Close Calls With Nonsense

I’ve been out having fun with Jessie and Nathan holed up in a cave proofreading the next two books doing stuff, while far away these things happened:

I have an essay about comic book superheroes in poetry in the most recent Michigan Quarterly Review, which also has a thoughtful and counterintuitive piece on the future history of reading by my colleague Leah Price. My essay has something to say about poems by Bryan Dietrich, and by Ray McDaniel, who has been writing about the Legion of Super-Heroes, who would take a long time to list explain.

The Harvard Crimson decided to run a story about my science fiction course. People seem to like it.

Slumberland Records has a website with a beautiful series of podcasts, but where’s the track listing?

WHRB’s Record Hospital, the Harvard-based rock show that runs each weeknight from late to way-late on 95.3fm in Cambridge and on the web, is running a 25th-anniversary retrospective this week. I just taped an hour of air devoted to 1991, the year punk broke and indiepop got in between the pieces.

I’ve just finished writing about David Baker’s way-uncool– but very good– new book, and I’m excited about Karen Weiser’s first full-length out soon from Ugly Duckling. I really hope I’m not the only reader in America who likes both of these books a lot.

There’s a new book by Michele Leggott which I’m going to have to order right now: did you know that there’s quite a lot about her online?

Oh, and about those books I’ve been down a rabbit hole proofreading: the Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited by Ben Mazer, is now available for reading-about-in-the-catalog, and for pre-order, I think; and The Art of the Sonnet, which David Mikics and I wrote together, is too.

When you come back to New England from elsewhere you realize how pronounced our seasons are, and how human scale (or, from a Western point of view, bunched all together) our buildings and people have been. I like it here. (And I see, now more than formerly, why visitors from Western and Central Europe sometimes flee New England for other parts of America that look more “American,” more unlike what they know.)

I’ve got a piece on poetry and Project Runway up at the Poetry Foundation site today, and re-posted at the Huffington Post. Silliman correctly predicted the lineup for the finale. (I would have had Shirin, rather than Althea– but what do I know?)

I’m also in last month’s Believer (they come thick and fast these days! like the falling leaves), writing about Liz Waldner. More, as they used to say in newsrooms, TK.

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.

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.

I’m on a panel re: the future of poetry at the Twin Cities Book Festival next Saturday morning Oct 10. Also on that panel: Joyelle McSweeney, Ed Bok Lee, Elizabeth Robinson (who has a new book now), Matvei Yankelevich and Alexs Pate.

Also at the festival: Nicholson Baker, Robert Olen Butler, and Lorrie Moore!

I’ll be conversing with Donald Revell in public at the Univ. of Nevada-Las Vegas Thursday Oct. 15; he will read some of his poems. I might read some of mine. I’ve been reading his new book of poems. It’s stunningly good. Sometimes it reminds me of this older book of poems.

I describe D. A. Powell in last week’s London Review of Books, also known as “this week’s” if you live in North America and prefer print to screen (alas, the screen version requires a subscriber login).

According to the Current, it’s 48 degrees and about to rain in downtown St. Paul. Why couldn’t the Book Festival take place, not in October, but rather during the State Fair? (We miss the State Fair. We like it here, but we do miss the State Fair.)

I hope soon to report on some of the best things I’ve been reading, especially those I won’t get to write on elsewhere: I just got (hurray!) a new chapbook from Allan Peterson, and am waiting on others (reviewed, by the way, in the new print issue of Rain Taxi from Jordan Davis and perhaps Mathias Svalina. Things to read, surely, as soon as we’re done watching the playoffs.

Whatever you’re doing, stop doing it; whatever you’re reading, stop reading it, and look at the essay by Ange Mlinko in the current issue of Poetry. It is an essay I know I could never have written, and not only because “father” doesn’t mean what “mother” means (though that too). Nonetheless, it’s in some sense an essay I have long been trying, and always failing, to write, and not only because it describes some of my favorite not-yet-world-famous poets and poems.

If you are a parent yourself (or, hey, just someone who sometimes tries to get people to do stuff that they inexplicably won’t do: a teacher, for instance) you might also appreciate this explanation of how to get people to do stuff. Psychological research: useful, no?

Maybe not so useful, but fun for me to write: I’m in the new London Review of Books on the new D. A. Powell. John Freeman turns in his own vividly laudatory review of the same book for the L.A. Times. Dan Pritchard delivers a mixed verdict at The Critical Flame.

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.

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.

Still in Onset; just saw Falmouth Center (pretty pretty, pretty pretty) and Woods Hole (even prettier). Not as much ocean science on exhibit at the exhibits there as I had hoped, but we did see the inside of Alvin, along with startling pictures of life around hydrothermal vents. There’s a poem in there somewhere.

Lots of poems, some in translation, in Rachel Hadas, interviewed in the current CPR.

That was the day; for tonight, I’ve been rereading and enjoying Daniel Karlin’s Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (not to be confused with George MacBeth’s book of the same title, which we own). Christina Rossetti had a better ear than just about anyone, and I can’t get enough of her (neither can any anthology, really), though her tonal range was perhaps limited. Also neat to rediscover: Augusta Webster, who would probably be in our book about sonnets if that book had, not 100 sonnets, but 104. (If we can’t secure copyrights to a 20th-century sonnet or two, she might make it in after all: the problem is that “Mother and Daughter” works much better cumulatively, as a sequence, than when you read the sonnets one by one.) And Coventry Patmore’s “The Toys,” almost a stand-in for minor Victorians in general: if you like this poem, you’ll want to spend your free time (as I do) with anthologies of Victorian poetry; if not, then perhaps not. I suspect there’s more good Patmore out there, though his views on politics and culture have made him, let’s say, less than fashionable; I’m pretty sure the secretly-good Patmore does not include sonnets– we checked– though perhaps there’s a fourteen-line experiment anthologists overlooked. Similarly, this fine, wry poem by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt just isn’t a sonnet: it’s a two-stanza poem with 14 lines. Once you start seeking sonnets everywhere, it can get hard to stop.