Close Calls With Nonsense

No, I haven’t stopped blogging, nor have I been thrown into a semi-permanent pit of despair by the paralysis in Washington the Democratic Party the structural impediments to government– to any government at all– created mostly by the filibuster. Perhaps we’re doomed. But literature proceeds; so does lit-blogging.

For example, I see that Sina Queyras, who writes poems I like and who compiled one of my favorite contemporary anthologies, has started blogging at Harriet. So has Craig Santos Perez, whose book about Guam I liked. (I’m not sure if he’d want me to say “about,” though unlike Silliman, I do think poems are about things.) There’s something antithetical to the literary itself about blogging as such, since the former aspires to condensation and lastingness (for me, fading coal notwithstanding) and the latter to immediate, clear response: but in a time when other kinds of reviewing are (to put it quietly) under the weather, thoughtful blogging should be praised.

What else should be praised? The new fables, or prose works, or something (I don’t think they’re prose poems) by Craig Teicher. It’s called Cradle Book, and the first two sections (of three) are more like Kafka’s parables and anecdotes than any short prose I’ve read that’s not actually by Kafka or maybe by Lydia Davis. They are bleak, they have the legato arcs and the diminished minor chords of adult life, they are elegant, they should be read. By you, if you can.

Also recommended: that first book of prose poems by Alison Benis White, in retrospect perhaps the first book of the year; this superb collection of prose (not poems) by J. Robert Lennon, which will form one pillar of an essay about the difference between “prose” and prose poems if I ever get around to writing it (maybe this fall); and the Bikini Kill blog. If this band changed your life, tell them why. I might (I haven’t yet).

I have been writing reviews: of Samuel Menashe in the new TLS (review itself not online, sorry), of Mark Bibbins in the irreplaceable Cold Front.

And poems. When I figure out what the heck to call the next collection of poems, I’ll tell you; you can hear a couple of the new works (they are short, and some of them rhyme) at the Fordham event on Feb. 25, where I read with Eamon Grennan. Turns out the event’s on Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus: till recently I thought it would be in the Bronx.

Chris Lydon at Open Source Radio interviewed me last week and the results are up: he’s a Real Radio Person– and a reader, too. It was a pleasure. Check out his conversations with Helen Vendler and Rosanna Warren, too.

Before it was a completely absorbing, charming, memorable, entirely recommended graphic novel, Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds was a newspaper comic strip.

I’m still speaking with Donald Revell, and he’s speaking with me, at UNLV this Thursday at 7:30pm. I see from the website (scroll down for the event info) that Chris Arigo, whom I met at Colorado State University ten years ago, is now a fellow in poetry-writing there. Cool!

If you’re not already an admirer of Stephen Fry, you will be when you read this letter he wrote to a stranger who needed these words.

Every so often I find in the library, receive in the mail, or acquire, through the exchange of legal tender, books I very much want to recommend, and yet likely won’t have the time, nor the venue, to review properly (either that or the books are just too old for review). One such book is the new lit-crit study by the British poet and scholar Angela Leighton, called On Form. It’s one of the only recent books about form-in-general, poetry-in-general, and the history of ideas about poetic form in general that made me want to run towards, not away from its author: Leighton suggests, sympathetically and plausibly, that “form” has the hidden double “nothing,” itself a double (as you might expect) for “death”: that the fluidity of life (the opposite of nothing, the opposite of death) makes the idea of a wholly fixed poetic form something of an oxymoron; that Walter Pater understood all this; that we can trace specifically Paterian ideas about form, flux and “nothing” from the mid-Victorians all the way up to contemporary British poetry, with a useful stopover in the auroral America of Wallace Stevens; and that, once we have done that sort of tracing, we can place reductive, hostile ideas about the history of “form” (the sort of ideas many grad students think they’ve discovered) in the dustbin where they belong. I am making a vivid sketch of Leighton’s implications, rather than writing a proper book review and saying what she proves, because I’m not a Victorianist, really, and this is a blog, not a peer-reviewed quarterly: but really what I’m saying is, if you’re at all a lit-crit academic, I hope you will read her book.

Something else I really liked but probably won’t review: Franck Andre Jamme’s New Exercises, a book of brief shaped poems– all in caps, in shapes like the letters engraved on tombstones, with no spaces between the words– that sound good even in translation from the French. I knew that some folks believe lyric poetry evolved out of inscriptions on ancient tombs, but I never had an intuitive understanding of the sources for their beliefs until I read what Jamme has done: it sounds good even in translation (by Charles Borkhuis) from the French. You can see a typical, if more-than-typically laconic, Jamme-Borkhuis work here.

Two more recommendations, both graphic novels, both discovered in Ann Arbor, thanks to the dual agency– they are an irresistibly convincing combination– of Rebecca Porte and Ray McDaniel: first, the bittersweet, achy streamlined-realist teen-sadness chronicle SKIM, which is a lot less sexy– and a lot sadder, and at least a bit more profound– than the few reviews I’ve seen implied; second, the latest collection of Astro City installments. If I had ever possessed the ability to make technically sophisticated, long-form comics, Astro City is what I hope I would have made.