Close Calls With Nonsense

I’ll be on this panel for the National Book Critics Circle at the Minneapolis Public Librarynext Wednesday Nov. 3 with other Graywolf authors and editors: Eula Biss, the amazing Marlon James (who came to the Twin Cities just when we left!) and Jeff Shotts.

The night before that I’ll be trying not to think about the election results that come in as I listen to Sarah Fox and John Colburn read and discuss the death of poetry (so the hed sez) at Bryant Lake Bowl. Sounds like fun to me.

I’ve got something new on the Poetry Foundation site about Agha Shahid Ali and what’s likely his best poem. Thanks to the patient editors and Urdu-speakers who gave me needed advice.

And thanks, too, to Jessie, who built this site– which I don’t use nearly enough– as I head farther away from the books already discussed here, towards the books of the future, by way of the baby of the moment, who can do more, and it seems eats more, every day.

I’m not sure how other reviewers do it, but I am discovering that having a baby, being home with the baby, and saying to yourself “Hey! I have a very limited time to read books, will have more time later, and need to cut down on reviewing for now in order to come back to it later, because otherwise I won’t read anything at all except books I’ve agred to review” turns out to be a pretty good way for me! Which also explains the relative paucity of posts to this here blog over the summer. (Hey, it’s summer. We’ve been at the beach. Once… with three more visits coming up.)

Right now I have just written something (it’s yet to appear) about Agha Shahid Ali and the ghazal in English. Ali, as you might already know, did quite a lot to popularize the “real” ghazal, with its array of formal requirements– monorhyme, refrain, a name in the last line, a constant length. Did you know, however, that the ghazal he prescribed was a form invented in Persia (and subsequently spread throughout the Islamic world, and beyond it), so that the older Arabic poems called ghazals do not have refrains? Did you know that the English-language go-to guy on the Urdu ghazal, and on Urdu poetry generally, for the second half of the twentieth century was also a committed British leftist who worked hard on the practical teaching of Urdu in the UK? Did you know that said go-to guy, Ralph Russell, died recently? I had had no idea.

Cooper is wonderful. School is over. The WNBA season has begun. It’s a good time for short sentences and long evenings at or near the backyard grill. Also a good time to lowball the value of poetry, as I did in a piece picked up by the Boston Globe…

When I’m feeling unusually busy at home I think of a saying communicated to me by someone else I trust absolutely, but atttributed (by that someone else) to the scholar Marjorie Nicolson: “You can always read a sonnet.” That is, you’ve always got time, somewhere in any day, for 14 lines.

David and I will have time for a few sonnets this Friday at Harvard Book Store on Mass. Ave. at 7pm. Drop in!

Almost forgot: there’s an excerpt from The Art of the Sonnet up now at the Poetry Foundation site, and I have two poems in the current London Review of Books.

I won’t attend the AWP conference in Denver, due to imminent baby! though I am still on the program: if you go, you can hear Jeff Shotts of Graywolf, Don Revell, and Tony Hoagland talk about stuff tangentially related to– and perhaps more interesting than– than some stuff I wrote.

If you are professionally involved in the study of literature, the so-called book world, you might want to know that Publishers Weekly has been purchased. Looks like a good owner. (I hope they re-hire my friends.)

If you are so involved, you should also consider joining the National Book Critics Circle. I’m now on the board; if you ask, I can tell you why you should join, and tell you more about the good things it does.

Nathan’s favorite word this week is “meta.” A dollhouse inside a dollhouse is meta, but a food item does not become meta simply because it has its name (“bread”) on its package. Sophisticated stuff.

Also sophisticated: book blogger Neil Verma, who devoted a graf to my Boston Review piece last month, and Canadian culture bloggers The Mark, who put Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden on a decade’s-best list.

That would be the last decade. I’m having trouble concentrating, right now, on the literary promise of this decade, because there’s a serious chance that a Republican will win Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. If you’re half as distressed about that prospect as I am, you might consider making a few calls, either from home or at an in-state event.

You might also be glad to see Coakley’s new ad. Had she been all over the airwaves with this one two weeks ago, a lot of Mass. Dems would be sleeping more soundly right now.

Back to poetry: my father and I went to hear Joan Houlihan read from The Us last night: the poems sounded good, and the story that connects them comes through when she reads.

It’s an extremely good week around here for nonacademic nonfiction, by friends and by famous strangers:

Douglas’s five-minute explication of Kant with reference to Wolverine and Reed Richards, available here as embedded video, isn’t just a very funny, and very useful, explication of Kant: it’s also a good quick show of how to give an effective lecture in the arts and humanities, how to know your audience, and how to use images well.

Sara’s book about Riot Grrrl isn’t out yet, but the site that promotes it is, with teasers for the book and links to her earlier writings. Also recommended.

This morning I finished the big detailed book on Sesame Street that’s been getting publicity everywhere: it’s worth your time if you ever cared about Muppets, and it makes a neat contrast with some very poorly crafted reported nonfiction I’m supposed to review at great length next month.

The first season of Friday Night Lights, the television series, must be the best writing ever done for TV, or at least the best I’ve ever seen– better than seasons 2 and 3 of Buffy, better than Aaron Sorkin’s best moments, better than The Singing Detective, better than the first three seasons of that show about Mafiosi in New Jersey. Jessie and I have been watching it– well, avidly, isn’t the word. (Virginia Woolf’s comments on George Eliot, as compared to her peers in the mid-Victorian novel business, might be the word.) I recommend the second season, too, though maybe not with such buttonholing, over-the-top enthusiasm, and I’m now reading the well-known nonfiction book that generated, first a film, then the TV show. It’s hard to put down.

But you have to put it down if your three year old wants to go play in the snow, and by “play” in his case we mean “play music”: Nathan spent much of the morning and part of the afternoon pretending a big stick was a contrabassoon, then pretending a medium-size stick with a clump of snow (played with a smaller stick) was a viola, and that a set of thin trees were tubular bells. Now that’s outdoor fun I can get behind. Fortunately, when asked, we can find and watch some great punk rock violin. And some smoking rock viola. Merry holidays to everyone; watch out for the freezing rain; and enjoy the new year.

Now it can be told: though my title won’t change till this summer, Harvard’s committees have met and decided to keep me around here. Suddenly I’m able to sleep well.

I’m not sure it’s a poem, but it’s fun, and it’s hard to forget: Silliman links to a video-poem composed entirely of homonyms. It’s probably time for me to read Riddley Walker, speaking of homonyms; quite soon I will. Right now I’m in the middle of this novel and this novel, and the usual cluster of new collections of poems.

I’m in the NYTBR on Marie Ponsot. There are very fine poems in that book.

Jordan Davis gets meta for Lemon Hound. Good reading. He also responds to me (thanks!): but I don’t think I ever said (contra Jordan) that blogs couldn’t host serious literary criticism, or if I did, I no longer think so. What I think now (and probably thought back then) is that blogs are ideal for tasks that have to be performed immediately if they are to be done well at all– e.g. in-the-moment reporting and instant reactions to real-time events, as in life-writing (online diaries), sports-writing (we want to know about this week’s games) and politics (by the way, Howard Dean now supports the Senate bill– see what a difference two days make?). Literary criticism, even reviewing, at its best isn’t usually so in-the-moment and doesn’t need to be: that’s why I had a bit of a hard time on Harriet, even though I was happy to blog there last year.

The new Terrance Hayes just came in the mail. If it’s as good as his last two books, it’s going to be very, very good.

The onetime Pacific NW fanzine writer and record-label creator Nancy Ostrander has a great blog, with vast swaths of indiepop content: if the term indiepop means something to you, as it has long meant something to me, check it out.

I’m in the current PN Review, number 190, describing the supposed differences between British and American poetry since the 1960s, with examples from Denise Riley, Peter Riley, Alison Brackenbury, Robert Minhinnick, Greta Stoddart, and other poets you probably haven’t read if you live in the United States, which is part of the point. The essay has generated at least one fascinating piece of hate mail; if you’re a current subscriber you might be able to read it online.

Ange Mlinko is in the last-but-one London Review of Books, making a brilliantly careful case for Barbara Guest.

Harvard has made the very defensible decision to fill up, and then leave alone for a bit, this big hole in the ground.

Nathan told us a story yesterday about the Angry Orchestra, which plays angry orchestral music all the time: the conductor, and all the musicians, are frogs, and all of them have the same name, Huckleberry, which might explain why the conductor gets so angry. I’m now seeking recommendations– seriously– for music the Angry Orchestra might play: that’s kid-appropriate classical or avant-garde, ideally with unusual instruments.

I should be correcting yet more proofs, but I’m fascinated instead by this sheepish site.

I’ve been out having fun with Jessie and Nathan holed up in a cave proofreading the next two books doing stuff, while far away these things happened:

I have an essay about comic book superheroes in poetry in the most recent Michigan Quarterly Review, which also has a thoughtful and counterintuitive piece on the future history of reading by my colleague Leah Price. My essay has something to say about poems by Bryan Dietrich, and by Ray McDaniel, who has been writing about the Legion of Super-Heroes, who would take a long time to list explain.

The Harvard Crimson decided to run a story about my science fiction course. People seem to like it.

Slumberland Records has a website with a beautiful series of podcasts, but where’s the track listing?

WHRB’s Record Hospital, the Harvard-based rock show that runs each weeknight from late to way-late on 95.3fm in Cambridge and on the web, is running a 25th-anniversary retrospective this week. I just taped an hour of air devoted to 1991, the year punk broke and indiepop got in between the pieces.

I’ve just finished writing about David Baker’s way-uncool– but very good– new book, and I’m excited about Karen Weiser’s first full-length out soon from Ugly Duckling. I really hope I’m not the only reader in America who likes both of these books a lot.

There’s a new book by Michele Leggott which I’m going to have to order right now: did you know that there’s quite a lot about her online?

Oh, and about those books I’ve been down a rabbit hole proofreading: the Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited by Ben Mazer, is now available for reading-about-in-the-catalog, and for pre-order, I think; and The Art of the Sonnet, which David Mikics and I wrote together, is too.

When you come back to New England from elsewhere you realize how pronounced our seasons are, and how human scale (or, from a Western point of view, bunched all together) our buildings and people have been. I like it here. (And I see, now more than formerly, why visitors from Western and Central Europe sometimes flee New England for other parts of America that look more “American,” more unlike what they know.)

I’ve got a piece on poetry and Project Runway up at the Poetry Foundation site today, and re-posted at the Huffington Post. Silliman correctly predicted the lineup for the finale. (I would have had Shirin, rather than Althea– but what do I know?)

I’m also in last month’s Believer (they come thick and fast these days! like the falling leaves), writing about Liz Waldner. More, as they used to say in newsrooms, TK.