Close Calls With Nonsense

Did you know that if you read only poetry and poetry criticism for more than a month at a time your eyelids will fall off? Pretty scary. I’ve come close, but I’m happy to say that I’ve avoided that fate, and not (or not only) by reading about the women’s Final Four: also just finished the first novel in the “Science in the Capital” trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and either it’s really first-rate, or I am the ideal reader for a novel about global climate change in which Washington, DC gets hit by big floods. Or both!

It’s got a witty– but by no means optimistic– ending, and has me scurrying to the second novel in the triad; if you want a short, optimistic look at one way to solve a very big political-cultural problem (though not global climate change) check out this anticorruption tool from India (and from Indian expats). It seems to work!

And if you want to see ecocriticism done entertainingly and reasonably and in a way that might actually interest “lay readers” and American historians (not just professional literary criticism), check out this book about how we see (or don’t see) what goes on in the National Parks.

And here is the sort of multimedia, couldn’t-be-anything-else very short film of a microfiction that makes me wonder why I don’t write about video art all the time. It’s a wonder, and it’s apparently also a book trailer for an upcoming book of flash fiction, or microfiction, or prose poems, or whatever the kids are calling such things these days, by Joseph Young. The same webmag, HTMLGiant, said something about me a while back, and now says something haunting about Lydia Davis.

Speaking of which, or of whom, is there any difference between microfiction and prose poetry any more, other than what it says on the spine and whether the publishers send it to “poetry people” or to fiction reviewers? Because as I start to think seriously about whatever prose poems now do and mean (Waldrep, Benis White, Guess, Johnson, Clary, Lerner, &c &c) I’m thinking that Lydia Davis does most of those things too. (No wonder poets tend to admire her.) I realize that it’s hardly a new question: I’m just wondering whether I’ve missed some cool answers.

Did you know that you can reach a human being at almost any megacorporation that deals with consumers, even the ones that try very hard to connect you only to automated computers when you dial their 800 number, and even the ones that try hard to get you not to call? There’s something like a figure for 21st century lyric poetry right there. Stay tuned.

Up late doing laundry for our upcoming trip to MN and the Twin Cities Book Festival. Maybe we’ll see you there.

Yesterday I said I’d been enjoying Nicholson Baker and Mark Bibbins, and I nearly promised enjoyable examples: I am almost as good as my word. Baker’s The Everlasting Story of Nory is a book you will find either charming beyond belief or so irritating you’ll close it as soon as you open it, since it is narrated (if “narrate” is really the word) by a cute-as-a-button nine-year-old girl:

“In Shakespeare’s plays what they would do, according to the drama teacher at the Junior School, is they would have an outfit on and they would sew a pig’s bladder in a little tiny place under the outfit that would have a little mark on it so that the person knew right where to stab… ‘But wouldn’t they run out of pigs quite quickly?’ Nory though to herself. ‘And therefore run out of pig’s bladders, and therefore could not do another play?’ Shakespeare would have to go on stage before the play and say, ‘As you may know, we cannot do any of the blood we were going to do tonight, because we have run out of our lovely pig’s bladders. We checked in the cupboard this morning, but due to good business, and a number of highly gruesome plays, we have run out. Please enjoy the show. You can have your ticket refunded if you would rather not see the show without blood, since early next week we will have more fresh pig’s bladders shipped to us. We are also going to be getting some big, fat, juicy cow bladders in stock that we will be using for some extremely disgusting effects in a play I will be finishing soon.’”

Also from Nory, on the practice of literary criticism: “Sometimes the problem with telling someone about a book was that the description you could make of it could just as easily be a description of a boring book. There’s no proof that you can give the person that it’s a really good book, unless they read it. But how are you going to convince them that they should read it unless they have a glint of what’s so great about it by reading a little of it?”

(The solution to which dilemma, squarely faced, might be– as Jarrell said of Marianne Moore’s prose– to make book reviews just “quotations and a few conjunctions.” But then perhaps no one would read, nor solicit, book reviews.)

And from Bibbins’s new one, the second half of a poem entitled “Redemption”:

That was ages ago, when everyone’s predilections
could spread unchecked and without consequence.

We flourished, all dirty and dazzling
as tranny hookers under the Manhattan Bridge.

Yes, but can you [activity] when you’re not [adjective]?
What if you were slightly [adjective]?

Today, in the great corporate slideshow
of the heart, the bullet points are blanks.

Today, though I am feeling positively artisanal,
I’m letting you do the work, like you

like to: I’m letting you pretend you’re still
the sun, drawing an infernal line through everything.

Things that have kept me going this afternoon: the new and fun (groovy, even) Mark Bibbins (his poem “Ending in an Abandoned Month,” a relic of the late Bush administration in some ways, reminds me in others of those new, bare, articulate poems by J. Moxley); several books by Nicholson Baker, of whom perhaps more later (his new novel is a lot of fun, though its claim about Robert Herrick seems to be bogus); the rest of the music of Game Theory, the band whose pop music I would make if I were able to make superb pop music, said “rest” being in my possession only on vinyl until this very week (thanks, MT!); the quick submission of several pieces I’ve been simultaneously at work on, and under contract for, since June (thanks, editors!); a surprise visit from my youngest brother, who is in town for most of the week; the athletic example of Cappie [warning: site plays music]; and, most of all, a new bottle of ibuprofen. If you have a desk, I strongly, strongly recommend you keep such a bottle in it. Otherwise you could lose a whole day.

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.

No time to post more now, but do check out the just-launched site for the Harvard UP New Literary History of America, for which I had the privilege of serving on the editorial board. The Press is also running a contest for bookstores around the volume, for which I also wrote a couple of the 200-plus entries. You won’t see my essays on the site, but you will see Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison; Arnold Rampersad on W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington; and Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors on Hurricane Katrina, which is in this extended sense a literary event.

I’m in the middle of Jenny Davidson’s YA novel, The Explosionist. It’s a lot of fun– even more so if you notice the way her eighteenth-century expertise informs the world she’s built for the book, noticings that the younger parts of her intended audience won’t mind if they don’t pick up (and will feel pretty special if they do). It is, in a way, set during the Scottish Enlightenment… and yet, really, it’s set in an alternate-history Scotland where Napoleon, 200 years ago, won the Napoleonic Wars.

I’m in Harvey Hix’s new anthology, intended to introduce US poets to Northern Ireland! It ends with William Meredith’s fine sonnet “The Illiterate,” but most of the people in it are my age, or not much older, or a bit younger. So far I like it. Best discovery: a poet about Bikini Atoll by Quan Barry.

I’m also in a recent, though no longer the current, LRB, writing about Frank Bidart. People should read him.