Close Calls With Nonsense

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.