Kepler’s has a lousy poetry section but a devastatingly good magazine section–I picked up jubilat, Fence and 580 Split before tearing myself away. Looks like Neal Stephenson is going to be reading there in September, which means I won’t get the chance to show up and throw rocks at him. I mean, Snow Crash was all well and good but…
Author: Timothy Yu
I think maybe my blog was better in April. Sigh.
Sleepless but electrified Jordan says: “Function of ‘reminiscing’: to keep at bay sadness over what’s lost.” What about sadness over what’s about to be lost? My senior year in college I remember experiencing what I can only call pre-emptive nostalgia: walking through the campus (this would mostly happen at night) I would imagine what it would be like to be…
I can only see Alli’s blog on Internet Explorer; when I pull it up in Netscape it seems stalled on Aug. 7. What gives?
A National Asian American Poetry Festival! Pinch me, Madame Corpse.
Or Catherine’s recommendation: “weekly adjustments.”
The point being, though, that Language writing seems to a lot of younger writers like something you can’t just go around, but something you have to go through to get wherever you’re going, the narrow and constricting tunnel to freedom. I keep running into this sense but have trouble understanding it. Maybe the issue is partially generational (to people who…
Maybe when I get to Chicago I should join Poetry magazine as a mole. I’ll gradually rise to power on the mediocrity of my inoffensive verse and the excellent coffee that I make and then in 30 years when I get appointed editor (thanks Laurable) I’ll use what’s left of the $100 million to fund a really expensive blog.
The persistent feeling, evident in James’s remarks, that Language poetry is this hulking, frustrating obstacle that we all have to go through if we want to get to poetry today. That it’s schoolmarm, take-your-medicine orthodoxy. Question: if Language writing is such a barrier to expression, if it just gets in the way, why not just ignore it or write as…
Kasey does raise some good points, though. That there’s a concern with how “to answer the inevitable charges of escapism, mystification, naive romanticism, etc.” is evident from that “You Are James Meetze” result, which declares “You strongly desire to bring emotion back into ‘innovative’ poetry, yet you disdain pure confessionalism.” Shades of the “third way”? Well, not exactly. It seems…