Close Calls With Nonsense

I’ve just now discovered the Structure and Surprise blog, which supplements and comments on the poetry-and-poetics material in Michael Theune’s edited volume, which I think I’ll have to read.

I’m in yesterday’s NYTBR. Bite-size reviews, but they were fun to write: some people are going to have their lives changed by the Waldrep, and others by the Estes, though I fear that nobody except me will have a life changed and improved by both. Prove me wrong, broad-minded contemporary connoisseurs…

Joel Brouwer gives Harriet a long and thoughtful review of three books I spent some time considering too: Chris Martin’s book-length neo-New York School project, Karen Volkman’s beautiful, dense sonnets, and Rick Barot’s latest.

Want to buy Publishers Weekly? Because someone should.

In non-poetry news (though it’s certainly arts news) we have been spending as much time as possible at outdoor music events: Nathan and I saw Metric, Passion Pit and the Gaslight Anthem at City Hall Park two days ago; the week before that, all three of us hit the Lowell Folk Festival, where a friend is part of the sound-and-stage tech team; and, before that, and best of all in a number of ways, a weekend away at the Green River Festival, an outdoor music event of a kind I had never attended before: we loved it, Nathan loved it, and we’re going again.

And in other non-poetry news, I’m finally reducing the size of the contemporary fiction stack (I may have more to say about such matters at Critical Mass soon enough). Jedediah Berry’s Manual of Detection is terrific, for what it is (sinuously self-conscious neo-meta-noir) and has stayed in my head for weeks now after I’ve finished it; and Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which Lev put on the TIME roster of the 100 best modern novels, has held my attention raptly so far– though you might want to be warned that, so far, it’s absolutely comfortless, even compared to Oryx and Crake. Speaking of which: there’s a companion novel (a sequel, even) to O&C, due soon.