Close Calls With Nonsense

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!

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.

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.

Via David Blair, I see the magazine storySouth has a new online format, in which you can find a poem I like very much by Christopher Ankney, a fun harsh political poem by David himself (look for the beefsteak tomato), and a very memorable essay by Lee Zacharias, who has just retired after three decades at UNC-Greensboro and reflects on the difference between the Lee who started teaching there in the 1970s and the Lee who has finished teaching now. The magazine, connected to UNCG, also contains tributes to the poet Robert Watson, whom I met and liked when I was there in the 1990s doing research on Randall Jarrell.

My student Victoria Ascheim is a videographer for Harvard’s Office of the Arts: in the latter capacity, she made this long video in which I talk about Laura Kasischke, Kay Ryan, and poetry-in-general.

Monica Youn’s amazing book of poems about Krazy Kat has officially been published, and it’s the pick of the day on Poetry Daily!

Marjorie Perloff still likes the poetry of Rae Armantrout. (Me too.)

I’ll be onstage briefly at the marathon reading next Wednesday, March 10, at the New School, where everybody nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award this year can read for five minutes, presumably from the nominated book. It might be grueling, it might be a lot of fun, and if it’s like the last marathon reading I attended (in Chicago a year and a half ago) it should be a little of both. The NBCC’s James Marcus throws fine praise at Close Calls,for which I’m nominated, right here.

If you teach the poetry of Terrance Hayes you will have reason to look up– and your students will have reason to look up– an uncommon assortment of famous, but not very famous, musicians and other performers: that’s how I discovered, yesterday, the music of New Orleans piano player James Booker and how some of my students discovered the early-1970s peak personae of David Bowie. Next week I’ll have to play them some Kool Keith.

Looks like Paul Millar’s selection from the poems of the great New Zealand poet- polemicist-visionary James K. Baxter has now been published in Britain. I can’t really praise him enough, though I’ve tried. If you care about modern poetry in English beyond the bounds of the United States, and you don’t own a Selected Baxter, you need one; and if you care about modern poetry in English, but only within the bounds of the United States, that’s kind of parochial, don’t you think?

Also new and wonderful, though not quite in the same way: thanks to Jessie, the book covers to the left of this post now reflect my next book, co-written with David Mikics. We’ve also brought up to date the part about me.

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.

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.

Happy New Year to all, and to all a good preschool restarts on Monday morning night…

Habitual book reviewers, such as myself, keep an eye on the ratio of stuff read to stuff written about; when the denominator approaches the numerator, as seemed likely to happen in 2009, then it’s time to take a step back and read in genres you’re not likely to write much about, which is what I’ve been doing over the holiday. Further reports may, or may not, be on the way.

For now, I’d like to call your newly, yearly, resolved attention to the rock band Sleepyhead, who made four great records, lost a bass player (who happened to be our wedding photographer– I met him through writing about his band), moved to Massachusetts, had at least one child (not sure there), and spent about ten years making record #5– and now you can hear the first songs from that record: it’s not a big departure from record #4, and it’s going to be at least as good.

You might also check out Lightful Press, run by my dedicated and inventive former student Katie Fowley: they’ve got a book length poem by Liz Waldner out already, and some other projects in the works.

I plan to attend at least two Boston readings in January: Joan Houlihan at Lesley Univ. on Jan. 10, and Julie Carr at Pierre Menard Gallery on Jan. 30. Maybe I’ll see you there.

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.