Chicago Review: Rodefer!

Fans (oh yes, count me as one) of the ever-enthralling Stephen Rodefer would do well to grab a copy of the latest Chicago Review, which has an enormous feature on Rodefer – lots of stuff, including an interview with Rodefer, critical essays on his work by Keston Sutherland and David Georgi, two essays and four poems by Rodefer himself, a memoir by Fanny Howe and a checklist.

And there's more: poems by Rae Armantrout, Carl Phillips, Ange Mlinko, Endi Hartigan, John Tipton, Joanna Klink, Alice Notley, Paul Éluard (translated by Robert Huddleston) and Elizabeth Arnold.

And my own review of John Matthias's latest, strong collection, Kedging: New Poems.

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A reminder to Britons, & those who might be drifting thru southern England late next week, that the place to be for the Zukofskynalia this year (that's 23 January, Zukofsky's birthday – 105 if you're counting) is the University of Sussex, where their Centre for Modernist Studies'll be celebrating the event with a performance – by Sean Bonney, Ken Edwards, Daniel Kane and Francesca Beasley, with Kerry Yong on harpsichord – of "A"-24. There'll also be talks by Harry Gilonis, Jeff Hilson, the indispensible Jeff Twitchell-Waas, and Tim Woods. 

And by yr. humble blogger, as well. Someone tell me what the weather's like there; should I bring socks?

Deaths; Stephen Rodefer: Mon Canard

I'm not sure I'm ready to get back to semi-regular blogging, despite the fact that (most of) the holidays are over & I've survived them. There seems to be a haze of melancholy, due to a string of deaths: Benazir Bhutto, of course – & I, like everybody who's been watching affairs in Pakistan with any sort of interest lately, am rather in a state of shock – but also, in the closer-to-home world of poetry, the Gloucester poet Vincent Ferrini, who was so much more than "that guy Olson attacked in Maximus"*; and Sylvester Pollet, a genial & familiar presence at poetry conferences in Orono, Maine, & the publisher of the lovely & modest Backwoods Broadsides series: one of the few men who could wear a late-Basil Bunting beard & hairdo, & get away with it.
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But the year winds itself down. No, thank heavens, I'm not going to be at MLA this year, much as I'd like to hang with my friends in Chicago & get away from the surreally warm weather down here. Instead, I'm girding my loins for the coming semester's courses & finishing up a few books. The tip of the week is Stephen Rodefer's Mon Canard (The Figures, 2000). All six of the poems in this collection are first-rate, but the real tour de force is the title poem, some sixty-odd fourteen-line stanzas that seem to marry Zukofsky's Catullus "translations," Finnegans Wake, and a snazzy trans-dictional, translingual crosscutting into a wonderfully erotic cassoulet (which, as a fine violinist once showed me, must always be eaten with vinegar). It begins

Julie my duck, mama's lute, chouchou in lieu of amore
of our loo, butte of my butte, beate of your butt
mont rue, my verity former not HERE, not her
mob spent of row, flowers in rue Lappe, pet asinine pot
my lovely cinder, mine ashen heart, onliest wit
ness to my witness, jump in Seine, berth, ankeberry
every thin necklace nested, sturdiest hysteria, white
patent leather policefemme, unreading gaoler, op
pen opera, princess mon amie electuary Jew, petit rat burg
er, my choo choo, coughdrop of my esophaguy, my lu
dens, by my mitten, minion of my invisible cake, liz
ard die of my destiny, mutt, cuff, flycast, gal
oshes, SMITTEN GLOVES, smith of my smith bull
's blood drawn in sleepy smiles....

And on and beautifully on. Hot stuff.

*I was astonished some years back, in conversation with someone or other, to learn that my interlocutor regarded Edward Dahlberg primarily as "that guy Olson wrote letters to & had a falling-out with": Because I Was Flesh, after all, is something like a benchmark in American memoir-writing.