Close Calls With Nonsense

I have returned from Britain. I like travel, but I like coming home. I really can’t overstate the hospitality shown by pretty much everyone who handled my event-packed visit there, most of all Michael Schmidt of Carcanet Press and PN Review. (If you’re not a subscriber to PN Review, do consider it.)

I have also reread The Sea and the Mirror (though not in the Arthur Kirsch edition, alas) a couple of times by way of preparing to teach it.

Were those birds I saw in Kelvingrove Park actually magpies? I’m not sure. (The proportions and tones are right, and I was told that there are a lot more magpies in Britain than there were ten years ago! but the double stripe on the wing makes them look unlike the pictures I’ve seen.) I may look here.

If you have no conflicting plans for tonight you should consider hearing Chase Twichell and Kathy Fagan read at the Blacksmith House, on Brattle Street in Cambridge, at 8pm.

If you have no conflicting plans for Wednesday night you might consider attending this roundtable discussion aboutr recent poetry with Maureen McLane, Adam Kirsch, Rob Casper, and me. I now know where and when it will take place: Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy St, Cambridge, on Harvard’s campus, at 7pm.

Finally, I have discovered (or perhaps remembered) that Allan Peterson, one of my favorite new-ish poets and maybe the smartest underrated poet in America, has a calm, black-and-white website, promoting both his visual art (about which I don’t know a whole lot) and his poems. Here are some of his poems.

I’m in Liverpool with the Irish poet and critic John Redmond. Check out his mysterious, rewarding new book of poems, which has both a Minnesotan (he used to live there, and to teach at Macalester) and a science-fictional/ computer game component.

My talk at Glasgow went quite well– thanks to the uni, and to Michael Schmidt, and to John Coyle and the School of Scottish and English Language and Literature (which goes by the alarming acronym SESSL, pronounced “sessile”). The relatively posh parts of Glasgow– the West End, around the University, and Kelvingrove– are truly beautiful, with greennness and neat slope, and some kind of bird with black and white, cupcake-like stripes on the wings, that seems to fill the same niche as the US pigeon. I hope to go back.

Time Out New York has a very flattering feature about me!

Elsewhere, there’s a provocative denunciation of pretty much all contemporary reviewing, from Matthew Zapruder at the Poetry Foundation site, and there’s a poem by Liz Waldner at Verse Daily today.

If you live in southern Scotland or northern England, or you can teleport, you might want to consider coming to these events at the end of the month:

On March 24, at 5:30pm, I’m in Glasgow, talking about the differences between American and British poetry, and about what British poets can do that Americans ought to notice (but don’t).

On March 26 at 6pm I’m talking at Rylands Library, Manchester about sonnets, with a Q&A to follow.

And towards the end of the week I’ll be talking about contemporary poetry, and reading some poems of my own, at the Universities of Liverpool and Hull– though I can’t find a link to those events online yet. I’ll post ‘em when I do.

Back in the US, Cleveland State’s press had a neat poetry list even before Michael Dumanis arrived– they published an early volume by Thylias Moss, e.g.– but either just before, or just after, he got there, CSU released two exciting poetry books.

There’s one I expected to like, the latest from Liz Waldner, entitled Trust (not to be confused with this work of art, which I also admire).

And there’s one other book I knew nothing about before I picked it up on a whim at AWP, but which I really like now: Allison Benis White’s collection of prose poems more-or-less about, or derived from, sketches and paintings by Degas, called Self Portrait with Crayon. There’s a rather violent and atypical poem from that book at Verse Daily today; here’s a more complex one, and here’s a more tender one, reprinted from print-only journals at Benis White’s own site.

Just heard the Woodberry Poetry Room’s somber, and yet celebratory, reading by three poets known for their recent elegies, their poetry of mourning: Mary Jo Bang, Catherine Barnett and Noelle Kocot. Kocot’s new book, more enthusiasm than elegy, just came in the mail: I’m not sure what I think, except that she has energy, admirable, strange energy.

Also new, also something I’ve been happy about as I’ve begun to read; Jessica Bozek was one of the seven students in the first poetry-writing, and the first poetry-reading, class I ever taught, at any level. I taught the class at the now-defunct Massachusetts Advanced Studies Program, a summer program for gifted high school juniors, together with the poet and critic Andrew Osborn. Jessica went on to Boston University, then to the MFA program at the University of Georgia, then to various small-press ventures and to teaching poetry in and around Boston, and now she has a really stunning book. I may have more to say about it later, maybe here, maybe elsewhere.

If you’re in Cambridge on April Fool’s Day you may want to see me, Maureen McLane, and Adam Kirsch chat about contemporary poetry, in a debate or conversation or something, ably moderated by Rob Casper of the Poetry Society of America and also of this influential magazine.

And if you’ve been reading academic writing about British poetry lately, you might have suggestions, and might help me avoid shame: I’m finishing up the talk, or paper, or essay-in-draft, I’m to deliver in Glasgow on Tuesday March 24, where I will be trying to characterize recent British poetry in general in ways that suggest both why Americans should read it, and why most Americans (Americans who read American poetry) don’t. I’m going to say something about British ideas of nature (not much, but something) and I want to mention the very high population density in England, and the rather high population density (higher than most U.S. states) of the UK as a whole, but I’m haunted by the idea that a critic– perhaps Donald Davie? perhaps Edna Longley? perhaps someone younger than either?– has used that fact to talk about British poetry and British “nature” before. I thought it was in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, now reissued and very much worth reading, but I haven’t found it there. Have I skipped a page? Or ought I simply give the talk saying “I don’t think this comparison is original to me, but I haven’t been able to find it anywhere?” I’ve seen that manuever done, and it beats unwitting plagiarism, but it’s best, of course, to give a source.