Marathon Monday / Lexington & Concord

A few bits and pieces from a perfect Marathon Monday:

• Event! U35 Poetry @ The Marliave: a reading series developed by yours truly to highlight young poets (under age 35; hence, U35). Our inaugural readers will be James Stotts, whose work was featured in the first issue of Little Star alongside such names as Heaney and Walcott; and Janaka Stucky, voted Boston's Best Poet 2010 (as advised right here) over old-timers Pinsky, Glück, Warren, & Bidart, as well as founder and managing editor of Black Ocean Press. Tuesday, May 18 · 7:00 pm · The Marliave, 10 Bosworth Street, Boston MA (Park Street)

• Two pieces on the economy: at The London Review of Books, Joseph Steiglitz reviews a new book on the late great economic thinker John Maynard Keyenes, writing, “The present crisis should lay to rest any belief in ‘rational’ markets. The irrationalities evident in mortgage markets, in securitisation, in derivatives and in banking are mind-boggling; our supposed financial wizards have exhibited behaviour which, to use the vernacular, seemed ‘stupid’ even at the time. If we are to design policies to prevent crises or to deal with them when they occur, it is essential to understand the critical flaws in the standard paradigm.”

At Rolling Stone, Matt Taibai writes about Goldman Sachs, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” who will very likely face no real consequences for selling out our country and their own investors to make a quick buck. It will take all the strength of the people, and their votes, to force members of our government — the sole balancing force against the destructive impulses of these Leviathan for-profit organizations — to face reality, truth, fact, and put an end to the myth of the perfect free market.

• Now to more important matters: poetry. At The Boston Review, Seamus Heaney has an essay on the power and influence of T.S. Eliot. “All this persuades me that what is to be learned from Eliot is the double-edged nature of poetry reality: first encountered as a strange fact of culture, poetry is internalized over the years until it becomes, as they say, second nature. Poetry that was originally beyond you, generating the need to understand and overcome its strangeness, becomes in the end a familiar path within you, along which your imagination opens pleasurably backwards towards an origin and a seclusion. Your last state is therefore a thousand times better than your first, for the experience of poetry is one that truly deepens and fortifies itself with reenactment.”

• Finally, and also at The London Review of Books, Benjamin Kunkel reviews Fredric Jameson's newest book, Valences of the Dialectic. He writes that, in the era of “neo-liberalism” (what is in the U.S. termed, oddly enough, “neo-conservatism”) from 1983–2008, “no figure seemed to embody more than Fredric Jameson the peculiar condition of an economic theory [Communism] that had turned out to flourish above all as a mode of cultural analysis, a mass movement that had become the province of an academic ‘elite’, and an intellectual tradition that had arrived at some sort of culmination right at the point of apparent extinction.”