.Read More
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Sucking Up (My Morning Vitriol)
“The Contradiction” (by David Spear) Why am I not surprised that Michael Robbins, in “reviewing” Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and My Life in the Nineties, begins with a truth (that Language poetry is boring), then accurately characterizes Hejinian’s approach: “writing as a paradoxically polished automatism.” Robbins is obviously a bright guy. Of course, calling Hejinian’s approach paradoxical doesn’t explain or justify it; in fact, it unmasks it as an exercise in cynicism: polish gives the lie to the writing’s ersatz automatism.Read More
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The Writin’s on the Wall
My previous couple of posts may paint me as a stick-in-the-mud, an opponent of “innovation,” a reactionary sonneteer or lover of Tradition (cue Tevye). No. There is a dimension of the avant-garde I enjoy and admire (the two responses need not align, but it’s best if they do), and I believe one of the best spokesman for this dimension these days is Kent Johnson. I bring Kent up merely to direct Perpetual Birders to his Chicago Review takedown of Marjorie Perloff’s “Avant-Garde Poetics” section in the latest edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.Read More
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Contrarian
I have a knee-jerk reaction to contrarians. I automatically like them. It takes me a while to step back and decide how valuable their views are because I enjoy their spirit of opposition. I’ve been following a contrarian named Thomas Brady for some time now. His blog is Scarriet. I like the punning sneer at the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and I like some of Brady’s critiques of the current situation of poetry. But I’ve come realize that his views aren’t finally very valuable, despite his contrarian credentials. The problem is this: Brady is a fundamentalist.Read More
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The Current Paradigm
New York Quarterly editor Raymond Hammond, in a wide-ranging interview with Anis Shivani, makes these trenchant observations: I have come to believe that workshops are only in part responsible for the uniform, unambitious, minor products of poetry that we see over and over again. There are other elements, an entire paradigm that includes workshops, MFA programs, and contests that contribute to this. And the key in your question is the word minor.Read More
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A Facebook Ad. No Kidding.
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Folderol Stew
Ever wonder why even the best American poetry draws so little attention from the public at large? There are lots of reasons, of course, but today’s sermon deals with just one: the dreadful quality of writing about poetry. Compare the 11,000 words Susan M. Schultz lavishes on Charles Bernstein here with the 3,850 words James Salter devotes here to Paul Hendrickson‘s new book on the last 27 years of Ernest Hemingway‘s life. Salter beguiles; he makes me want not only to read Hendrickson but to reread Hemingway.Read More
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For Whom Do Poets Speak?
Linh Dinh is right, of course, in this powerful brief statement on poetics, which takes as its touchstone a powerful stanza by Czeslaw Milosz. The question is why. Why do we (poets, yes, but citizens as well of a system—there are no nations, really, not anymore—designed to maintain the hegemony of a mendacious, thieving elite) … why do we tolerate and even promote poetry that is superficial, trite, and purposely “uncreative,” utterly lacking in scope and depth? Why do we write about what we wish rather than what we know? I’m not talking about politics, per se.Read More
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A Toast
Bill Knott’s Poems for Death has made Don Share’s list of … well, I’m not sure what it’s a list of! Important books Share’s read so far this year? (A shot in the dark.) Anyway, he observes that “Bill is one of the best poets in the country.Read More
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A View from the Outside
If you haven’t seen Martin Earl’s farewell post on Harriet, read it now.Read More