More on the Buddhism and poetry symposium… Buddhism and American poetry–especially experimental poetry–obviously have a long and distinguished association, at least from the Beats onward; and there’s no question that American writers’ encounters with Buddhism have produced some of the most interesting writing of the past 50 years. But discussions of these connections always make me slightly uneasy, for many…
Norman Fischer, Michael McClure, and Leslie Scalapino were down at Stanford yesterday for a day-long symposium on Buddhism and poetry, sponsored by the Workshop on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. [Is Stanford really “down”? I guess I always think of Stanford as “down” and San Francisco as “up.” Does that make the East Bay “up and over”? Not very glamorous. Maybe…
Somebody has finally nailed why it’s weird posting poems in your otherwise prose blog. My gloss: it’s like hearing your own voice on an answering machine.
The air in Palo Alto today has an actual smell. I can say this because usually (at least to my Midwestern nose) the air here has an aggressive no-smell, as if it had been forced against its will through an ionizer, rendering it odorless and colorless. But today the air is palpable, faintly damp, as if the ocean were much…
Is a tympan somewhere between an elsewhere and a ululation? Or is it just a blade in the tall grasses of theory?
“Duckie”? “Andie”? “Blane”? Ugh.
I blame Jim’s whole “Jordan=Mulder, Stephanie=Scully” thing for starting me on this morbid train of thought.
At some point during high school I was watching Pretty in Pink with a friend of mine–someone I’d had a crush on, actually. At the very end, Duckie (Jon Cryer) and Andie (Molly Ringwald) show up at the prom together, where they run into Blane (Andrew McCarthy), the rich boy who Andie’s had a crush on but who dumped her…
If blogland were a teen movie, who would everyone be?
Of course, gossipy criticism, like gossipy poetry, can be oppressive in ways similar to biographical criticism–in this case, by drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, positioning the reader as a voyeur of a social world that remains totally inaccessible. I experience this any time I pick up books on the Beats, which often seem to both compellingly romanticize their exploits…