Close Calls With Nonsense

…introducing the finalists in criticism for the National Book Critics Circle this Saturday night in New York.

I’ll also be reading from my own poems with Allan Peterson, who is terrific, at Blacksmith House in Cambridge on Monday Feb. 7.

Do consider attending either event, if you’ve got no other plans.

The first issue of the new online journal Evening Will Come appears to consist (so far) entirely of a fine lyric essay by C. D. Wright: read to the end to see what she views as the primary, or most powerful, single word.

Just received, and something I’m really going to be very happy to read: the new Chicago Review, whose essays’n'criticism section amounts to a festschrift for Robert von Hallberg. You can’t read the essays online– you’ll have to buy the issue, or read it in some good library– but you can read new poems by Rae Armantrout, along with a swath of book reviews.

Trying to track down something in a literary magazine you can’t find, and one your library doesn’t own? If the magazine is British, you’re in luck: I had to look up something in the much-lamented Thumbscrew and there’s lots of ’screws at the Southbank Centre Poetry Library. Also Angel Exhaust for the avant-gardiste, a few New Welsh Reviews, and many more. That’s what the Internet is for. (Well, that, and some other things. Pictures of cats, say.)

One of my new favorite poetry bloggers, Mike Chasar at Poetry and Popular Culture, has been puncturing pretensions for a while now: in his, or their (friends do it too) latest, we see how and why the Hallmark card might surpass even (say) Susan Howe, or Pound, in requiring its projected readers to focus on the materiality of the page on which the verse appears. (Is a sigh in order? Perhaps.)

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.

We’re in DC with my family and while our children nap I’ve been reading this good anthology of “experimental”/ disjunctive UK women poets, edited by the US-to-UK transplant poet Carrie Etter, and also reading this very good anthology of UK and US poets invited to Oxford by Christopher Ricks. They are thesis and antithesis, or avant-garde and retro, or something. I’ll have more to say about the apparent opposition between them elsewhere soon, with any luck.

If you are stuck somewhere with no book, but with your iPhone, do check out the Poetry Foundation iPhone app: shake it and you get a random poem; shake it again if you don’t like the poem you get the first time. It’s like a Magic Eight Ball that is also a rather good poetry anthology; if I’m not careful it’s going to cause me (and not only me) to hold up all sorts of long queues checkout lines.

The latest online issue of Verse Wisconsin has a new poem by Lorine Niedecker. Turns out the parts aren’t new– but the assemblage is. Take a look.

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!