After getting a big sloppy soul-kiss of enthusiasm for the forthcoming The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (still available at a whacking great discount from Amazon.com, just in time for Hanukah, Kwanzaa, & all those other gift-giving occasions – 4 weeks & counting till publication, kids), I've been alerted to the existence of Al Filreis's consistently lively & informative blog. Al, if you don't know him, is the co-director (with Charles Bernstein) of PennSound, the fantastic poetry website-clearinghouse-reading series at the U of Pennsylvania, & the author of for my money two of the 5 or 10 best books on Wallace Stevens.
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I've also added a link to W.B. Keckler's ebulliant Joe Brainard's Pyjamas, a blog (& webzine) that gives a big (smiling) one-fingered salute to the brow-furrowed seriousness the likes of Rbt. Pinsky & Louise Glück would project as the climate of American poetry today. (The Divine Oscar: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.")
3 comments:
I'm not sure if genuine feeling is the same as sentimentality, but of the latter, Richard Hugo said: "Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake."
I like that quotation. See today's update for something in lieu of a response.
Thanks Mark! I love the Strachey portrait you posted! What a great and appropriately styled image of the neurasthenic at work. That instantly triggered the Stevens poem, which then haunted me at work that entire day. But it was a good haunting! Now I have to type a word verification that looks like what someone says when they ejaculate to post this. It says "Ejaoa!"
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