Close Calls is pleased to announce the arrival of someone else closer to us than any mere literary work could ever be: Jessie and I now have our second child, Cooper Robert Bennett Burt, born safely in Boston on Tuesday April 13, and later delivered safely to our home. He’s got dark eyes, fine blond hair, and a winning smile, which he deploys on nearly every occasion.
I’m conducting a discussion of contemporary poetry with Chris Lydon for PEN-New England at Upstairs on the Square, the restaurant, tomorrow (Thursday, April 1) at 5:30pm: apparently there may be free wine. No foolin’.
After a few months with maybe not so many exciting new poetry books I’ve suddenly got a stack I’m (at the least) happy to spend more time looking over: from the “left,” Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path, a big sequence– maybe the best of a few big sequences– whose collage and recombinant techniques let him shift back and forth between worries about the political irrelevance of poems in the age of Big Capital, attractive materials “quoted” from science, war poetry and meta-war poetry, despite-it-all expressions of fidelity to “Ari” (his partner, I assume) and much else. And from the, um, “center,” Sandra Beasley’s second collection, I Was the Jukebox. I may have more to say about this book– which deserves to be very, very popular (I wouldn’t have said that about her first collection)– soon.
Julie Carr in the new Colorado Review has reviewed Close Calls: she gets it exactly right. (It’s flattering, too– though it also outs me as a [gasp!] liberal humanist: don’t tell my devoutly poststructuralist far-left friends. Come to think of it, can you be devoutly poststructuralist? I think it involves a contradiction in terms; then again, that’s what a liberal humanist would say.) Check out Counterpath Press, which Carr co-runs. (Co-operates? Co-exists?)
The Art of the Sonnet has been published, as of this week: there’s a big glossy hardcover copy in front of me now. Thanks to David, and to our editors…
Want to know what the @#$% happened in last night’s election? Here’s my take on the London Review of Books blog, where I hope I’ll be making less than regular but more than occasional appearances.
I’ve apparently been elected to the board of the National Book Critics Circle, where I’ll be joining such luminaries as Craig Teicher, Jane Ciabattari, Lizzie Skurnick, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Kevin Prufer… fortunately my responsibilities don’t start quite yet. It’s a welcome honor and I hope I don’t screw it up.
I’ll be reading at Fordham University along with Eamon Grennan on Feb. 25; the event’s supposed to focus on Irish poetry, and I’ll probably be talking a bit about the poetry of Paul Muldoon.
And now, music. When I feel frustrated with other people’s irresponsibility or overwhelmed by my own responsibilities there’s really only one band I can completely enjoy: it’s Scrawl, of Columbus, Ohio. I saw them at the end of their final tour, when they were in the process of being dropped by their major label, before about a dozen people in a big white room at the Knitting Factory: it was anticlimactic and sad, and it was also one of the best rock shows I’ve ever seen, and you can usually pick up their great last album, which also serves as a best-of (with out-of-print songs re-recorded), for pennies.
Scrawl broke up after that tour, to nobody’s surprise, and I thought they had stopped making music– but now it turns out that singer and bassist Sue Harshe has at least two great new songs. Is there a record? Are these live videos of Scrawl in Columbus really from 2009, which would mean that the band has come back together? Are there new songs?
Scrawl guitarist Marcy Mays apparently owns part of this Columbus bar. Here are two Scrawl songs, in much better sound quality than you’ll get from the video. And here’s a crazy long interview for compleatists; there was another one in a zine called Too Fun Too Huge, which I ought to revisit someday.
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.
Our edition of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman speeds towards completion, like Tuckerman’s “bird that shuts its wings,” though such a bird would probably be diving– I hope the book doesn’t sink, but catches some prey in its elegant bill. By “our” I mean that the actual textual edition, the edition per se, is Ben Mazer’s: I just wrote an introduction and contributed some of the notes. He’s been a pleasure to work with, and superbly thorough in textual matters (as makers of editions surely should be).
I review the new Nicholson Baker novel, or “novel,” or maybe “introduction to poetry,” in a recent SF Chronicle. It’s a good one, though not his best– and it won’t take you long to read.
Jordan reviews several rock shows. I wish there were a wormhole through which I could get to Madison whenever I wanted to get there. (Same for the Twin Cities, of course.)
Andrew Seal reviews me, generously and thoughtfully. He also indicates that what I write in Close Calls about D. A. Powell doesn’t help him understand what Powell’s new book does differently from Powell’s prior books, to which I reply: stay tuned.
Robert Archambeau, responding to Kent Johnson at length, responds to me in passing (as Robert Baird responded to me earlier): Archambeau and Johnson (not to be confused with Devin Johnston) are defending, indeed advocating, a Chicagoland poetry scene, claiming– with some plausibility– that it’s the most promising set of youngish poets operating in American English right now. I’d like to see the same (again, plausible) claims taken up by somebody who lives somewhere else.
The new Jubilat looks good. So does There, a journal of place-attachment and literary geography (more or less), making clear how vast the subject is (I’m glad I only write about it in relation to particular authors!). So does this music book. Some of our friends are in it. So does this music school, where Nathan and I watched an orchestra rehearse today!
This memoir and its author absolutely deserve their recent popular success: it should appeal both to people (like me) who care first of all about craft,the arrangement of chapters, the timbre of sentences, and to people (like the large majority of the large public for life-writing) who just want the stories of eventful lives clearly told. The attention has gone first of all, and understandably, to the part about adoption. I wish she would say more somewhere about how it felt to be a nontraditional student at a very traditional and selective small college. (Maybe she already has and I’ve missed that essay.)
I’ll be at some of these events celebrating the New Literary History of America. See you soon.
I’m up at the National Book Critics Circle blog talking about enumerating recent reading: I seem to have developed a love/ hate/ scratch-head relationship with the latest book by Rachel Zucker. I disliked her first two, never saw her third, and am now enthused and discombobulated by the fourth. If you get it, start with the one where one of her kids has a fever.
In the latest Jacket, Rob Stanton (a critic I want to read more often) looks at Joseph Massey’s big collection of small things.
I so want this book, and not just because a few of our friends are in it.
Courtney Queeney in Bookslut has a thoughtful essay about feminism, femininity, and contemporary poems. She thinks I’m falling prey to unconscious sexism when I praise Ange Mlinko, in an early poem of hers, for virtues that “Personal Poem,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and Paterson also possess, which is weird, but I take her larger points: scroll down for spot-on comments about Glück’s justly famous poem “Mock Orange.”
Here’s a prolific and thoughtful poetry blog, full of interviews with editors, I’m glad to have (just) seen.
Jen Hadfield, a Scottish poet whose work (fragmented couplets, prose poems, sense of place) I like a lot, really ought to be known to more than three Americans: you can read a neat new interview with her at the Scottish Poetry Library blog.
And in non-poetry news that still counts as arts news, I saw the Trash Can Sinatras last night, with high expectations, and was surprised to discover that though the TCS surely practice a lot, and the lead singer has quite a flexible voice, the new Youth Group record (which the club had on the stereo) was not only simpler and more “commercial” (whatever that means these days) but better, with more internal variety, too.
Via Johannes Goransson’s blog, I discover the continuing project that is Anne Boyer’s Odalisqued. Space opera? Experiment in taste? Ongoing prose poem? Fascinating, for now– we’ll see how long the fascination keeps up. It’s certainly an instance (a rare one for me) of something memorable that feels like a poem, not a work of visual art or a web-based game, and yet something that could only exist on the Web, not between pages, without distorting what it tries to do.
Brief but remarkably laudatory– thanks!– reviews of Close Calls now out in Publishers Weekly (scroll down a bit) and in… Entertainment Weekly! Where Ken Tucker has also been recommending, within the severe limits of the EW word count, Denise Duhamel and D. A. Powell.
Now reading penultimate drafts for The Art of the Sonnet, and realizing how many of the poems we have chosen– esp those from before 1960– are elegies. What is it about our expectations for poetry in general that make (a) protest and (b) mourning seem like the highest, most praiseworthy goals, or those most likely to lead to an aesthetically successful, memorable result? Or does the question not make sense with such a relatively restricted sample, and such a small (100 sonnets) sample size? (If you want to read a lot more sonnets– no, a lot more, from 1600 and c.1750 and 1800 and 1850 and 1900 and 1910– Sonnet Central is the place to go. It’s almost certainly a nonacademic site, though the texts, taken from public domain sources, are trustworthy from what I’ve seen– and the level of nonacademic, presumably noncompensated labor involved is just immense, and deserves praise.)
Not directly related to contemporary poetry, I realize: my youngest brother’s op-ed in the new U.S. News, about his years of contact with Archbishop Tutu. With pictures. Take a look.
Vermillion, South Dakota is friendly, and flat, and has chislic, which is, or are, deep-fried meat pieces. It’s nothing like Vermillion Sands. Or is it? Would the Coffee Shop Gallery fit there?
I learn from her blog that Sandra Beasley’s second book will be out in 2010. This is good news: I’ve been liking her recent poems (sestinas in the Black Warrior Review, for example) an awful lot (more, really, than I liked some of her Theory of Falling).
My piece about William Carlos Williams’ poem “To a Poor Old Woman” now looks just as it ought to look: props to the Poetry Foundation folks for fixing, immediately, something I should have fixed before it went live!
A lot of smart people seem to be reading The Rumpus I should start. It seems to be a web-only culture-in-general mag, but they’re doing cool things for National Poetry Month– printing poems by people who aren’t already famous, for example, and running articulate book reviews. Here’s another articulate admirer for the prose poetry of Allison Benis White. The Rumpus is also running a book review contest aimed at students– but why is the contest restricted to reviews of prose?
This year’s Best New Zealand Poetry is now out! It’s a web-only anthology (click the link to get to the front page), so no worries about whether you want to pay to have a book shipped all the way from, say, Auckland: you can read last year’s gems by Michele Leggott, e.g., right now, for free.
Finally: sad news this week about the loss of the important critic Eve Sedgwick, best known as one of the founders of queer studies. You might not see it in what I’ve been writing lately, but her work, especially the essays in Tendencies, have been models I’ve admired for a long time.
