Joanne Kyger: Not Veracruz

Not Veracruz, Joanne Kyger (Libellum, 2007)

[41/100]

Three months' worth (January–March 2006) of journal poems in this slim, generously designed book. I like Kyger's laid-back, sometimes cynical California-Buddhist sensibility, her ability to pull a joyful haiku-ish exclamation out of the clearing up of a clogged septic tank. Overheard language ("the world's sole remaindered superpower"), the static surrounding everyday life, all of it shadowed & bordered by the "war on terror" & other, more concrete wars.

glumness

I have courses to teach; I have essays & reviews to write; I have poems that cry "neglect"; I have dozens of emails & letters to answer (yes, Liz, I got yours); I have 2 daughters to raise. I cannot afford to slip back & forth into glumness deeper & sharper than my usual melancholia.

In short: I've gotta stop spending hours daily watching polls & reading editorials. There are still – what? – 8 weeks of this roller-coaster to go.

quote of the day (Orwellian version)

From a story in today's Washington Post, "As Campaign Heats Up, Untruths Can Become Facts Before They're Undone":

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said the campaign is entering a stage in which skirmishes over the facts are less important than the dominant themes that are forming voters' opinions of the candidates.

"The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent," Feehery said. "As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

Remember, children: "little facts" don't matter; "big truths" do.

Peter Gizzi: The Outernationale

The Outernationale, Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP, 2007)

[40/100]

Still rife with image & sound, but sparer, more tentative than Gizzi's previous volume. Notes of love, of celebration, yes, but more notes of disquiet, even despair. The syntax halts, takes a step beyond previous simplicity, not into a heightened Prynneian complexity or a Zukofskyan indeterminacy, but into incompletion, or truism. The Watts Towers, triumphant emblems of the homegrown bricoleur – focussed in their glory on the cover of Ronald Johnson's ARK – appear on Gizzi's cover at a precarious angle, brought down to earth in their scrubby context: a pickup truck, a panel van, an electrical pole, prefab buildings.

***

And check out Rodney Koeneke's thoughtful pokes at my last Gizzi post.

republican demographics

Last week I watched Michelle Obama's, Hillary Clinton's, and Barack Obama's speeches at the Democratic Convention. Life is too short to spend much time with the GOP, but I just took a 10-minute break from lecture notes to catch a bit of Sarah Palin's red meat address to the Republicans. She'll make a great student body president, folks. What struck me, however, in light of contemporary American demographics, which are abundantly evident in my own classes – the Census Bureau assesses the overall American population at 68% non-Hispanic white, 15% Hispanic, 12% African American, and 5% Asian American, and projects that the non-Hispanic white population will be only 46% of the total by 2050 – is that over the 10 minutes I wasted on Palin, during 6 1/2 of which the camera trawled over the rapt and slavering faces in the packed convention hall, I saw only one African American.

Why, 5 1/2 years after we invaded that country, are so many people still unable to pronounce Iraq? Whatever the proper pronunciation may be, it's not "EYE-rack," Governor Palin.

***

Update: And it's not just my cynical eye, either: this morning's Washington Post has a precise count – out of 2380 delegates at the Republican Convention, a whopping 36 are African American.

Peter Gizzi: Some Values of Landscape and Weather

Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP, 2003)

[39/100]

A splendid extravagance of language, a brilliant eye for colors & for details, the objects/detritus/treasured things of the visible. Yes, the reinvention of the "lyric," whatever that means – or a loving caress of the body of the sensual world. A splendid extravagance of forms, as well, from reinventions of the cante jondo to love songs built on syntactic games. A far better elegy for Gregory Corso than one would expect – or than he perhaps deserves. (Yeah, go to it, Ed.)

***

Obviously, I've got a lot of catching up to do in this "100 poem-books" game, a lot of scattered notes from the past month or so. Entries will no doubt become shorter, as my attention finds itself diverted by, you know, classes to teach, actual assignments to write, job searches to run, etc.

***

So we seem to have missed the brunt of Fay, Gustav, & Hanna, tho heaven knows what Ike is up to out there. We have it's true been spared a direct hit for some years now, since Wilma in in 2005, and I'd forgotten, over the months since the last hurricane season, the whole fingernail-biting business of watching the National Hurricane Center website, trying to gauge whether or not (and when) to put up the shutters, making sure the flashlights are batteried up & the pantry is full of bottled water. An evolutionary adaptation, the ability to forget perfectly valid reasons that human beings shouldn't settled in particular parts of the world. And I'd forgotten, hoofing it all over Manhattan & Stockholm thru July and August, how dreadfully difficult it is to walk anywhere in South Florida without soaking one's clothes with sweat. 

Swedish style, Swedish design

I guess I mentioned we spent a couple of weeks in Stockholm at the tail end of the summer (now officially over, due to the start of classes this week). I'd love to earnestly say that it's one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen – and I think that's the case, only it was raining about 80% of the time, so it was kind of hard to tell. Beautiful cobblestones, tho. A wonderful change to be spending time in a city that dates back to the Middle Ages, & looks it, here where a house that was built in the '60s is likely to be on the historic register, & one can drive 30 minutes in any direction without seeing a single structure that wouldn't have made Ruskin puke.

I was thinking a lot about Swedish style & design while I was there. On the one hand, there's the "traditional" style, what gets marketed as "Scandinavian Country" – muted yellows, greens, & blues, whitewashed pine furniture, lovely detail painting. A certain amount of that in people's interiors, tho not nearly as much as you'll find in US antique shops. (We never visited anyone's country home, however, so I can only vouch for the urban interiors – admittedly, it's pretty hard to place an 8-foot armoire in one of those 400-square-foot apartments.)

Far more common – indeed, ubiquitous – is the high modernist, Bauhaus-derived Ikea style. Not just Ikea style, either, but literal Ikea. Everybody, but everybody, seems to do at least some of their furnishing – the younger folks, almost all – from Ikea. It appeals to my Samuel Beckett side, I must admit, but gets a bit oppressive after a while. So much white, so many clean lines. I found myself longing for a bit of colorful, texturally various just plain clutter. (No lack of that back home, I assure you...)

Most shocking of all, however, was the general sense of personal style. I had the mistaken impression – derived mostly from a regular diet of Hannah Anderson catalogues – that the Swedes were a nation who dressed with a wonderful, colorful flair: lots of pastels, stripes & patterns, etc. I even bought a couple of pairs of eye-poppingly colorful striped socks to wear with my red Diesel trainers, just to fit in with this fashionable race. Instead, I found a bunch of folks whose passion for earth tones, clunky shoes, and muted sweaters would make them fit right in in, say, Portland, Maine, or Waukegan. Occasionally you'd see something cool – a sixtyish man with spiky grey hair in a magenta sweater, or a pair of running shoes in colors that don't occur in nature – and the children, to be sure, are miniature palettes of bright color; but for the most part the Swedes I saw seem to melt right into the countryside.

Worst of all, I must confess, was the youth style. Aside from a half-dozen weird approximations of American hip hop wear, the default mode for the Swede of 15 – 21 seems to be, of all things, "New Wave" styles, MTV circa 1983. Much black, usually accessorized with chains & studs; fishnet hose; stovepipe trousers, inevitably worn with Chuck Taylor sneakers; lots of dyed hair; many Robert Smith asparagus hairdos (the Cure must still be really big in Sweden, judging by the number of t-shirts on people who weren't born the first time they played Stockholm). I felt like I was in a time warp back to the "new wave nights" at the local Marriott, Blacksburg Virginia, during my undergraduate days.

***

Alas, with a 4- and 6-year old in tow, there was little time for sampling Stockholm's cultural pleasures (tho I do have a good working knowledge of the city's playgrounds now, & have been to Junibacken – read "Pippi Longstocking Land" – twice). But I'm happy to report that the architecture is magnificent, the public transit system is extraordinary, the people are uniformly friendly and welcoming even to an American ugly as I, and the Modern Museum ("Moderna Museet") is absolutely first-rate. The weather – at least for our two weeks – could use some work.

product placement

Try as I might, I can't entirely seem to move myself into the digital age – even, for that matter, into the keyboard age. Now and again, when taking up a new writing project, I resolve that this one will be strictly word-processed – no pens, paper, ugly scribbles, & so forth. All clean & on the keyboard & screen. But I can't really do it, ultimately, even though I know it would save me tons of time & help avoid the writer's cramp that seizes my right hand just a little bit earlier every time I sit down to write. 

I've had some luck writing reviews and brief prose pieces on the keyboard, but I simply can't make it work when I'm trying to write poems. It's pen & paper or nothing. (Note: think about what writing technology means to literary texts – Pound was Mr. Typewriter, but he still drafted his poems by hand; the late Henry James, however, & Adorno for that matter, tended actually to dictate their work.)

Anyway, a big part of my equipment for life has always been notebooks. Yes, I fetishize notebooks, & I'm not the only one. A post a couple years back on Ron Silliman's blog alerted me to his love for the clunky orange Rhodia notebooks (see left), which are pretty cool but not quite to my taste. For the past seven years or so I've been pretty much in love – like everybody else, it seems – with the wee compact Moleskines, with their elastic closure, the pages that end flush with the binding, & their deliciously portable size. I think I've filled maybe 17 or 18 of them; they're the sort of books that make you want to write.

Problems with Moleskines, however: (1) Their very size, which is great for jotting travel notes or scribbling blog entries or taking notes at a lecture, can be constraining when drafting poems. It's true that I tend towards a short-lined poetics anyway, but there are times when I dream of a Whitmanian / Kochean expansiveness, & it just doesn't work when I'm scribbling in a Moleskine. (2) I also happen to fetishize pens, fountain pens in particular; this doesn't mean that spend money on cigar-sized pretentious Mont Blancs or other corporate office doodads, but I have a pretty large collection of brightly colored inexpensive, mostly beautifully designed European student-quality fountain pens (and yes, a couple of nice Pelikans as well). The paper in Moleskines simply doesn't take fountain pen ink very well – it bleeds thru, or spreads out. I've spent ages trying various inks to find which work with the notebook best (for the record, Waterman ink wins out, which is bad luck for the pens that don't take Waterman cartridges or can use bottled ink). (3) The darned things are expensive; when Moleskines first got reintroduced in the US, they retailed for $12 apiece; now they're down around $10 at most outlets, but that's still a pretty steep price for a hunk of paper.

I came upon solution of sorts to my notebook dilemma at the MoMA design store over the summer. One word: Muji. Muji is short for "Mujirushi Ryōhin," which means "No Brand Quality Goods." It's the Japanese Ikea, a company that makes well-designed products that range from paper goods & office supplies to clothing, furniture, & packaged foods. I picked up a couple of their notebooks (see right) at MoMA because I was entranced by their size & clean lines: approximately 8" x 5", a single fifteen-leaf sewn signature (for 60 pages total) with a band of heavy tape covering the spine, the pages narrow-ruled with very light grey lines. And mind-bendingly cheap: $1.00 apiece, in fact. 

When I got them back to the apartment, I found that this might well be my new workhorse notebook: the color of the paper is pleasantly neutral, the notebook opens satisfyingly flat, the cover is stiff enough to promise some durability, while still being able to be written on. And delightfully, the paper proves absolutely perfect for fountain pen use. Even the broadest, wettest nib leaves a perfect line that doesn't spread out or bleed thru to the opposite side of the page. I was delighted: the next time J. left me at the apartment to catch something on Broadway, I sent her to the new Muji flagship store in the New York Times building to pick me up a serious stack of the things – 10, to be exact. (There, it turned out, the notebooks were going for all of 99¢ apiece.) I'm looking forward to filling them up.

Enough anality for now. Is it clear I'm avoiding preparing syllabi?

***

But speaking of slim & cheap volumes, I have a largish stack of copies of Anarchy on hand at the moment, probably enough to send one out to anybody who cares to backchannel me a request.

Moody's Pound

So we're about 65% unpacked; I'm still waiting for a couple of cartons of books to arrive from New York – acquisitions from The Strand & Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth), but there's plenty to keep me busy right now, including a copy of A. David Moody's new Pound biography. The thing's got one of those titles that makes you unclear as to where to colonize & where to hyphenate: near as I can tell, the full moniker is Ezra Pound: Poet – A Portrait of the Man and His Work – Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920 (pause for breath).

Back in November, I responded rather snarkily to Andrew Motion's Guardian review of the book – mostly to Motion's inane review, mind you, not to Moody's book, which I hadn't seen at the time. I do regret, however, a sidenote in which I doubted – based on Moody's Eliot scholarship, which was all I'd read of his work – how good a Pound biographer he'd prove. Boy, how wrong could I be!

Anyway, back then I'd noted that Pound had already received more than a little biographical treatment:

There's no shortage of Pound biographies out there: full-length treatments include Charles Norman's (1960), Noel Stock's (1970), Humphrey Carpenter's (1988) and JJ Wilhelm's (in three volumes, 1985, 1990, 1994); shorter & more specialized books include Ackroyd's illustrated Ezra Pound and His World (1980), Jacob Korg's book on EP & HD (2003), C David Heymann's Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, A Political Profile (1976), Anne Conover's book on EP & Olga Rudge (2001), John Tytell's Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (1987), Ira Nadel's recent volume for Palgrave's Literary Lives series, & probably a few others shelved in my office at work right now, where I can't lay hands on them.

All of these books have shortcomings, some of them more dire than others. Norman's book is a breezy celebrity bio, notable mostly (to me at least) for his use of Zukofsky as a resource. Stock's is the life as told by a somewhat repentant former disciple. Wilhelm simply can't write, & has no sense of discrimination among his materials.

Humphrey Carpenter's big (1000+ pp.) work, then, is probably the biography of record, unfortunately: while he conveys an admirable density of facts & dates, his work is hampered by the fact that he's utterly unsympathetic to, & mostly uncomprehending of, Pound's mature poetic project. (What possessed the author of lives of Auden & JRR Tolkien to devote this much energy to Pound of all people? Aesthetically, it's rather like me polishing off the LZ biography & setting out to write the life of Billy Collins.) I'll consult Carpenter for a date; but for a sense of Pound's poetry or for a clear idea of what his political or economic thought at any particular stage, I look elsewhere.

And now I know where that elsewhere is: Moody's first volume (out of a projected two, which even if vol. 2 is the same length as this hefty volume 1, will still be a bit shorter than Carpenter) is absolutely luminous. I'm tempted to say that this, folks, is biography as it ought to be written – if you've gotta read one biography of a major modernist (who isn't Joyce or Zukofsky, of course), then Moody's Pound is the ticket.

I'm particularly impressed, beyond Moody's limpid and sometimes elegant (but never show-offy, like Carpenter's) prose, with how the biographer keeps Pound's poetic project in his sights, and shows convincingly that even the "stale cream-puffs" of A Lume Spento are logical steps in the development of a quintessentially modernist poetics. He's very good on the poetry; he's even better on Pound's cultural thought, how even in his earliest stages he was seeing poetry as inextricable from the larger life of the polis (in volume 2, we'll see how this leads him down the path to Italian fascism). And he's very good indeed at depicted Pound in the context of the London literary scene of the 'teens – just how much of an outlander, a kangaroo Pound was even to those who sensed his formidable drive and intelligence.

The only fault I would find with Moody is his discounting of WC Williams's testimony about Pound's early years. (By the way, on the evidentiary issues that I find so fascinating in biography, Moody is about as scrupulous as they come; his notes at the end of the book make fascinating reading when he tangles with earlier biographers & editors.) All of WCW's testimony about the pomposity & basic silliness of the young Pound, it seems, is vitiated by the distance from which Wms was writing, & by his tangled relationship with EP in the intervening years. The biographer in me approves of Moody's handling here; I think he's well justified. The biography-reader, on the other hand – the one who's cherished those snapshots of a silly young Ez – is disappointed with a rather puerile disappointment.

Go read this one; you won't regret it.

Back!

So we're back in Boca, & have just ridden out messy Tropical Storm Fay (a fine welcome home, I should say). Weary from too long away, perhaps too much travel. Much to write about – Swedish style, Moody's Pound, Proust, and many new entries for the "100 poem-books." But for now will leave my few remaining readers with a snap of winsome Daphne (aet. 4) in attendance at the fabulous if rainy Stockholm Europride parade. ("Is this the Swedish flag, Daddy?")

Lyn Hejinian: Slowly

Slowly, Lyn Hejinian (Tuumba Press, 2002)

[38/100]

I’m always trying to catch up on my Hejinian-reading. Slowly is a short long poem, published by Hejinian’s own Tuumba Press (resurrected? – dunno, but I miss those wonderful letterpress chapbooks from the old days). As the title would indicate, it’s a poem about – or revolving around, or formally built upon – the adverb. I can’t help thinking of all those workshop strictures on adverbs – I’ve thrown them around myself – you know, “if you’re using an adverb that means you haven’t found the right verb,” “avoid adverbs, they drain energy from your language,” etc. So there’s some foundational cheekiness here I quite like. Of course, what LH’s really interested in, & what gets tracked thru all those adverbs (yes, “slowly” appears quite often) is the process of perception, how the world comes to us modified by our senses, by the various grids & seines of our consciousness that can be represented on one level by the shorthand of the adverb. Much of the book’s in a series of the sort of paratactic, present-tense declarative sentences that I associate with some of Barrett Watten’s & Ron Silliman’s work. So much so that it’s a kind of major event when Hejinian shifts into the past tense for a run of lines. A brow-furrowing read.

Graham Foust: Necessary Stranger

Necessary Stranger, Graham Foust (Flood Editions, 2007)

[37/100]

My last Foust post got pilloried in ways that I didn’t really have the energy to respond to, except to say that all I meant to imply by name-dropping all those “short-line short-poem” poets along with Foust was that (as I said) the form bears specific dangers & possible rewards, which can fall under various epithets: the “gnomic,” the “epitaphic,” “brevity as the soul of wit” – or the “portentous,” the “squib” – and so forth. When you put a small thing – a set of words, a splotch of color, a cluster of tones – in the midst of a big stretch of nothing – white paper, blank canvas, silence – you automatically place a heavy weight of readerly / viewerly / auditorial attention on that something. The poetics of the haiku, or of nouvelle cuisine.

Problem I’ve always had with writing about poetry is that I tend to want to describe what’s new to me in terms of what’s familiar. And since I was trained as a formalist, I tend to think in terms of the gross physical forms of poems. Don’t mean to imply that Foust’s short-lined, short lyrics are equal to (or better than, or not as good as) Creeley’s or Ammons's or whoever’s – that needs to be settled on a poem-by-poem, collection-by-collection basis – if indeed one wants to spend the energy “settling” it. But the problem (or tactic) of semantic isolation & the concomitant semantic weight placed on the poem is common to everyone I named, however awkwardly or gracefully they negotiate it.

I like the poems of Necessary Stranger, Foust’s 3rd collection, a trifle better than As in Every Deafness. If anything, they’re a bit more mannered than the earlier book – still given to terms of really unexpected weirdness, but with a few elements I didn’t detect in the 1st outing. For one thing, there’s a lot more open intertextuality of the “high culture” sort, hat-tipping to other, earlier poems (mostly, unsurprisingly, in a subversive manner). And then there’s a new sort of minimalist groove going on – minimalist in the repetitive, Steve Reichian sense – the repetition of phrases & words within individual poems. All this, plus a kind of general broadening of Foust’s scope & language in general, shows that he’s not a poet who’s standing still.

(“Critical equipoise”?!? I know what you mean, Curtis – I call it my “bullshit hat” – but I have enough trouble piggybacking my 4 year old without toppling over to worry about “critical equipoise.”)

not dead yet...

Well, I'd had no intention of prolonging that blip of a hiatus into a regular furlough, but these things happen; as Zukofsky says somewhere, "this is after all vacation..." And so much to write about: books by Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Fishman, (more) Graham Foust; the dangers of wobbly dinner tables & adjacent book stacks; Proust; & Culture Industry's 100,000th visit (!). Still blogging from the mobile at the moment, but will try to get some real posts in before we leave for Sweden (!) next week.

technical difficulties...

Well, I'd like to jump right into this comment-thread discussion, but we're headed out to Fire Island this weekend (keeping my eyes peeled for dune buggies, as always), the DSL's been out all day, & I just don't have the under-18-crowd's thumb dexterity for cellphone blogging. So I'll see you all in a few days.

Graham Foust: As in Every Deafness

As in Every Deafness, Graham Foust (Flood Editions, 2003)

[36/100]

The short-lined free verse lyric, as pioneered in the 20th century by such folks as Zukofsky, Williams, Robert Creeley, AR Ammons, Cid Corman, Frank Samperi, etc., runs its own set of risks & offers its own rewards. Both risks & rewards are on display in Graham Foust's first full-length collection.

By "short-lined lyric," of course, I mean something distinct from a merely short line, which can serve as the formal basis for much longer works (LZ's "A"-19, for instance, or Samperi's or Ammons's various long poems): I mean a brief poem,  rarely two full pages, in which the lines tend to hover around a 4-word average, in which the proportion of blank space to printed paper is at times overwhelming. Mallarmé's Un coup de dés was the 1st great verbal exploration the aesthetics of the isolated mark against the void of the blank page, but the weight of silence or nullity has long been an obsession of contemporary arts – think Arvo Pärt, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Brian Eno's Music for Airports, & any number of 20th-century visual artists.

The most obvious effect of writing poems that are shards of language marooned in a sea of white paper – or scattered stars shining out of an otherwise empty sky, choose your metaphor – is that an almost unbearable weight is placed upon what few words do appear. At least this is the case in Foust's poems, which almost never have the insouciant, tossed-off quality of so many of Creeley's short lyrics. They're composed, sometimes almost painfully so.

More often than not, the poems work. Foust has a very good ear, and as importantly a strong – tho not unerring – sense for the off-balance, the off-kilter & incomplete that saves them from becoming Bronkian reports on reality or Cormanesque cuff-jottings. I sense that Celan is a tempting model for Foust, as well – Celan, the singular master who's led so many young American poets into dead-ends of laconic portentousness – but Foust has a wonderfully light touch that enable him to nod to the German poet without falling into his gravitational black hole. As in Every Deafness – dark poems, but with a wry, slanted darkness that makes the reader smile uneasily, lines stuck in her or his head.

Turner; Bacchae + Rocky Horror

Finally yesterday, a full week into the visit, a bit of kulchur. At the Metropolitan Museum, a large JMW Turner exhibit. I'd never seen so many of his canvases in one place, & was frankly blown away by the mastery, the intensity. I begin to see – as I never really could, judging only by reproductions – what so excited Ruskin in the work.

***

Then to Lincoln Center, for the National Theatre of Scotland's production of The Bacchae. Alan Cumming is the big draw here (overheard one of the ushers telling a patron, "enjoy Alan!"), the radiantly wry and omnisexual Scottish actor whose reinvention of the Emcee character was one of the highlights of the recent revival of Cabaret. (Other than that, I've only seen him as the null-set villain Saturninus in Julie Taymor's Titus.) As Dionysus, Cumming is resplendent in gold lamé (!) kilt and vest, giving his thick Scots accent full throttle as he leers his way thru the action. (Of course, the character he most resembles here, oddly enough, is Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-N-Furter, from Rocky Horror.)

The Bacchae themselves are 9 gospel singers; they deliver their choruses both in speech & in song, & it's that songs that at times come close to sinking the show. A couple of them are excellent; most are all right, tho less than inspired; a few are instantly forgettable. Worst is when Cumming/Dionysus himself sings, fronting the Bacchae like a late-70s Thin White Duke in a skirt. It's moments like this that require a strong & distinctive set of pipes – Bowie himself, or Luther Vandross, or even Cumming's compatriot (& near contemporary) Chris Connelly – & Cumming just isn't a very good singer at all.

But on the whole it was a fabulous show, bringing the tragedy into the present as far too few contemporary productions of Greek drama do. Makes me hanker for that big 4-volume set of the Grene/Lattimore Greek Tragedies (back in Florida) I splurged on a few weeks ago.

***

Lunch with Mike Heller & Jane Augustine the other day, a flying moment with them before they're off to their summer digs in Colorado. A nice time – Barney Greengrass is indeed the Sturgeon King, but I'm afraid I'm not enough of a New Yorker to pine for said fish more than once or twice a year; especially at $17 the appetizer plate.

Many projects breathing down my neck; will be good to get the girls back into their day camp tomorrow.

ripostes & fiddles

L'affaire Kleinzahler slowly fades. Bradley at The Ethical Exhibitionist has a very nice, longish post on The Poem of a Life, & why Stinky-Feet Augie's review is wrongheaded. (Full disclosure: B is a colleague of mine, & we've hoisted a few drinks together – but as anyone in academia can tell you, such relationships doesn't mean you actually read each other's books, much less like 'em.) 

And Bill Sherman at Friends of Fayaway (gotta love that title – it reminds me of my dad's old small-format 1940s-era paperback of Typee, with its only slightly salacious native-girls illustrations) posts a letter from Leon Lewis in re/ the Kleinzahler review, which the LRB didn't see fit to print. Surprise surprise.

***

New scientific study purports to prove why Stradivarii are still the best violins. (By way of Don Share.) Paul Zukofsky says humph!

K. Lorraine Graham: Terminal Humming

Hey, it's hot here in New York! Really hot. Everybody sweats. (Nobody sweats in South Florida, because the walk from the air-conditioned SUV to the air-conditioned inside environment is so short; oh, wait, I'm only thinking about people in Boca Raton...)

***

Terminal Humming, K. Lorraine Graham (Slack Buddha Press/La Perruque Editions, 2004)

[35/100]

The title of Graham's chapbook, judging from the cover art – the instantly recognizable "male/female" bathroom icons, flanking the highway icon indicating an airport – would seem to refer to the exhilarating babel of conversations, languages, & linguistic registers in which one is immersed at the airport. And Graham's poems, which consistently surprise & delight, beautifully capture the effect of the constantly shifting, densely cross-grained linguistic environment of any public place in the early 21st century. But the title bears darker implications: that the "humming" of voices which surround us is an index of the late Capital's "terminal" status, that the "white noise" of our environment – as in DeLillo – is no more or less than a numbingly complex death rattle. The opener, "Love Poem," encapsulates the American consumerist libido:

And I want

And I want

And I want baaaaah

In the city

We arrived yesterday afternoon, & have more or less settled in. It's grand to be back in New York, where it's not yet too hot (at least in the mornings & in the evenings). The whole urban experience – the constant traffic noise, a hum that underlies everything; the constant stream of human beings; the occasional (strangely comforting) sour stench of garbage.

The carton of books won't arrive for several more days, so I'm reduced to Wuthering Heights; one could do a heck of a lot worse.

Hurrah for Euphony!

Among the busyness of getting ready to leave, & the inevitable quandariness of deciding what books to carry & which to leave, a lovely package comes thru the transom: The big-ass collection Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, edited by Joel Bettridge and Eric Murphy Selinger and published by the Orono-conference-sponsoring National Poetry Foundation.

This is it, all you Johnsonians out there: almost 700 pages of tasty criticism, memoir (Peter O'Leary recalls his "apprenticeship" to RJ), interviews, and bibliography (at long last, a full primary & secondary bibliography of Johnson's works). The list of contributors is almost a who's-who of coolness: Patrick Pritchett, Norman Finkelstein, Ed Foster, Donald Revell, Barbara Cole, Susan M. Schultz, Mike Basinski, Marjorie Perloff, jena Osman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jonathan Skinner, Gregg Biglieri, Graham Foust, Paul Naylor, & a bunch of others just as hip & intelligent.

And need I mention that there are two articles by your humble blogger?: "Notes and Numbers (Johnson, Ives, Zukofsky)" and "The Book of the Green Man: Ronald Johnson's American England." You can order the whole thing here.

(I'm posting in part because I imagine my old chum Eric S. is out of internet range, since he's spending several weeks strumming his mandolin & getting drunk on fine Irish whiskey in Killarney. Alas – some people have it hard.)