Tomorrow I am off to Jolly England for some R&R with TBG, so you won't be hearing from me for a while. We're headed to a little cottage in the lake district, will be visiting Oxford, and we'll be having some fine cuisine as well.

* At The New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews August Kleinzahler's new collected verse, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. Garner writes, 'Mr. Kleinzahler, who has lived for several decades in San Francisco, writes most often in a strongly accented free verse that is among the most articulate and alive sounds American poetry is currently making. He plays effortlessly with forms, voices, registers. And his range of cultural reference — from Catullus to Custer, from Lorca to Eric Dolphy — is wide and artfully deployed.' Interesting that he thinks of 'American poetry' as an independent productive force, like a factory, spitting out verse of varying quality. It is very culture industry of him.

Also in this review is yet another reference to Frank O'Hara, a point of reference that continues to baffle me. Perhaps because there is so little technical dexterity in his work, it is very easy to imitate? Frank certainly found it easy to produce himself. . . Ah, now I'm just being small about it. I would be embarrassed to like his work though, this literary tabloidism – the Britney Spears of verse.

* The Guardian reports that 'When Joyce discovered that Matisse was to illustrate Ulysses for an American limited edition, he asked a friend in Dublin to hunt down visual material evoking the atmosphere of the city in 1904: "He knows the French translation very well but has never been to Ireland," Joyce explained. In the event, no suitable material was found, and Matisse went about the task in his own way, which was far from the way Joyce had intended. When asked why his illustrations had little or nothing to do with the novel, Matisse replied that he had based his ideas on Homer's Odyssey instead. Joyce said he thought his daughter Lucia a better artist anyway.' Hah!

* At The New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn reviews – or rather, ruminates upon – Herodotus' History. He writes, 'The fable-like arc of Croesus’ story, from a deceptive and short-lived happiness to a tragic fall arising from smug self-confidence, admirably serves what will turn out to be Herodotus’ overarching theme: the seemingly inevitable movement from imperial hubris to catastrophic retribution.' He goes on to argue that Herodotus constructed in this history the East-West paradigms that still exist, and are being enacted even today.

* It is really a shame that The Harriet Blog is run by people who want to be alternative and hip so damn badly. They could reinforce some important values and encourage interesting debates / discussions, but, like so many boomer parents, they'd much rather be your buddy-pal than an authority figure (even though they are an authority, as the mouthpiece of the National Poetry Foundation). See posts on: movies, graffiti, gossip girl, dance music, for examples. The few interesting posts I find there are usually by Reginald Shepherd, who is insightful, well-read, and, I think, is feeling too much the squeeze of time to waste any on nonsense.

Nothing better than being screamed at first thing in the morning.

* At The New York Sun Benjamin Lytal reviewed Grete Weil's short-story collection Aftershocks (a Godine 'Verba Mundi' title). It's exciting – Ben Lytal and Adam Kirsch have both reviewed the book now.

* Speaking of Mr. Kirsch, he reviews new collections by David Yezzi and Adam Zagajewski. But really, he is taking an occasion to fire one across the bow of Poetry Month, writing, 'April is National Poetry Month, the poetry world’s annual effort to soothe its bad conscience about practicing a minority art in a democratic culture. Institutional attempts to make more people read poetry always have something forlorn about them, because they are based on a basic error in economics: They try to address a shortage in demand by creating a glut in supply. But if no one likes to read poetry — or so it can often seem to the discouraged poet — then putting poems in hotel nightstands or on subway cars only multiplies the public’s opportunities to ignore them.'

* At The Washington Post, Edward Hirsch pushes the sad stereotype of the poet (and the idea the poetry is all dreamy feelings and transcendental pseudo-thought – the reason there are so many damned bad poets), and writes that walking was important for 'the cosmopolitan Frank O'Hara, our Apollinaire, who liked to mingle with Manhattan crowds on his lunch hour, as it was for the gentleman farmer Robert Frost, our Horace, who often needed to rove out to the edge of the woods that surrounded his land.' I just; I just don't get it. O'Hara – why? Why the esteem? Blows my mind, but there it is: Frank and Frost in a sentence together. Next week: Barney and Beethoven.

* Salman Rushdie will die! . . . someday: 'Another advantage of advancing years is a focused mind, Rushdie believes, is that criticism becomes easier to bear. "It's always nicer when people get it and like it than when they don't get it and don't like it. But you reach a point . . . when you realize how many good working years you've got left?'

* Have you heard of The Ogura Hyakunin Isshu? I had not, but apparently it is a selection of poems from the entire history of Japanese literature up to 1237 AD. The Complete Review reports, Scott at Conversational Reading comments. All English gets is the Norton Anthology.

from Slate (via Zak): FAQ about Poetry with Robert Pinsky –

Q: Well, I like poetry that is amusing, that maybe makes me chuckle a little. I'd rather read something reassuring and light than something complicated or gloomy. Is that bad? Does that mean I am a jerk?

A: Yes.

What a good long weekend. Talked to TBG (which always puts me in a good mood), got a lot of writing done, hung out with friends, sorted out some work issues, and went sailing on the Charles for the first time this season.

* Let's kick of with The NY Times Book Review. In his review of John Ashberry's Notes from the Air, Langdon Hammer of Yale claims that 'the combination of languor and urgency in his work [links it] to a moral situation we all know. There are no rules to be followed (either in writing or in life), but we must make what we do and say, and therefore how we live, count. Ashbery’s willingness to go on confronting this simple, central problem makes him an important poet.' Not sure that I buy this thesis.

Hammer's analysis (or argument) reminds me of my T [subway] ride on the way to have dinner with my family in Quincy. The marathon crowd and the Red Sox crowd were packed into the train. An older woman was hugging one of the vertical hand poles in front of the door, blocking others from holding on to it as well as entrance to the car. One young woman tried to grab hold of it, to avoid falling over into everyone else, and was verbally abused by this elderly woman. So I spoke up – 'It's rude,' I said, 'to hold on to the pole like that; you're blocking everyone else.' She demanded to know where the rule book was. 'You don't need a rule book to go out in public,' I said, and she looked ashamed and moved away from the pole a bit. Ok, yes; I'm proud of myself for speaking up and putting this woman in her place, I won't lie. I felt the need to disabuse her of her rudeness when so many people were affected by it. Another woman on the train thanked me.

But that presumption – that nothing is necessary except when it imposed as a rule – is something I can't necessarily accept as given, in literature or in life. We recognize the implicit standards in the culture, and 90% of people (and authors) follow them. There must be a purpose if they are not to be followed, or else it is, for lack of a more technical term, rude.

The idea of there being no rules (danke, Nietzsche) or boundaries is purely academic, as is, I think, Ashberry's poetry; perhaps a cultural studies thesis in verse (and if that, an opaque, often incoherent one) but I hesitate to call him a poet since he has no interest in communication or aesthetics. His poetry seems to be rude in the way that a self-important solipsistic college professor might be, lording over students for their ignorance without attempting to pass on any of that difficult knowledge. But as was the case with those professors and is with John Ashberry, I'd rather actually work through Derrida and Foucault myself than be verbally abused by an expert.

* Also in NYTland, Terrence Rafferty reviews Dermot Bulger's novel The Journey Home, about the conflicting identity of modern Irish youth in the face of a powerful, seductive pre-modern nostalgia. Rafferty writes, 'These kids, who are supposed to embody the future (“We are the young Europeans they keep telling us”), are afflicted with yearnings for times before they were born and places they’ve never seen, a free-floating nostalgia that seems as indelible as original sin and as general as the snow over Ireland in “The Dead.”' And so, I must now read this book.

* The Daily Texan reports that Russian author Mikhail Shiskin's advice to young Russian authors is to "Stop writing. Now."

* At the Columbia University Press blog a Harvard professor makes the case for less useless arguments and more incisive description.

Friday, bloody Friday. Had a conversation with a poet and teacher I greatly respect (who ought to be the poetry editor of a publication somewhere, or at least have a poetry column) regarding Helen Vendler. He pointed out that, while he admires her work enormously, she focuses solely on the construction and the design of poems, foregoing the words themselves. This can lead to the mistaken impression that architectual skill is predominant in the workings of a poem, as opposed to the language being the primary driving force. It is an excellent point, and certainly not a 'failing' of Vendler's work as much as it is simply not her concern – but her emphasis on formal construction can lead to a misdirection of focus in some poets.

* Over at The London Review of Books, James Wood reviews Pilcrow, a new novel by Adam Mars-Jones. Wood writes that the novel 'measures its length in such tiny units that at times you feel that a version of Zeno’s paradox will stop you from ever reaching its end' and that it 'is painted, as it were, with millions and millions of little dots: we experience, at a devotedly slow tempo, the thoroughly ordinary occurrences in the early life of an ordinary English child whose disability soon comes to seem ordinary, also.' That would be literary pointelism, in case anyone is keeping track. Overall though he seems to find the book acceptable enough, enjoyable despite its apparent flaws and dearth of plot movement.

* The LA Times profiles some young(ish/er-than-other) literary men with books about to be published, including n+1 co-founder Keith Gessen, 'The Moscow-born Gessen, 33, may be the end of the line, the last of the bold, hungry, text-based thinkers, a throwback to the heyday of Dissent, the quarterly at which he once toiled.' Hmm, I am definitely . . . younger than that. So no, he ain't the last text-based intellectual – perhaps he and his comrades were at avant guard of a new wave? One can hope. I'm not the biggest fan of n+1, which seems too interested in picking arguments and inventing criticisms where they seem inappropriate and at times fabricated; they miss an opportunity to do appropriate and worthwhile criticism, engaging the cultural sphere in the kind of independent analysis it has lacked since the hippies . . . I mean, the 60s.

Goood morning! Visited Newburyport with a few friends last night for a reading at the Newburyport Art Gallery by Marcia Karp, hosted by the Powow River poets. It was nice enough for the burbs, Marcia read very well – otherwise a lot of gray beards and Birkenstocks; a chorus of annoying Mmm. . .'s rife with pensive recognition from the audience; no copies of the readers' books for sale; not enough seats, so when we arrived they had to set some up for us.

Also, having grown up in Quincy, I never spent a lot of time away from Boston, but more on the South Shore than up North. I'd forgotten what Route 1 North is like: garish monstrosities of giant neon cacti, plastic thirty-foot leaning towers of Pizza, faux-pleasure-schooners containing Yankee Candle stores. The horror, the horror – it is Massachusetts' own New Jersey.

* Reginald Shepherd writes at his blog that 'A dichotomy is commonly made between aesthetic expression and aesthetic construction, in which the two terms are set in opposition as ways of proceeding in art. One is either exploring the possibilities of one’s medium or one is expressing one’s emotional and psychological state. One is either following formal necessities or emotional necessities. I find this dichotomy to be false.'

I'm not sure where he is still finding this dichotomy – my experience has always been to fit form to content as much as possible – except in the case of undeveloped and ignorant poets (in his students?). Or perhaps he is simply dissatisfied with the ability of so many published poets to match form and content; not an easy task, and one that takes more than mere workshop training. There lies one of the margins between passable or good poetry, and great poetry.

Reginald's post gives me the opportunity to mention Helen Vendler's masterful analysis of Yeats in Our Secret Discipline. In it, Vendler analyzes Yeats' use of form as it relates to theme and content, in sequences and also individually, down to the measure of each line. She shows how Yeats carefully chose each form to fit the tone, and that the shape of stanzas and their relations in sequence informs each poem as much as the diction and syntax do. It is a fascinating and artful study, informative for scholars and poets alike, for those who want a better understanding of poetry and those who want a better understanding of Yeats' work.

* At The Times Literary Supplement, the poem of the week is The Widow’s Eulogy, by E. A. Markham, with an introduced by Mick Imlah.

* At The Poetry Foundation Linh Dinh reviews the new book by Kent Johnson (the Araki Yasusada guy), Homage to the Last Avant Garde. Dinh writes that 'Johnson yearns for "poetry’s return to fiction, its old and forgotten home." He's obviously not talking about the "I do this, I do that" or "guess what I saw yesterday" sorts of narrative, which are common enough in today's poetry. I also doubt he's hankering for more of the epic. Poetry was fiction back then simply because there was no prose to speak of.' No, you fool. He means that it needs to be understood on a most basic level that poetry is not – not – therapy. It is not good enough to be 'authentic' or 'true,' which is why he lampoons the New York Poets (like O'Hara). In order to fully separate these he invented Yasusuda and clings to the kind of imaginative imagery that Borges used – it calls attention to its unreality, its non-truth.

Whew: crazy day yesterday. Here's a post to make up for it.

At The New York Times Stanley Fish ran a column on the 'death' of French Theory in America. He simplifies and explains their underlying assertions, and gives an example. He then claims, 'Obviously the rationalist Enlightenment agenda does not survive this deconstructive analysis intact.' This is where Stanley Fish and other proponents of theory become frustrating. These acolytes, in their blind and foolish desire to be radical, cling to the assertion that only a blind fool could possibly using techniques of analysis based in Enlightenment Rationalism again.

For those who feel that the French theorists' work was interesting for its primary assertions, this is a wildly farcical claim. Never in my study of Derrida, Foucault, or Lacan did I feel that their presumptions were anything more than academic – certainly never did I feel that they were not, in their own way, using the same constructive techniques in their arguments as every other 'modern' thinker since Aristotle. They fit into post-Enlightenment thought in several important ways, including their roles in the thesis/antithesis dynamic the culture and their use of internal coherence as a guiding structural principle.

This does not mean that these theories and systems of thought are invalid or not worth study, and their techniques have been fruitful. They are but a few more in the pantheon of seminal thinkers – revolutionary perhaps, no more so than others. These theories are not dead, but they are no longer intimidating.

Huzzah the work week.

* This week's NY Times contribution to literary culture in America: zero poetry reviews or articles. Disappointing. When given the opportunity to say to your board of directors, Look we have this poetry month theme, people expect this from us as cultural leaders, we have to provide more space to poetry; but you don't, or you fail, then something is wrong. It has to change; there are only a handful of book review sections left and The NY Times can't continue to be this spineless.

* Sixty-Six got a mention over at Siliman's blog.

* At The Atlantic, Ta-Nahisi Coates has an essay on Bill Cosby's crusade to re-form black culture in America. Cosby has been traveling the country giving speeches and calling out deadbeat fathers, murderers, rappers, and pregnant teens, and trying to imbue black culture with values of personal responsibility and self-reliance. 'If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at that—a personal and communal creed—there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights. He chides activists for pushing to reform the criminal-justice system, despite solid evidence that the criminal-justice system needs reform. His historical amnesia—his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage—is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations.'

It is a really interesting article, and other than that I won't say much. However, I am annoyed that anywhere the ideas of self-reliance, discipline, responsibility, and hard work are mentioned they're 'conservative,' while 'liberals' are cast as believing it can all be fixed by a few government programs. When economist Harry Holtzer called for a reasonable, even handed, two-fold analysis, he is dismissed with a short and unreflective 'fair enough,' as if to say – that doesn't make a good article, now back to the fight. By staging the two sides as caricatures, we lose the nuanced approach. But I and many other 'liberal'-minded people would argue that a two-fold and reasonable approach is the only way out – the long, slow road.

I don't deride Cosby for his crusade; he is a civic, non-political community leader (greatly needed in all communities). But there is such a thing as institutionalized racism that has to be taken into account here. Values of self-reliance and personal responsibility are basic and necessary to thrive, but they are the most basic necessity – it is not a cultural solution by itself. I think that programs which work to deteriorate institutional racism are important to solve this puzzle, just as those basic civic values are. Only one of these can be affected by government policies, and we are remiss to ignore either.

* Lemon Hound reports on a 200 page novel that is a single sentence using only irregular commas as indicators of shifts in tone, voice, speech, and stops, entitled Dies: A Sentence. Wait, stops? Speech? Why would you use a comma when we have punctuation to do that? It seems as if the author is being difficult for the sake of a gimmick.

Sixty-Six received its first review recently, at Sonnet Central. Michael Alexander writes, 'reading it through gave me great pleasure. I've always wanted to see a journal where new poetry & a disciplined response to that poetry could co-exist, side by side. To narrow the field to a chosen form simplifies such a dialogue, increasing the likeliness that one side will be relevant to the other. (Unlike, say, the essays that appear in Poetry magazine, where the one hand rarely has any idea what the other hand is doing.) . . . These people are thorough, if not beautifully obsessive. Just the people I want to be running a journal of sonnet studies.'

And here is a friendly ORDER NOW link, for your pleasure.

New online literary journal from Ireland, Moloch, looks very nice – sort of grunge. Could work on readability. Well done.

I forgot to congratulate Rose Metal Press for having a book in the BookBuilder show this year, a chapbook of short-short fiction, entitled The Sky is Well and Other Stories. A beautiful little chapbook and quite an accomplishment for such a small operation as theirs. I only wish I could buy a copy – perhaps there will be a second printing?

And also, congrats to Boston College for reaching their 3rd National Championship in a row, and this during a "rebuilding" year. They dominated North Dakota (a very good team itself) yesterday 6-1.

* Very very glad to have This Space back, one of the blogs whose content is entertaining and often insightful. Here he lists some critical texts he has recently enjoyed – 'Warning: they may contain erudite literary argument.' Well done to include Boston's own Christopher Ricks, whose office InBox is perpetually, and perplexingly, empty.

* Edward Byrne at One Poet's Notes commemorates the birthday of Canadian-born poet Mark Strand. What I've read of Strand's poetry has not excited me. It isn't exactly offensive, or obviously lacking in some respect, but bland. Perhaps I'm out of the loop. One more case where my tastes just don't fall in line with the rest?

* Book columnist Edward Nawotka has an essay (soon to be published in Publishing Research Quarterly) on the legal / business future of digital literature. 'According to the IDPF, in 2006, publishers sold some $22 million worth of ebooks in the U.S., numbers which the organization expects top $30 million or more this year. In Asia, where laptops and cellphones are more sophisticated that in the US or Europe, the numbers are much more significant. The Digital Content Association of Japan estimating sales of e-books topping $126 million in 2006, with $58 million of that coming from sales from mobile phones – an increase of some 331% from the previous year. “The numbers are growing very fast,” said Bogaty, “but they are growing from nothing. Give it another five years and it will be a real business.” ' Crazy stuff.

* Michael Dirda reviews The library at Night, a collection of essays on libraries by Alberto Manguel, at The Washington Post. 'From a psychological viewpoint, most bookmen and women are actually among the more unfortunate sufferers on the wheel of life – for them there is no respite, no relief, from the insatiate ache of desire. Surrounded by plenty, they hunger for more.' Oh, Michael. Why so purple? Other than the attendant self-pity over his less-comfortable-than-Manguel's life (still far better than mine at a barely living wage, so no empathy there) this is one of the better reviews I've read by Dirda recently. Almost as if he engaged himself with the text, rather than with himself.

Last night was the annual BookBuilders of Boston show at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, as well as the Dwiggins lecture on typography by Erik Spiekermann at The Boston Public Library. Ten minutes into the Dwiggins lecture, the fire alarm went off – German humor? No. And despite the unusually amusing introduction Spiekermann had partially given, at the sound of alarm I scurried to the book show across the street. The show is a place to be shmoozed by printer sales reps and to be told, for the thousandth time, 'Oh my, I interned at Godine ages ago!' Usually followed by a question of how business is doing and how on Earth we stay open, and I tell them, 'Well, we do nice books, often good books, and they have the same audience they always have. Nothing changes.'

* I've noticed less and less interest in James Wood now that he moved over to The New Yorker. Cause/effect? I predicted a short life there when he moved; they aren't intelligent enough, and too parochial. Wood reviews Lush Life, the new novel by Richard Price – or more specifically he reviews Price's dialogigcal abilities: 'Price’s dialogue gets really interesting when it surges past the referential, when a character’s words are not a technical argot but a highly personal, oddly unaccountable mélange.' Whoa James, whoa. Other than the batter-thick diction, it's a pretty good account of dialogue and one of the ways it can be put to effective use, and put down effectively on the page. Wood has to stop hanging out with Sven Birkerts and John Freeman though.

* Patrick Goldstein at the LA Times has an essay on the death of the critic, all kinds. He places the problem squarely in the realm of trust – as in, 'I trust my friends more than I trust that guy writing the review.' He goes on to write, 'Whether critics are irritants or masters of elucidation, opinions still matter. But no one is respected simply because of the authority of the institution they write for. The Web isn't the enemy of critical thinking. The land of a million blogs is a medium brimming with opinion. What's different is the reader gets to decide whose opinion matters the most. It's a big adjustment, but maybe it's time critics, like many artists, realize they should pay more attention to their audience.'

Hmm. Maybe not their audience, but perhaps more towards non-egotistical ideals. Rather than believing your opinion matters, perhaps one should make one's opinion matter. Critics who hold themselves under the greatest scrutiny are often best suited to judge a work. Opinions in and of themselves actually don't matter, at all, unless they are made to matter, unless they are refined so that they are right opinions. But then again, there is very little 'opinion' in Edmund Burke, or James Wood, or Adam Kirsch; only a set of well-elucidated standards against which works are judged. Perhaps this is a problem of vocabulary though.

* Barcodes are usually very boring, very ugly – uninteresting. Except Right Reading has some exceptions to the rule.

Welcome back Bill Buckner – it was a classy thing he did to throw out the first pitch of opening day. I love catharsis.

* At The NY Sun, Adam Kirsch reviews a bio-analytic of the genius cultural critic Theodore Adorno. The book is 'not quite a biography; it does not lay out the events of Adorno’s life in chronological order, preferring to skip thematically through the decades, and it assumes a good deal of prior knowledge of his work and milieu. It might best be described as the biography of Adorno’s friendships — or better still, his relationships, since even his friends tended to go through phases of disliking him.' The author Detlev was apparently a student of Adorno; feelings of kinship with his master rise up in his explication of the personal clashes Adorno had with others.

Kirsch writes that 'for all the intellectual dexterity Adorno expended in this effort, and all the undoubted insights he gained into history and culture, it is precisely the totalizing nature of his thought that renders it so questionable. . . . Adorno effectively denies the possibility of spontaneity and pluralism, of freedom and new beginnings — in other words, all the human capacities that make genuine humanism possible.' I'm skeptical of his use of the phrase 'genuine humanism,' but Kirsch makes an excellent point here: one can take so much from Adorno's work – and I certainly feel like I have – but one should never assume an uncritical posture.

* Speaking of big unsupportable claims about culture: Dan at The Reading Experience has a fairly long post regarding Brian Boyd's essay at The American Scholar. My 2¢ : I think the study of literature can never be a science. This would be a issue of categories. Science is that which is known and able to be verified through reproduction of results in controlled experiments or through matrices of knowledge derived therefrom (this is a very simple definition of science, I know – bear with me). Consider that each person is a set of variables at once too numerous to quantify, too fluid to verify, and impossible to accurately categorize. Also consider that each person has a different set of variables. How can the reaction to, response to, or production of literature be scientific, when each test case is unique? The study of literature simply does not belong to the category of human knowledge deemed Science.

* The Guardian reports on a multi-faceted tribute to America's darkest literary genius: Poe. 'In Fergus Bremner's work, the public is encouraged to add two or three lines to a story on a computer screen. The programme will translate whatever is written into Poe-ese. For instance, if I were to write "Fred and I had some decent grub before shoving off into the filthy night", it would become "Frederick and I partook of a sumptuous repast before once more going abroad into that most abysmal species of all evenings." ' Hah! Love it.

* The Guardian reviews Salman Rushdie and his book The Enchantress of Florence, which is apparently his Blood on the Tracks.

* Scott at Conversational Reading points out that 'the people who write literature pieces for Slate and Salon actually know better than one might guess by what tends to get said in their pieces, but have to write toward the audience.'

Busy busy and getting sick. This does not bode well.

* The NY Times announces this year's Pulitzer Prize winners, including Junot Diaz for fiction and the tandem of Robert Hass & Philip Schultz for poetry. ZzZzZz Oh, oh I'm sorry – I fell asleep thinking about this award, which I feel grows more meaningless each year, and each year more poorly selected. The Times also reports on the death of Simon Michael Bessie, the founder of Atheneum Press who should have stuck with the eminent Mr. Knopf.

* Critical Mass will be running a series of posts focusing on small press titles, and they begin with poet Jon Pineda's collection The Translator’s Diary, published by New Issues Press in 2008. A nice little interview with the author I thought, placing him in a lineage with James Wright and discussing the themes of his collection – I would warn against the oversimplification of themes and purpose by the interviewer though. I'm ever glad to be introduced to new writers.

* Linh Dinh at Harriet makes a great point about the postmodern "lack of self" and the realities of sickness and suffering as spotlights on human individuality and value; she juxtaposes the words of pomo-Warhollian Kenneth Goldsmith with those of Reginald Shepherd. There is, I feel, a renewed (though not unified) sense of the value of humanism among those of us who were born into postmodernity – from the GenX Brooklyn writers to the new formalists and classicalists, and even to those whose work is formally similar to the postmoderns but more philosophically human.

It is a renewed interest in the individual as containing value, and seeing the things that people make – as Vico put it – as the only things we can truly know (as opposed to the pomo idea that everything we know must have been things we made). And so, we can know self and other, can come to know values, can know about the workings of history and knowledge, and power, because as so many postmodern thinkers have shown, these are all constructions – hm. Larger than individuals, but not larger than community, society? Hm. I'll have to think this through some more.

I hate one of these men. Guess who.

In the gallant name of National Poetry Month, two exciting offers: one is a great poetry deal offered at my day-time base David R Godine Publisher and Black Sparrow Books if you order with a special form from the website, great titles at 30–80% off the list price; the other exciting news is that 66: The Journal of Sonnet Studies is available to order online, and each subscription comes with a limited companion chapbook of original sonnets in November.

* The NY Times is really going crazy with National Poetry Month by filling up the review this week with . . . fiction. Two reviews of poetry (more than usual) but tons of fiction, and by most of which I am not particularly excited. James Longenbach reviews Jorie Graham's Sea Change, a collection whose themes are drawn from global warming and ideas of an ecological end times. She has, once again, out-thought herself in her work – undermining successes in the poetry itself with neat but shallow hermeneutic concepts that she stole from actual philosophers.

* At The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Michael Robertson discusses the 19th century reception of Walt Whitman as less a great poet than 'a successor to the Buddha and Jesus.' Robertson writes that 'Before the Civil War, most spiritual seekers turned for inspiration to some combination of Emersonian transcendentalism and non-Western religious writings and traditions. From the 1860s on, many turned as well to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.' Whitman intended that his opus be read by working Americans, men of his urban and suburban landscape whose selves were being lost to the newly rising mass productive forces. However, he was far more influential amongst the more educated classes, especially 'among the British intelligentsia.' Not the last time this working/privileged dynamic unfolded in the US – See: Democratic National Convention, 1968.

It is important, I think, to bear in mind that our perceptions and reception of Whitman's work (and that of other writers of his stature) are constructed by the matrix of critical interpretations over the course of, in this case, more than a century; we have to purposefully strip these away to find alternate ways of looking at the text.

* Tony Hoagland has won second place in the Jackson Poetry Prize, the LA Times reports.

* ;;;;;;;;;;;;; = death? Mon dieu!

* The problem in the Middle East is that they are apparently Sicilian, Southern, or a Simpsons episde? The Weekly Standard reports: 'The central institution of segmentary tribes is the feud. Security depends on the willingness of every adult male in a given tribal segment to take up arms in its defense. An attack on a lineage-mate must be avenged by the entire group. Likewise, any lineage member is liable to be attacked in revenge for an offense committed by one of his relatives. One result of this system of collective responsibility is that members of Middle Eastern kin groups have a strong interest in policing the behavior of their lineage-mates, since the actions of any one person directly affect the reputation and safety of the entire group.'

Friday Friday Friday – need one say more? Big weekend of work on my writing ahead.

* Colm Tóibín has another essay at the NY Review of Books (does he ever sleep?) reviewing Hart Crane's collected: Library of America edition. Last weekend I stood in the bookstore with Hart Crane in one hand and Wallace Stevens in the other, and in a moment of arbitrariness I chose the Stevens. Fret not, Crane: your day will come. Colm writes, 'In his poems he worked a gnarled, edgy sound against the singing line; he played a language dense with metaphor and suggestion against images and rhythms of pure soaring beauty. His syntax had something hard and glittering in it, utterly surprising. In his best poems he managed to make the rhythms – the hidden nervous system in the words and between the words – so interesting, intense, and effortless that they command attention and emotional response despite their verbal density. . . ." I think this area is quite where Tóibín excels.

* The NY Times reports that a startup HarperCollins imprint is going to try to 'take all the things that we think are wrong with this business and try to change them' according to its head Robert Miller. This 'everything' includes author advances (they will get a share of the profits instead), nixing returns from retail bookstores, and offering all their printed material digitally as well. It's a fascinating project but I would rather see several divisions trying each of these innovations in order to get a clearer picture of what parts were working. With this method there is no way of knowing whether successes or failures were a result of any single alternative mode, or all of them.

This could be a sea-change in publishing though. No author is going to sign with a house whose annual profits are slim when they could be at a NewsCorp company. The Culture Industry is creeping into our skin like flesh-eating bacteria.

* I have a green 'Feral Cat Awareness' ribbon.

* The Times Lit Supplement has a review of Salman Rushdie's reframed version of Arabian Nights, The Enchantress of Florence, in which the critic may well have begun with 'We are not amused' to get right to the point. He writes, 'This ninth long fiction is a pendant to the previous one, Shalimar the Clown, published in 2005. And that book reprised aspects of Fury, published in 2001. All three books use breathtakingly paced sets of plots, interlinked with back stories, delightedly offending the boundaries of verisimilitude. All repeat elements which combine stereotypes with the writer’s own obsessions: Kashmir, revenge, the longing for peaceful religious and ethnic coexistence, and a savage anger about the perpetual dying of love.'

Ladies and gentlemen: India's answer to Philip Roth. Same themes, new story: novel; repeat as necessary to gain desired status.

Good morning! Got an email last night that The Library Of America is having a sale of leather-bound editions, boxed sets, and multi-author volumes. I picked up the leather-bound editions of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, and Thomas Paine: Collected Writings. It feels nice. Like, I have those two authors done now.

* Rose Metal Press is a small publishing house in Boston specializing in hybrid genres – such as verse novels and short-short collections – and they just launched their new website. Looks very nice. Clean, nice colors; the dictionary entry is a little on the 90's marketing kitsch end of things. They have a number of titles that sound interesting (like How to Build a Ghost in Your Attic by Peter Jay Shippy). Go browse, pick something up.

* The Poetry Foundation has an interview with Yusef Komunyakaa. I have mixed feelings about his work, or maybe it is that I often like his work but he seems pretentious. His poems are far more personal than I think he intends, or at least they are more personal than he lets on when talking about it. In this interview he says, 'I believe that, especially when considering the evolution of the species, almost every tool became a weapon. In that sense, our capacity for violence is perhaps biological or chemical.' I'm on the fence, but hearing him read last year was fantastic – great speaking voice (if he did go on a bit long).

* LanguageHat arouses lexical interest by attending to a lecture / article by Jack Lynch from Rutgers on the first English dictionary.

This is what I want for Christmas next year.

Ok the technissues didn't last as long as I thought they would – although I lost everything on my computer in the process. Thank goodness for the server!

* Travis Nichols at the Poetry Foundation has an essay on the zen of Philip Whalen, of whose poetry I have never been keen. Nichols writes, 'both Japanese Zen poetry and American poetry in the Objectivist tradition purport to show the world in this manner—without superfluous adjectival or analytical baggage—the poetry of American Zen poet Philip Whalen takes the artist-as-mirror idea to beautiful extremes.' I'm interested in this not so much for the content on Whalen, but for this comment on the Objectivists, of whom Frank O'Hara was a part. In my quest to unearth the reason for O'Hara's inflated reputation – aside from an early demise, everyone's favorite poetic attribute – this might be a key: the diluted influence of Zen poetry from the early Orientalists through WCW, so that the Objectivists accidentally mimic (without knowing it I would think) the mechanisms of a deeply-held philosophy. Appearance over substance, of course! Validation of the tragic hip and want-to-be hipsters.

* Couple notables from the NY Sun today as well (huzzah!): Adam Kirsch reviews John Burrow's A History of Histories, a book which does much to revive Histories as humanist art forms – as in the Greeks and Romans. Kirsch writes that 'Every great historian is, rather, a permanently valid witness to human experience. Together, they form what Mr. Burrow calls "a kind of community of the dead and the living," of which he is himself a honorable member.'

In a semi-related review, Simon Winchester discusses Nicholas Shrady's The Last Day, a book about the day the Middle Ages ended and science / humanism stepped forward: November 1, 1755. 'One hundred thousand people died in the [Lisbon earthquake], which remains the most catastrophic of all natural events in European history. But it is the reaction to the earthquake, rather than the event itself, that remains today so fascinating. For until the year 1755, all of the terrors that had been visited on humankind by nature [. . .] were said, unequivocally, to be the work of an angry God, with man paying the price for his manifold sins and wickedness. . . . it was Voltaire who employed the disaster to advance the cause of the Enlightenment, at the expense of prevailing Christian dogma.'

Computer problems here again. Back later, maybe.

* It is official: Amazon.com is becoming a tyrant. Had a feeling this would happen. According to a Publisher's Weekly report, the Amazon print-on-demand service BookSurge has told other POD publishers and providers that the buy buttons on Amazon for their titles will be disabled unless they switch. To the proverbial dark side. You can read about the whole situation at Writer's Weekly. Between this move and the introduction of The Kindle, Amazon is making some enemies in the book world – which is apparently expendable in their eyes.

Nice

Happy Poetry Month. Going to be a busy one today. As it has been for a while.

* In a Village Voice interview with John Banville, the acclaimed author says 'The Booker Prize is still amazingly influential: A book which would sell 5,000 or 6,000 copies in hardback, like The Sea, sold 75,000, 100,000. Of course, one doesn't take it as an indication of the worth of one's work. If there had been five different judges, there would have been six different books on the short list. But it was very gratifying to win it.' A good healthy perspective, I think. I know this is probably boring to you folks but so many authors are egotistical marketers that Banville is always a nice change of pace. May I recommend the only work I've read by him, The Newton Letter.

Banville goes on to say, 'Writing as Benjamin Black, it's halfway between doing long reviews for The New York Review of Books and doing a John Banville book. It's craft work, which I'm quite proud of. It gives me a lot of fun – well, some fun; a lot of satisfaction. I'm quite proud of these books – proud as a craftsman. Whereas I loathe and despise all my John Banville books. I really hate them. They're better than anybody else's; they're just not good enough for me.' Hah!

* At Poets & Writers, in an essay on the dwindling readership, Kevin Nance quotes Christian Wiman, “I do think for a long time writers turned completely away from the audience,” Wiman says. “You can’t simply go back to the past, of course, but I do think writers have to be aware of an audience.” And this, of course, results in appalled outrage at The Reading Experience. But this claim is not new, nor is it particularly philistine. Wiman is pointing out a possible cause for lower readership, and what an author can do to help counteract it if they feel so inclined – such as John Banville writing crafted noir novels that people can enjoy and not worry about working through. You do need both ends of the spectrum for a strong literary culture.

* At the Times Literary Supplement, Stephen Burt discusses John Ashberry's late style. He writes that 'Ashbery’s non sequiturs throw us back on the reasons we have tried to follow them, on why we take, or try to take, an interest in any topic at all – on our desire for conversation, for companionship, for evidence that we are not entirely alone. . . . Yet to chase allusions, or to seek a continuous tradition, is to miss the point. Where other poets ask us to look everything up, or berate us for not being as learned as they, Ashbery implies that life is too short for him to expect us to learn what he knows' Hmm. This might be why I don't get anything out of his poetry – enjoyment, enlightenment, or camaraderie. He would have made a much better theorist than he does a poet.