Off to Book Expo America

I'll be in New York City for the weekend, along with the rest of the Godine crew, out of touch (and likely out of breath). It's all sales sales sales with intermittent lapses for meetings, presentations, catalogs, and maybe some galleys. I suspect there will be a certain amount of doom and gloom as well, since the AP recently reported book sales down 20% this year (and this guy runs Random House). Scary stuff. But generally, I'm optimistic — because I'm young and I got nothing anyway, and up is the only way to move. If you're down at BEA, swing by the Godine booth on Saturday or Sunday and say hello!

Man-Booker to Alice Munro

The Guardian today reports that Canadian author and renowned short-story master Alice Munro has been awarded the 2009 Man Booker International Prize: 'Munro's spare, quiet stories of small-town life have won her a host of literary awards, although the Nobel prize for literature, for which she is a perennial contender, still eludes her. But she has nonetheless spoken of her desire to write a great novel. "I'm always trying. Between every book I think, well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff," she told the Guardian in 2003. But Smiley said that Munro managed to do more in the 30 pages of her short stories than some novelists do in an entire book.'

I picked up Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories, her 1968 debut story collection, on a whim at a used bookstore quite a while ago, having very little idea of what kind of writer Munro is but having heard her mentioned as a great contemporary author. Of course, once one is looking for stories from Munro, they're abundant — it's been easy to keep up with her career. Her writing is lucid, her stories human; they are sometimes memorable but almost never failing, and if there is a true flaw to her writing it is that she seems to ever err on the side of simplicity. I've enjoyed just about every story I've read by Munro though: many congratulations to her.

Memorial Day

This memorial day, TBG and I watched The Pianist. Thinking of a way to celebrate Memorial Day this year now that my grandfather is gone, I offer a poem of witness from Geoffrey Hill: "September Song."

The title is almost Keatsian (perhaps intentional for the self-reflective poem that follows) in its lyrical evocation of the classic Autumn / leading-to-death paradigm, bolstered by the dates below. These dates illustrate the occasion of the poem: the deportation (unto death) of a child in 1942. The tone of that word "deported" in those dates is cool and bureaucratic, a distancing of the description of the event from any human reality. The child was simply processed and deported, inconsequentially. It is an unsettling resistance to expectation and an implicit connection of deportation with certain (as in factual) death, but also mirrors the type of conveniently narrowed (en)vision that allowed for so many to die in the holocaust.

The first line acknowledges the position / excuse of a strained government and society ("Undesirable you might have been") at war, and closes with the "untouchable" that is, perhaps, more damning than "undesirable" for its connections with disease and low caste. I feel that the words "caste" and "cast" — as in, cast out of heaven or the holy land — was certainly a connection the poet held in mind for this word choice in line one: an implication of the ancient traditions of Judaism, its history of abuse and diaspora, and its conflict with the mechanistic modern nation state.

Line two — "you were not. Not forgotten" — turns on the first line and redeems "untouchable." It is a true statement of witness in its resistance to forgetting. It affirms as it unties what was left of sense in the previous line. In the third / last line of the stanza, we come upon another untying of sense in the questioning of the very act of witness: the fact that the child was not missed or "passed over" by the state is itself worth lamentation. Again, "passed over" is no random selection — passover is strong in the phrase, as is the sense of being "chosen" as the Hebrews are (an ambiguous honor, not clearly beneficial).

The second stanza details the systematic ("Things marched"), bureaucratic ("sufficient, to that end."), and scientific ("Zyklon and leather") process of the child's death in the holocaust camps. Hill emphasizes the juxtaposition of violence against the child — "leather, patented / terror" — by evoking the patent leather shoes that school-children wear in England. And then we find the surprising inward turn of stanza four; it is an admission of complicity or at least self-doubt, again drawing in to question the act of witness in a new way. The lines ask, Is the act of witness also an act of self-regard? It is a stark reminder that we must not focus on the feelings that the event raises in us, but in the reality of its actual circumstance in fact — it attempts to rescue the description of terrible facts from safely-distancing fiction.

Following from this, the next line — "September fattens on vines" — seems to be an indictment of the poem itself as an "elegy." The fattening calls to mind corpulence, bodily and human, and the vine original sin (itself laying a bodily penance, giving way to the pains of birth and the sins of Cain and Abel). This moment of moral /ethical and religious reflection returns the poem to the historical moment (rose wallpaper crumbling from the city's bombardment), and then to the personal, to sight and witness. The smoke in this speaker's eyes is the smoke of the bombing but recalls the cinder of bodies burning; it is the point at which the concerns and questions are atoned — though obscured, or imperfect, the witness that we enact for those who've died is still (as the loaves and fishes were) "plenty."

Obama at the Naval Academy

Congrats Papi

David Ortiz has really struggled this year, and it's been hard to watch, but he carried the team once and I can't not support the big guy. I just saw this in the Globe:

8:50 pm, bottom fifth, 8-0 Red Sox
In his 150th at-bat since his last homer, David Ortiz brought the Fenway crowd to its feet with a two-run homer to centerfield right below the foul pole in centerfield. The crowd roared. Ortiz received a huge outpouring of affection from teammates, manager Terry Francona and coaches in the Sox dugout. Ortiz' longest drought previous to this was 145 at-bats without a homer.

Drawn Lots of Poetry

Nota Bene from President Obama's speech at Notre Dame University: 'Because when we do that — when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe — that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.'

* In an interesting interview at the Oxonian Review, Geoffrey Hill admits, 'I don’t have much faith in creative writing courses such as the Master of Fine Arts programmes so prevalent in the States and increasingly active in the UK. I believe that poets should be self-taught, based on an intensive programme of preferably serendipitous reading.' Maybe he should have begun this with 'Dear Boston University' to really get that dig a little bit deeper. Unsurprisingly, I agree with him. He also says of John Milton, ' I believe that, were he alive now, he would be the people’s champion against plutocratic anarchy' (see my lengthy review of Hill's Selected Poems at The Critical Flame where, at the end, I cursorily compare Milton and Hill). Also from Geoffrey Hill today, a revision of his 'Seven Hymns to our Lady of Chartres,' appearing in English the French magazine LISA (opens as a PDF).

* At Caracanet, Christopher Logue makes the case for John Dryden, 'Satirist, pedagogue, playright, proselyte, pornographer (mild), occasional plaigiary, songwriter, literary critic (our first), expert in three types of translation (including English to English), always, and above all, the master poet of his age, John Dryden (1631-1700), by today's standards, is worth at least three or four Nobel Prizes for Literature.' The piece is mostly selections from Dryden's poetry. Oddly enough, Hill says in the interview, 'I’m drawn to writers who seem to me to be brave, beleaguered, and cheerful — like John Dryden.' It's all happening, man.

* Another post that criticises a James Wood essay, at Blographia Literaria — this time it's his London Review of Books piece on Ian McEwan. It's sort of a boring exercise to actually attack him, although the very fact of our discussing 'defamiliarization' as a concept, and his application of it (which does appear to be weak) speaks to his success as a public critic; it is not his job to be 'totemic' and right, correct, authoritarian; rather, his role is to formulate an opinion and present his case for further discussion, private or public.

* In an interview at the Contemporary Poetry Review, poet / critic William Jay Smith says, 'I detest theory in criticism. Theory killed poetic criticism in France and Derrida’s Deconstruction theory has had a disastrous effect on criticism in this country and has completed the ruination of English departments by continuing what had started as a misreading and misunderstanding of the “New Critics”. Robert Graves said once that a poet writes poems for his friends, and I agree. And he also writes criticism for those same friends.'

* Narrative Magazine is accepting entries into their first annual poetry competition.

Poetry & Painting

About three months ago Stephen Sturgeon (Fulcrum editor) and I were having dinner and talking about a variety of things when the merits of Frank O'Hara's poetry somehow came up. It probably had to do with the review of O'Hara's Selected Poems, by Queen-of-Hearts William Logan in the New York Times. I've never liked O'Hara for some of the narcissistic qualities that Logan points out (realizing that it seems to be almost purely personal). Stephen was saying how much he enjoyed the articulation of aesthetic elements that the poet borrowed from painting at that time, to which I responded that I'm admittedly not familiar enough with painting to appreciate those kinds of connections. (Maybe he recalls and can correct me here if that isn't quite what he meant.)

Recently, I've been listening to some of the Poetry Foundation Poetry Lecture podcasts, and happened to begin with talks by Edward Hirsch, Helen Vendler, and Langdon Hammer — all intelligent, credible, I thought. Good places to start. Vendler compared the element of still life in Wallace Stevens and Jasper Johns; Hammer discussed the relationship between Hart Crane and Johns again; Hirsch talked about the relationship between painting and poetry, in general. And just this week, at The Harvard Bookstore, Colm Tóibín read from his new novel Brooklyn, and, in answering questions afterward, compared his way of thinking about the construction of a scene with details to Cezanne's brush strokes.

It isn't a new phenomenon, this comparison and connection between poetry and painting. Or, rather, it isn't as if I hadn't been aware of the connection between these two art forms, but never before have I felt so unprepared to engage with poetry (and, literature). It seems this relationship and my lack of background, my only basic understanding, is coming to a head — either I need to deepen my art-history background or there needs to be some articulation of an approach that chooses not to allow those connections to take part in my judgment and engagement with poetry. But that seems arbitrary — excluding painting and and privileging history, culture, literary reference, etc. Where then do I begin?

CSI: MBTA

From TBG this morning: 'Well, I get on the train and there are four towny guys on there all in their Boston jerseys, with the gold chains and the hats. They all turn to look at me as I get on and watch me as I find a seat, so I assume they're towny guys with slightly wandering eyes. Then as I'm sitting in my seat, facing them, I think, "Where have they come from?" They're clearly not BC students and there aren't that many stops further west of us; they don't seem like the type to live in this neighborhood. So I wonder if maybe they had been somewhere all night watching the Bruins game and were now coming home, because they aren't dressed for work and that's pretty conspicuous on the T at 8:30.

We come in to Warren Street now and this guy gets on the back and one of this group turns to talk to him. He's asking the guy questions about his Charlie Card, which, from where I'm sitting, sounds like he doesn't know how it works. So in my head I'm going, "These crazy townies must be from the way out suburbs, it's like they've never even ridden the T, and all these people going to work do not want to be bothered by their questions." The towny guy is asking about adding money to a Charlie Card, and the passenger says "Yeah, it's a stored value. You add money to it."

Then the towny whips out his MBTA PD badge and says, "I'll need to see an id!" The working man says, "Why? I was told to come on in the back, and I have a monthly pass."

Towny / MBTA PD: "You just said this was stored value!"

Businessman: "No, it's a pass."

So they go to the front and check it out, and, of course, it's a pass. There were four of them on my train alone, which, if we really underestimate how much they get paid, means that the MBTA spent at least $100 today just on one ride from BC to Govt Center and, in the time I was on the train, they didn't catch a single person.'

Cue The Who.

Almost Done

Been a hell of a week here. Catalogs, bookmarks, posters, BEA right around the corner. I need a scotch. Meanwhile, check out my baby The Critical Flame if you haven't already — more than 500 visitors this week and many kind words from readers. I've been surprised how few Letters to the Editor we've received; we may not have any to publish in June as we'd planned.

* At Conversational Reading, Scott asks, 'Why read African literature?' with several ham-handed responses from The Brooklyn Rail. I think the question, in that case, ought to be, Why read any literature from outside one's culture? Or, any literature at all? By wading gently in the comfort of our own easy cultures we learn nothing of our shared humanity — literature is that bridge between us otherwise-island minds, of nobility and degradation, happiness and sorrow, sin and salvation. It is not only what we share but the only way in which we're able to share ourselves. [Thanks to Homi Bhabha for this idea.] The more interesting question by far is, 'Why do we not read African literature in particular?'

* There are two morals from this Chronicle of Higher Education article, a) graduate students are a bunch of jackasses, and b) never trust a Kirkus review. 'Sometimes you need visual aids to make clichés come to life. I was once watching a TV documentary on hyenas and realized how little I knew about them. The pack had taken down some elegant ungulate and was tearing big chunks of flesh out of it, ripping it apart, devouring the viscera so that within a few minutes, the victim was no longer recognizable as what it had been. Occasionally the hyenas would turn on one another, growling and snapping with blood-spattered muzzles. It reminded me of something. I thought for a minute. Oh, yes, of course: a graduate seminar.'

* Speaking of reviews, but in a positive sense now, prose master John Banville has a review at The New Republic of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940. He writes, 'We should address first things first--though our subject would no doubt recommend last things last; so let us get the scholarly apparatus out of the way, for it is an ungainly contraption. Here then, in brief, in more than brief, is the tangled history of the project which the editors tell us is known as "The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett," although the publication is called The Letters of Samuel Beckett — this is one of a number of odd nonsequiturs that crop up in Fehsenfeld's and Overbeck's guarded, not to say defensive, introduction to this, the first of four projected big volumes. In 1985, perhaps fearing the attentions of another delver into his life and work whom he would have to neither help nor hinder, Beckett decided that an edition of his letters should be published. To this end he appointed his American publisher and friend Barney Rosset as general editor, with Fehsenfeld and Overbeck — do they not sound like a pair of minor characters from Beckett's earlier, more rambunctious fictions? — as editor and associate editor, respectively.'

Oh, Snap!

* Mary Beard, classics editor for the Times Literary Supplement, takes on lazy book designers and their covers. After an extended critique of the use of pots as a catch-all to cover designs, she writes, 'Sometimes I just don’t get the point. Maybe when I look more carefully at A. S. Hollis’s edition of Callimachus’ Hecale, I’ll understand what the blue splodge in the bottom right-hand corner of the (otherwise undecorated) jacket is meant to mean. Is it perhaps supposed to be the cloud that causes the rain storm so crucial to the poem’s plot? It doesn’t look much like a rain cloud to me. And so far, I am baffled as to why there are two large black patches under the eyes of the marble bust that features on Daniel A. Dombrowski’s Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals. Again, perhaps it will all become clear later.' Oh, snap!

* In The New Republic, Adam Kirsch reviews the new anthology of Chinese poetry in translation, writing, 'A scholar-translator such as David Hinton, whose new anthology forms the capstone to a long and productive career, certainly knows infinitely more about Chinese language, culture, and literature than Pound ever did.' Oh, snap!

* At CNN, Ali Soufan testifies against 'enhanced interrogation techniques' when dealing with terrorism. The article reports, 'The techniques, which were approved by the Bush administration, are considered torture by many critics. "From my experience — and I speak as someone who has personally interrogated many terrorists and elicited important actionable intelligence — I strongly believe that it is a mistake to use what has become known as the enhanced interrogation techniques," Soufan noted in his written statement.' Oh, snap!

It's Always a Party

This is also good, from The Olive Reader at Harper Perennial.

* I am dying to pun on the name Walcott as The Guardian reports on the withdrawl of his candidacy from the post of Oxford professor of poetry. What comes to mind though is a letter by WH Auden concerning Robert Lowell's candidacy for the same Oxford post, 'His supporters should be aware, if they aren't already, that Cal has times when he has to go into the bin. The warning signals are three: a) He announces that he is the only living poet b) a romantic and usually platonic attraction to a young girl and c) he gives a huge party.' Of course, that was a long time ago. And check out this interview with Walcott at Next.

* Book parties? Apparently they're all the rage in New Delhi. 'At its best, the Delhi book party brings together an artsy, youngish crowd and — in varying degrees of abundance — free liquor and canapés.' Sweet. Sounds a bit like the Pierre Menard in Cambridge.

* At the Poetry Foundation blog, Eileen Myles writes, 'To have a lively, and slightly dangerous poetry world [sic] one of the prerequisites would be that we would trade some polite ambition in order to court that wild exchange . . . So John Updike. I actually could care less about his poetry, even whether it is that or not. What I was floored by really was the review in the Times recently of his last book. A British poet (and I’m dying to put quotes around that word) wrote an incredibly pro-man review. I mean if a woman wrote this way about a famous dead woman I guess you’d call it feminist. Actually I think you’d call it lesbian.'

The rest of the piece is . . . well, you read it. If this is a dangerous poetry culture then I'm all against it, and will take intelligent, reasonable, and critical in its stead. I'm certain that Updike wasn't a great poet, and that the Times review to which she refers was ostensibly in honor of the man of letters as opposed to his work — not a piece of journalism to be praised — but Myles' essay is borderline hateful. And ne'er does she cite one line or even a phrase from a single poem. What is the Poetry Foundation doing over there?

Rejoice

This is good.

* At The New York Times, some readers respond to the recent review of William Logan's book of collected essays, 'so much of contemporary poetry seems very little different from prose — it’s just prose broken into poetic-looking lines (a technique started by Pound and Williams), and few contemporary poets attempt anything deep. It mostly seems academic and cute — glazed over by a layer of faux insight. I think poetry should be amazing. I rarely hear poets discussing such subjects of interest as sex or death or finances, especially their own. I have yet to attend a reading where the poet discussed his or her ego involvement — there’s a lot of dishonesty and shallowness around in contemporary poetry. Logan has the moxie to strike a dissenting note, a rare thing in itself. How many reviews do you read where the writer really cuts loose? Are poets so fragile a group that a little criticism might blow them away?' I don't even know what to say about this. Williams? Cute? Finances? Moxie?

* Does liberalism have the problem of finding a basis for its tenants? Humanism seemed like a pretty good foundation for a few hundred years. At the Philadelphia Inquirer, 'The great 18th-century English man of letters Samuel Johnson considered the Declaration [of Independence] a parody of itself; his contemporary Edmund Burke found its central concept — freedom of the individual — an interesting but undeveloped idea that would ultimately fail. In fact, the initial British antidote to rebellion was to withdraw the government of Massachusetts, confident that the resulting chaos would teach the insurrectionists a lesson they would never forget. When that strategy didn't work, an amazed Burke observed that in America, "anarchy is found tolerable" — giving Purdy a title for his book.'

What is most interesting, in light of recent conversations, is this: 'Most important to Purdy is that the real revolution of our Revolution was not the overthrow of power — which has happened throughout history — but rather that human rights were conceived for the first time to be innate and that government was, therefore, to be the servant of liberty.' Purdy argues it is the society — individuals living together and their several ethical relationships — that takes precedence, and from which (& in support of which) the validity of any institution derives. On Meet the Press yesterday, the president of Afghanistan called upon his country's democratic status in surreptitiously defending his support of a bill that allows men to rape their wives: the institution of a parliament and elections is what defines them as a democracy and it is that status which empowers their government to rule, in their eyes (and their conception of our eyes), even in apparently immoral and anti-democratic cases such as this. Their institutional democracy only mirrors our own — it is not defined by a civil society holding the at-times-conflicting democratic values of individual freedom and human dignity. Not yet, at least. That is the work at hand for democratic societies, I think, else we only continue to repeat history's many atrocities.

* A Bicentennial Tribute to that first flaneur, America's own Edgar Allen Poe, from Steven Fama.

* A London Times review of the new sympathetic biography of Jean Rhys, whose novel Wide Sargasso Sea you ought to read: 'Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour, named after Rhys’s favourite perfume, is pacey, sharp-witted and sympathetic. It vividly evokes the locales that enthralled Rhys — Dominica, bohemian Paris — and, though combative on Rhys’s behalf, it concedes that her belief in her own victimhood was largely a myth. There were always Samaritans who helped her — a wealthy professor’s family in Paris, relatives of Leslie and Max, local clergymen. She repaid kindness with abuse and distrust because her faith in people had been poisoned. But the paranoid sensitivity and sharp eye for insults that destroyed her as a person also made her a writer. All her novels are now in Penguin Modern Classics, and Pizzichini has written a study that is worthy of them. Which is saying a lot.'

* Seriously: huzzah! The Boston Globe today reports that 'The heavenly brew, once deemed harmful to health, is turning out to be, if not quite a health food, at least a low-risk drink, and in many ways a beneficial one. It could protect against diabetes, liver cancer, cirrhosis, and Parkinson's disease.' (Maggie I'm thinking of you right now.) That brew is coffee. Thanks goodness.

Cheers to the brilliant Mark Noonan

Halving

It persists! TBG thinks it's fantastic! There have been toasts over port-glasses clinking in Brighton! It is: The Critical Flame! Read it now while supplies last.

* I've created a Wooden Spoon Amazon Store of recommended books. It was harder than you'd think to come up with titles to recommend. Not sure how I feel about this but let's see how it goes.

* At Conversational Reading, Scott has a post on 2008 Nobel Laureate JMG Le Clézio and his possible stylistic connection to another 'post-colonizer in the ex-colony' Nobel-winning novelist with initials for a first name: JM Coetzee. Not surprisingly, I think he's made a comparison that is insightful and of a type that becomes obvious only in retrospect. Both authors write in a style that is simple but not simplistic, and the pacing and plots often verge on (but never fully becoming) alegory. I think of Waiting for the Barbarians in particular. Hopefully this will help give American readers a better sense of cultural context for how to read his books.

* At the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Gorra has a review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes. He writes, 'Over the years Ishiguro has come to seem the most consistent writer of his generation: consistent in his formal choices, and consistent too in the quality of his work, in an oeuvre without the startling highs and lows of many of his contemporaries. He has a complete mastery of a particular kind of narrative structure, in which we move always towards anticlimax.' I've never read Ishiguro, and the review makes me wish I had begun reading him years ago. Aside from The Remains of the Day, this consistency seems like a flatline, an enormous plain with no place to stop or visit. I'm not saying it is necessarily true of Ishiguro, but the review that tries to be positive hardly makes his work sound appealing.

* Cormac McCarthy has won the PEN / Saul Bellow Award, 'which recognizes excellence, ambition and scale of achievement over a sustained career.'

CF :: Civil Institutions

First, enjoy my review of Geoffrey Hill's Selected Poems at The Critical Flame. Is that blatant? It might be. Depends on how you define 'blatant'. Oh, it's like this: 'completely lacking in subtlety; very obvious. ORIGIN: late 16th cent.: perhaps an alteration of Scots blatand [bleating.] It was first used by Spenser as an epithet for a thousand-tongued monster produced by Cerberus and Chimera, a symbol of calumny, which he called the blatant beast. It was subsequently used to mean [clamorous, offensive to the ear,] first of people (mid 17th cent.), later of things (late 18th cent.); the sense [obtrusive to the eye, unashamedly conspicuous] arose in the late 19th cent.' So. Yeah.

Now, I received a fund-raising letter from the Academy of American Poets today in the mail (it was slightly disappointing, I thought maybe I'd been awarded a grant!) that included a note from Donald Hall supporting the academy and its various efforts. In the note, Hall (or some impostor) writes, 'Poetry is an individual matter, both in the writing of it and the reading of it, but it requires institutions to give it a presence in the public world.' It reminded me of something I read recently in Slate, in a book review written by Francis Fukuyama. He writes, 'civil society is ultimately a complement to strong institutions and not a substitute for them.'

One statement is an almost exact inversion of the other. Hall assumes that the institution exists in order to support poetry culture as a subset of civil society; Fukuyama feels that any formulation of civil society exists as a result of and in support of presumably value-imbuing institutions. Interesting the way these essential conceptions of the relationship slip into all types of public speech.

The Critical Flame: a Journal of Literature & Culture

I would like to cordially welcome all of you to visit The Critical Flame, a new online book review journal, of which I am the founder and managing editor. Included in Issue 1 are reviews of the debut novel Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel, Andrew Motion's first US collection The Mower, and Geoffrey Hill's Selected Poems. Future issues will be somewhat meatier, but this is at least a start — and one has to begin somewhere. Hope you enjoy!

A Savage Question

To those who are on the Bolaño wagon, I ask: Is the biggest draw of The Savage Detectives his machismo string of easy sex scenes? One fears that this culture is still ruled by bored and crisis-ridden middle-aged men. A follow-up question: Is it going to get better? I'm about 120 pages into the book now, and it is so far just women throwing themselves at a young poet. I mean, in its seriousness it is pretty funny, but . . . I'm confused. Everyone was so excited about this. It's not un-enjoyable but so far this book does not live up to the reputation in the slightest.

Pre-Weekend

Check it out: the Godine website & blog have a link to my (unfortunately low-quality — I'll do better from here on) RECORDING of Nobel Laureate J.M.G. Le Clézio's talk this past Tuesday at MIT. And, speaking of Le Clézio, Scott at Conversational Reading has rustled up the coverage of the laureate's panel discussion at this year's PEN World Voices event in New York. It seems like we've finally gotten over the many, many stories whose premises were simply Who?! and have begun to discuss the author's work. It's never too late.

* Publishers Weekly reports on the recent LA Times Festival of Books panel on publishing, with Richard Nash, among others. To wit: '“Writing and reading are doing just fine. It’s the intermediaries that are failing,” commented Nash, referring to ineffective supply chain management among publishers. That supply chain needs to deal with 300,000 books published annually, which led Nelson to two points. “This is a gatekeeper issue,” she said. “We simply publish too many books. We need more midlist novels and less of the celebrity books that challenge the bottomline of publishing conglomerates. The supply chain is broken. In the 20th century you got books to distributors and they got books into stores, and reps from publishers into stores telling buyers what to order. . . that doesn’t work anymore. The more you publish, the more overwhelming it is, and you need somebody to help you through the morass of choices.'

* At the Columbia University Press blog, Stephen Burt — whose new book, Close Calls with Nonsense, is on my short-list to read next — writes about the steady decline in poetry's readership: 'My grandfather was one such person: in no way professionally connected with literature (for 17 years he was Deputy Undersecretary in the US Department of Labor), he was quoting “The Prisoner of Chillon” at length, over the phone, in the last month of his life. What was “The Prisoner of Chillon,” you ask? –and simply by asking, you make my point. How many people who hold such positions now can quote long-dead poets, for any reason, at length? We have lost that kind of cultural relation to poetry; but that does not mean that the poems of John Ashbery, Laura Kasischke, C. D. Wright, Jorie Graham, Rae Armantrout, have no cultural position, gain no attention at all.'

* The New York Times reports that Andrew Motion has been succeeded in his position as British Poet Laureate by the post's first female laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. 'Mr. Motion has complained that he found writing royal poems wearisome. A decade ago, when he got the laureateship, Ms. Duffy was quoted as saying “I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to” – a reference to the marriage of Prince Edward, the Queen’s youngest son, and Sophie Rhys-Jones, which Mr. Motion had been obliged to commemorate in poetry.'