Close Calls With Nonsense

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.)