Monday, August 24, 2009

Scroggins on Gizzi & Armantrout

Everything seems to hit the shelves or the internets right at the end of summer, as the imminent classes are breathing down my proverbial neck. To wit: The latest issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review has just been printed, & my contributor's copies have hit the mailbox. What's in it for me, you ask, that I should plunk down my hard-earned $15?

Well, there's the typical sprinkling of interesting new poems (among them a major chunk of John Matthias); a memorial section to Isaac Meyers and Tom Disch; and the usual run of beautifully-edited essays & essay-reviews: Devin Johnston on Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta, Wes Davis on Robert Hass, Catherine Madsen on Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Matthias on his co-translator Marko Kraljevic [can't get those diacriticals...], Eric Murphy Selinger on Palestinian poets Samih al-Qasim, Mahmoud Darwish, and Taha Muhammad Ali, and yr. humble blogger on Peter Gizzi & Rae Armantrout. The piece is called "Dark Matters," and begins thus:
On the back cover of Some Values of Landscape and Weather, we're told that Peter Gizzi is "on the quixotic mission of recovering the lyric." While I had no idea we'd lost it, I suppose the blurbist has a point. Gizzi, who during the late 1980s and early 1990s co-edited the excellent and eclectic journal O-blék, writes within an avant-garde tradition that sometimes views melopoeia with suspicion, or else discounts it entirely. What place song in the ranks of savage, analytic parataxis?
Go forth and buy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,
Is it possible you might be able to say a little more please about the contents/nature of the Disch memorial section?

Thanks

- matthew davis

Mark Scroggins said...

Sure, Matthew-- there's an introduction by David Yezzi to "Joycelin Shrager," TD's feminine alter ego, followed by 7 poems by "JS" and 5 poems by Disch under his own name; I assume these are previously uncollected.

Anonymous said...

thanks

- matthew davis