Close Calls With Nonsense

D. A. Powell has a blog all his own. I’ll be checking back regularly (especially as I’m writing on him again now).

I’ve just finished writing at length about the differences between British poetry in general and American poetry in general (the print-ready version of this lecture from March) and you know what? I’m very glad to get back to writing about individual poets and their bodies of work. For now. This week, at least.

Ange gets it right, I suspect, about Frederick Seidel. Quickly, and before you click the link: what poet does Siedel, after 1980, most often resemble? If you answered Lowell– well, you can click the link now.

I haven’t been reading the BAP-blog as much as I could, but one more friend of ours is going to be writing there soon: time to start? I used to tell people that poetry and poetry criticism, being a slow art form involving some solitude and some relationship with the distant past, just didn’t lend itself to blogging in the way that politics and sports (in which there’s something new almost every day, and a demand for up-to-the-minute reactions) really do lend themselves to blogs as a form. As more and more of our friends become blogosphere natives, I’m starting to reconsider: are we headed for a poetry criticism that just is faster, sloppier, more apparently personal, than the (non-academic) poetry criticism I grew up reading, the kind I’ve been trying to write? I don’t think we are (I don’t think the idea of poetry criticism has changed that much, or not yet): but it’s food for thought.

See you tomorrow?