In not too long the motorcade carrying Senator Kennedy will be passing through the downtown area of Boston, where I work, so I need to get this out and quick in order to step out and pay my respects.
* At The Nation, James Longenbach reviews the new edition of Wallace Stevens' Selected Poems. He writes, 'Stevens stands simultaneously among the most worldly and the most otherworldly of American poets, and it is paradoxically through his otherworldliness — through poems whose plain-spoken diction feels spooky — that his respect for the actual world is registered. What is uncharacteristic about "The Men That Are Falling" is not the desire to write about a controversial war; Stevens often did that. What distinguishes the poem is the unconvincingly urgent rhetoric in which that desire is registered.'
* Ed Byrne gives a 100-title poetry reading list for the 20th Century. Thoughts? I think that collected or selected editions ought to be disqualified; regardless, I'm struck by how sparse the century was in terms of really obviously great poetry. This list probably could have been 50 titles and some of them still would've been in dispute.
* At The New Yorker, James Wood cogently (to my mind) criticizes the two major forms of godlessness: the New Atheist clan and what I'll term the Terry Eagleton approach. [subscription req.] There are plenty of problems with Wood's description of both sides — one could say he oversimplifies each — but the point he seems to want to make is that atheism in any form today has not constructed a truly fulfilling alternative to the religious lifestyle. As a professed non-believer himself, I suppose that this is a piece of articulate frustration with that fact.
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