Mid-Week Wind Up

Wow, it has been busy at work lately. I'm going to see what I can do to pick up the volume around here but with a new issue of The Critical Flame coming out, the old day job, and everything else going on in the next four weeks . . . well, we shall see.

• Melissa Green and George Kalogeris, two really fine poets, were recorded while giving a reading at Boston University; the reading is now available through WBUR. I highly, highly recommend giving it a listen.

• Elizabeth Lund at The Christian Science Monitor takes on the idea of the new and selected: “When major poets release their collections of ‘new and selected poems,’ fans often ask two questions: Do the compilations provide valuable insights? Are the new poems as good as the old ones? In many cases, the answer to one or both is no, and what should have been a literary milestone feels like repackaging.”

Existing fans might ask these questions and find themselves disappointed; but, for a reader who is only familiar with the poet by reputation, appearance in journals, and reviews, these new and selected editions offer a guide to a body of work laid down over the course of years or decades, in trade titles as well as small-press chapbooks often too numerous for the common reader to navigate. They act as field guides for a reader to the shifts and changes of a poet's style throughout their careers. How many new readers of Geoffrey Hill will begin with the Selected, move forward through the few more recent titles, and then backwards again to the complete volumes of his older work? (I hope very many, but expect only a devoted few.) Anyhow, they serve a useful purpose to the constantly-refreshed numbers of the uninitiated.

• At Slate, Robert Pinsky asks whether or not Robert Frost was a Modernist, in the capital-M sense of the word. “Frost's greatest poems, such as ‘Directive’ and ‘The Most of It,’ do radically challenge and reimagine old conceptions of memory, culture, and ways of beholding nature. Like the distinctly Modernist poets T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams—a half-generation younger—Frost was formed to some extent, when very young, by the late-Romantic taste of anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury. (Williams says he more or less memorized the entire book.) In his own, quiet way, Frost too questions and challenges his pre-modern ancestors, represented by the 19th-century taste of Palgrave's.” I heard the brilliant poet, editor, and critic Stephen Sturgeon give a much superior talk on this very subject at the annual Frost Foundation festival in Lawrence. I wonder what became of that text.

• Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading writes that bookstores “need to be thinking about what they can do that Amazon and Apple can’t. Obviously there’s a huge potential for bookstores to be relevant with events and community-based experiences that Amazon and Apple can’t reproduce. They can also leverage the fact that by and large they’re dedicated to reading and literary culture, whereas Amazon sees books in roughly the same terms a microwave oven and Apple wants to sell devices and digital content as cheaply and efficiently as possible.”

• The Chronicle of Higher Ed points out an odd and woeful lack of actual literary scholars being cited in humanities scholarship: “we have literature researchers looking elsewhere for guidance and inspiration. Of course, all these figures on the list have powerful implications for literary study, but the near-total absence of people who were trained in and inhabited literature departments is striking.”