Close Calls With Nonsense

One of the delights in teaching a course all about Auden: reading and rereading Auden’s late prose. The poetry, as everyone knows, gets uneven, though I think some of the last poems as sharp as they are sad: but how many people know, and how many should know, about the fun you can have by opening, to a random page, A Certain World?

I’m at the Columbia University Press blog today, connecting Nathan’s recent activities in the field of visual art to the letters of John Keats. No, they are related.

Finally: it’s official, and I’ve seen the finished volume: Something Understood is available! I don’t know whether we will have events in its honor, since the person it honors is out of the country right now, but I am delighted with the set of critics and poets therein.

Via Johannes Goransson’s blog, I discover the continuing project that is Anne Boyer’s Odalisqued. Space opera? Experiment in taste? Ongoing prose poem? Fascinating, for now– we’ll see how long the fascination keeps up. It’s certainly an instance (a rare one for me) of something memorable that feels like a poem, not a work of visual art or a web-based game, and yet something that could only exist on the Web, not between pages, without distorting what it tries to do.

Brief but remarkably laudatory– thanks!– reviews of Close Calls now out in Publishers Weekly (scroll down a bit) and in… Entertainment Weekly! Where Ken Tucker has also been recommending, within the severe limits of the EW word count, Denise Duhamel and D. A. Powell.

Now reading penultimate drafts for The Art of the Sonnet, and realizing how many of the poems we have chosen– esp those from before 1960– are elegies. What is it about our expectations for poetry in general that make (a) protest and (b) mourning seem like the highest, most praiseworthy goals, or those most likely to lead to an aesthetically successful, memorable result? Or does the question not make sense with such a relatively restricted sample, and such a small (100 sonnets) sample size? (If you want to read a lot more sonnets– no, a lot more, from 1600 and c.1750 and 1800 and 1850 and 1900 and 1910– Sonnet Central is the place to go. It’s almost certainly a nonacademic site, though the texts, taken from public domain sources, are trustworthy from what I’ve seen– and the level of nonacademic, presumably noncompensated labor involved is just immense, and deserves praise.)

Not directly related to contemporary poetry, I realize: my youngest brother’s op-ed in the new U.S. News, about his years of contact with Archbishop Tutu. With pictures. Take a look.

Vermillion, South Dakota is friendly, and flat, and has chislic, which is, or are, deep-fried meat pieces. It’s nothing like Vermillion Sands. Or is it? Would the Coffee Shop Gallery fit there?

I learn from her blog that Sandra Beasley’s second book will be out in 2010. This is good news: I’ve been liking her recent poems (sestinas in the Black Warrior Review, for example) an awful lot (more, really, than I liked some of her Theory of Falling).

My piece about William Carlos Williams’ poem “To a Poor Old Woman” now looks just as it ought to look: props to the Poetry Foundation folks for fixing, immediately, something I should have fixed before it went live!

A lot of smart people seem to be reading The Rumpus I should start. It seems to be a web-only culture-in-general mag, but they’re doing cool things for National Poetry Month– printing poems by people who aren’t already famous, for example, and running articulate book reviews. Here’s another articulate admirer for the prose poetry of Allison Benis White. The Rumpus is also running a book review contest aimed at students– but why is the contest restricted to reviews of prose?

This year’s Best New Zealand Poetry is now out! It’s a web-only anthology (click the link to get to the front page), so no worries about whether you want to pay to have a book shipped all the way from, say, Auckland: you can read last year’s gems by Michele Leggott, e.g., right now, for free.

Finally: sad news this week about the loss of the important critic Eve Sedgwick, best known as one of the founders of queer studies. You might not see it in what I’ve been writing lately, but her work, especially the essays in Tendencies, have been models I’ve admired for a long time.

Tomorrow night I’m talking in South Dakota. It will be my first visit to SD, and my first visit to Sioux City, Iowa, the airport close enough to Vermilion that it’s the first choice for Vermilion-bound flyers. I saw some, but not enough, of the far, non-metropolitan Midwest when we lived in the Twin Cities; and now I’ll see more. I’ll be reading and talking about contemporary poetry, but also giving a talk about science fiction!

My host there, Lee Ann Roripaugh, has a neat, haunting poem that retells the Lamia story, and its equivalent in Japanese legend, through the Lamia’s eyes– literally through her eyes. Turns out the poem is online. She also likes octopus. Me too.

In other “me! me!” news, I reviewed Thom Gunn’s Selected Poems for the SF Chronicle, and now I’m the review of the day at Powell’s; I’ve also got something on William Carlos Willams up at the Poetry Foundation, though when I look at it now I fear that the graf breaks are all wrong, and that all the wrongness is my own hastily-proofreading fault. Anyone else have that feeling when looking at published work?

In non-me news, the always-worth-checking-with Cold Front web-journal has a neat feature called “Poets Off Poetry”: here’s Mark Bibbins on shoegazing and related dreamy pop sounds, and Chris Martin introducing some indie hip-hop. Note the props given to Slug, of Minnesota’s own fine Atmosphere.

My poem in the current Colorado Review was recently Verse Daily’s Poem of the Day.

Currently enjoying new, or new-to-me, books (not already mentioned in this space) by Patty Seyburn, Angie Estes, Patrick Pritchett, Jane Draycott, and, from South Africa via (I think) London or Manchester, Karen Kilalea.

Estes, Seyburn, Robyn Schiff (whom I wrote about recently already), and a few other poets are starting to seem to me like some sort of happy coincidence, or proto-movement– neo-glamor? the fabric baroque?– not just in their subjects but in how they handle their lines, their references, their often quite long sentences, their insistence that very complicated syntax and other high cognitive demands on the reader can coexist with high fashion and with a light touch. I may have more to say about such things in print sometime, especially if I don’t get the chance to review more of their books at length one by one, unless I change my mind (which is the peril of lit-crit blogging, I guess).

Still thinking about (another essay that may see daylight sometime next year) rules for how to read prose poems, with examples from Benis White, G. C. Waldrep, Geoff Bouvier, Ben Lerner, Killarney Clary, and a few others, perhaps back to Baudelaire. One of my (very, very bright) graduate students argued (if I understood him rightly) this week that “prose poem” is something like a diagnosis of exclusion (though he didn’t use the medical term): you know you are reading a prose poem if the text isn’t verse and isn’t any other kind of (consecutive, argumentative, expository, humorous or narrative) prose. Would Steve Monte agree?