Yikes. The AWP has descended on Chicago and even just thinking about it is a little exhausting. It doesn’t look likely that I’ll actually go to any of the official conference events; I should probably take a hint from the fact that most of the panelists I’m interested in seeing (Peter Gizzi, Elizabeth Willis, Samuel Delany, Bob Perelman) are grouped…
Mike Snider has graciously drawn this discussion of formalism and modernism to a close, but I thought I’d offer up a coda: two sonnets, composed (at least in part) by me. I wrote these probably in 1996 or ’97 with my friend J. Eric Marler (Eric, where art thou?); I’m pretty sure that we wrote them sitting at a table…
Mike Snider sent me a kind email in response to my last post, which among other things clarified something I’d been fumbling towards yesterday: that this discussion really centers around modernism and what one thinks of it. Here’s what I emailed Mike in response: “Post-rhetorical” is a weird phrase I came up with on the fly, and is probably a…
I’m rather sorry that Mike Snider hasn’t yet had the chance to write the “rather long essay” he’d intended in response to my post on formalism; I was actually looking forward to Mike’s account of why he found my position “frankly incredible”–an anticipation that was only to a very minor degree gladiatorial. So maybe it isn’t entirely fair to respond…
When we showed up for dinner my mother and grandmother were all aflutter about the assassination attempt on Taiwan’s president.
It appears that I also have a Vietnamese uncle.
I’ve tuned in a little late to the discussion of formalism, new or otherwise, between Kasey, Jonathan, and Mike Snider, and am not sure how much I have to add; it’s kind of a no-brainer for me to jump onto the Kasey/Jonathan side of the seesaw, and I don’t find much at all compelling about the Rhina Espaillat poem that’s…
I could be wrong, but I think Jonathan Mayhew’s new tagline indicates that he is my uncle, or maybe a distant New York second cousin. Any other family members out there? I’m waiting to see who claims the title of “The Asian American Jim Behrle.”
Since I neglected to change my registration, I had to trek up to my parents’ house in the suburbs to vote. The polling place was a middle school that had been derelict during my childhood–a demographic trough, apparently–but that has since been reclaimed to service a newly booming population. We arrived just as classes were changing; apparently this is just…
Choke poetry returns: Stephanie reports that Steven Vincent’s choke poem appears in the latest issue of MIRAGE #4/PERIOD(ICAL). Where do I get my copy?