Close Calls With Nonsense

I’m in the current London Review of Books on Seamus Heaney’s giant book of interviews with the thoughtful Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll. You can’t read my piece online unless you subscribe to the print LRB– but maybe you subscribe to the print LRB (we do)!

One of the minor discoveries in the interviews (there are larger-scale discoveries too) involves a moment, described in Heaney’s poem “The Flight Path,” when Heaney encountered a Sinn Fein spokesperson on a train: the spokesperson has now said Heaney got it all wrong. I trust Heaney.

Bruce Sterling writes in WIRED (where else?) that contemporary literature, as such, is challenged doomed. Check out his 18th challenge, which I take (he probably won’t) as suggesting that other forms of contemporary literature (and in particular the novel, and in really particular particulars self-consciously literary mostly-realist fiction) might become more and more, in this century, like what poetry now (compared to poetry in 1815, or even in 1865) has already become: given to short intense versions of itself, circulated in many forms whose prestige varies widely, divided into divergent taste communities, some of them international, some of them polyglot, some of them “difficult” on the face of it, and some of them certainly not…

If you live in New York and you have nothing to do on Thursday June 18 and you want to hear Elizabeth Alexander, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Sharon Olds, or (cough) me (as a moderator– I won’t be reading my own verse, much less my own essays), you might want to come to Central Park.