I’ve been working on an article on Jose Garcia Villa that will hopefully be forthcoming in MELUS. I sent a final draft off to the issue editor, who came back with a question: At several points in the essay I refer to the work of E.E. Cummings. Shouldn’t it be “e.e. cummings”? Good question. I thought I’d seen various answers…
Robert Lowell’s editor, Frank Bidart, is sometimes described as a “post-confessional” poet, but I think it might be more accurate to call him a philosophical or Cartesian confessionalist, one who’s more interested in the abstract, existential drama of a generally defined “I” than in the facts of any individual personality. His early stuff is recognizably autobiographical, but his later poems…
Reactionary fantasy dept.: I have acquired the dread tome. Since I don’t seem to have anything else to add to the Ron Silliman/Brian Kim Stefans Robert Lowell boondoggle, here’s my plan: I am actually going to read the damn thing and report as I go. Stay tuned.
Fishmongers sell fish, warmongers sell war, both may sincerely believe in their product.
I can’t believe the New Yorker actually has a poetry intern. I can’t decide whether to be pleased that the NYer actually thinks that poetry is worth bothering to have an intern for, or depressed that there is someone out there willing to be paid nothing to read New Yorker poetry all day long.
Bush lied and he knew it.
Robin thinks Kasey on fatal toxic cloaks sounds like something out of White Noise. We had the local news on that night but with the sound off and when we saw the dateline “Moss Landing” with a picture of a conflagration we briefly thought it was news of a horticultural invasion.
Ditto to Jordan on John Yau. Yau’s latest book ain’t bad either.
Welcome home, Zenith.
Free Space Comix wants to know: I’ve been assured by several emails that the Language school has never been in fact “attacked” by the “mainstream” (or “Official Verse Culture”) — that most of the “attacks” came from within our own New American “lineages.” Is this true? I think it’s true that sustained, in-print attacks on Language writing by “mainstream” poets…