fait accompli

I just put a link to Nick Piombino’s blog fait accompli in the list of blogs linked from mine because I ran across his entry for today. I can’t direct link to it yet, so you must navigate to it yourself. Check it out: entries from a spam poetry contest. I liked his entry especially because it tends toward aphorisms and because of it’s of the echoes of justifying god to men in his opening strophe: “Malt does more to Milton / than the policy of England.”

In other news, there’s a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle seeking to correct a recent fat-headed review of Philip Whalen’s Collected Poems (edited by Rothenberg, from Wesleyan). This earlier review attributed a baggy quality to this Collected, suggesting that a seeming lack of tension in some of the poems was a product of Whalen’s obesity. This earlier review echoes a line I’m seeing pretty often among some reviewers about slackness and volumes of collected poems. These reviewers are asking for the fat to be trimmed so that the General Reader can be introduced to a more lively and aerobicized volume. Welly well, what the heck does “collected” mean? And this previous review, as do the others I’m thinking of, make a back-handed remark about “useful to academics.” These reviewers don’t get the paradox of saying that a selection in which someone chooses poems for everyone is a more democratic gesture than allowing readers to read as much of the whole body of work as is possible. That said, the book weighs in at 832 pages and $50, but I don’t see these arguments framed in terms of cash and pounds but only in terms of attention and aesthetics.

Bukowski in Iran

“US poet and novelist Bukowski's poems to be translated in Iran”
Pretty much what it says, except that Marquez was also published there, his “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” then rapidly banned when the bluenoses figured out what was in the book, leaving his book to sell on the black market at twice the price to a much more interested crowd of readers.

Busy, Busy

There are so many things I want to write about here. I’d like to write about Joan Retallack’s criticism of fantasy and folklore in her discussion with Quinta Slef, “The Poethical Wager,” in which she claims that “the Grimm fairy tale can render [...] brutality oddly acceptable,” a claim I find very troubling, given my Duncanophilia. I’d like to write about Charles Bernstein’s “sixty-second lecture” “What Makes a Poem a Poem” and how it’s useful for teaching new poetry students about form and poetics. I’d like to write about my honors comp students’ encounters with Foucault’s panopticism, and I’d like to write about the same classes’ work on historical research and how letting them choose topics produced fruitful results. I’d like to write about my Early American lit students’ engagements with poetic form in an imitation of Whitman and of their engagement with Native American culture in an imitation of trickster narratives.

I’ve got to back to grading papers.