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’.
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.
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…
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.
