Close Calls With Nonsense

I’m in a new series of essays on neglected poems, sponsored by Poetry Daily, emailed to their donors and subscribers, and unavailable so far on the internets generally, except in a version pirated by a bot-run website. (I’m writing on S. M. B. Piatt.) You will be able to read the whole series later this year; in the meantime, you can read this striking poem by Terrance Hayes. You can also contribute to that site’s good work.

Plenty of Boston-area poetry readings by major figures coming up, including Kevin Young tonight at BC, James Tate, Matt Rohr and Joshua Beckman tomorrow at Harvard, and W. S. Merwin next Friday at Harvard. I will likely attend, at most, one (see previous post!).

I’m also reading with Ben Mazer at Pierre Menard (10 Arrow St, Harvard Square, Cambridge), at 3pm this Sunday. See you there? No worries if you can’t make it.

Anyone else see this document about “self” and “poem”? I got it from a U of Chicago mailing list and it’s feeding what are already rather convoluted thoughts about the evolution of (and the resistance to) the idea that we have selves, or that poems have selves too. I expect to turn those thoughts into some writing as soon as I can (which may not be super-soon), perhaps in conjunction with my mixed but ultimately admiring reactions to the projects of Jennifer Moxley, whose self-in-poems seems to run exactly against all the positions that her initial supporters in the post-avant world seemed to take.