We're getting everything ready for David R. Godine's 40th Anniversary Retrospective Lecture on May 6th at the Boston Public Library — hope to see you at the talk — but David's “Letter from the Publisher,” which appears in our 2010 Catalog, is posted up at The Godine Blog. Here is a snippet:
“WHEN I STARTED this company, some forty years ago in an abandoned cow barn, I was only twenty five and had no idea what the word “publishing” meant, much less how to do it. We were then, all six of us, primarily printers, producing fine books for others, and, when the presses were unoccupied, occasionally issuing a title for ourselves. As the years went by, I decided to concentrate on publishing and, like many deluded capitalists, dreamed of growing what clearly is — and should remain — a cottage industry into a major international player. This wasn’t entirely hubris; all houses were much smaller then, the capital required to produce books was modest, government support (even to tiny houses) was flowing, and the cost of mistakes was small. The narrow, personal world of trade publishing was still run by opinionated individuals, whose names were often eponymous with their companies, and who more or less published what they liked and did their crying in private. Company policy was dictated by editors, not by marketing departments. (It was Edwin Land who taught me that the size of a company’s marketing department is always in inverse proportion to the quality of its products.) It was still possible to dream of becoming a general trade publisher whose list would cover a variety of subjects and whose books could be produced to high standards, and to do it all with a minimum of fuss and compromise. . . .”
Read the rest at The Godine Blog.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
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.”
• 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.”
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Like a Bad Houseguest
In his review of Kay Ryan at the Los Angeles Times, John Freeman writes, “Contemporary poetry is a bit like visual art. Much of it makes you grab your chin and nod in stumped appreciation — but you wouldn't want to live with it. Kay Ryan's work, however, hangs well no matter where it goes. Clouds, calendars, time, birds, jackrabbits. Everything her eye falls upon takes on a brisk, beautifully complete clarity. Her tidy lines disguise an enormous intelligence and tonal warmth: a ferocious capacity for finding the essence of things.”
Freeman is using tropes of a narrow, diametric view of contemporary poetry. He means to account first for the scores of opaque (at best, oblique) avant poets, such as Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Goldsmith and, to some degree at least, John Ashbery, whose poems are not “about,” are often not meant to connect or communicate, and sometimes are even “about” the fact of not being about anything. The other species, implies John, is accessible, allusive, usually springing from a classic tradition and clearly seeking to evoke and mean and move. The recent PLOTUSs are of this latter type (though Kay Ryan is probably more cerebral, more abstract); and in their verse, a reader finds objects and ideas that he recognizes and that connect to a longer poetical tradition: “Clouds, calendars, time, birds, jackrabbits.”
So. What to make of this. I'm not here going to chastise the reviewer — he is employing a model of thinking about and judging contemporary poetry (and art). First of all, I think it can be said that to speak of something as “contemporary” is to place it in a particular genre or type. Second, if a poet doesn't exhibit the qualities that make you “nod in stumped appreciation” then they are not, somewhat confusingly, “contemporary.”(As if Kay Ryan were already a passed memory.)
If a poet wanted to be iconoclastic in this muddle — and of course you do want that because, as Christopher Ricks once said, “nothing is more dangerous if you want to create great art than playing safe” — that would mean breaking out of this dichotomy between the chin-rubbing and the jackrabbits.
Freeman is using tropes of a narrow, diametric view of contemporary poetry. He means to account first for the scores of opaque (at best, oblique) avant poets, such as Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Goldsmith and, to some degree at least, John Ashbery, whose poems are not “about,” are often not meant to connect or communicate, and sometimes are even “about” the fact of not being about anything. The other species, implies John, is accessible, allusive, usually springing from a classic tradition and clearly seeking to evoke and mean and move. The recent PLOTUSs are of this latter type (though Kay Ryan is probably more cerebral, more abstract); and in their verse, a reader finds objects and ideas that he recognizes and that connect to a longer poetical tradition: “Clouds, calendars, time, birds, jackrabbits.”
So. What to make of this. I'm not here going to chastise the reviewer — he is employing a model of thinking about and judging contemporary poetry (and art). First of all, I think it can be said that to speak of something as “contemporary” is to place it in a particular genre or type. Second, if a poet doesn't exhibit the qualities that make you “nod in stumped appreciation” then they are not, somewhat confusingly, “contemporary.”(As if Kay Ryan were already a passed memory.)
If a poet wanted to be iconoclastic in this muddle — and of course you do want that because, as Christopher Ricks once said, “nothing is more dangerous if you want to create great art than playing safe” — that would mean breaking out of this dichotomy between the chin-rubbing and the jackrabbits.
Monday, April 19, 2010
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.”
• 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.”
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Nota Bene: AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
"I am here tonight at the Kennedy School of Government to say that if you care about defending our country against the apostles of hate, you need to be part of the fight to rebuild a sustainable, high wage economy built on good jobs – the kind of economy that can only exist when working men and women have a real voice on the job. Our republic must offer working people something other than the dead-end choice between the failed agenda of greed and the voices of hate and division and violence. Public intellectuals have a responsibility to offer a better way."
— ACL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka, from a speech given at the Kennedy School for Government, Harvard University (via Time Magazine)
— ACL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka, from a speech given at the Kennedy School for Government, Harvard University (via Time Magazine)
Monday, April 5, 2010
A Rally Like a Box of Saltines
At The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh writes, ‘In 1963, when George Wallace was inaugurated as the governor of Alabama, he told the crowd that he was standing in the “heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” and he issued his famous rallying cry: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But when Wallace campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he stated his case more circumspectly, saying, “This civil-rights bill will wind up putting a homeowner in jail, because he doesn’t sell his home to someone that some bureaucrat thinks he ought to sell it to.” Wallace professed to be defending the common “homeowner,” presumably white, against the faceless “bureaucrat,” also presumably white. It was possible for Wallace to portray himself as a defender of the white race without mentioning race at all.
‘This was not a new strategy. Throughout history, the power of whiteness has often been linked to its invisibility: white supremacy lurked in seemingly race-neutral language, unmentioned and therefore incontestable. (Think of the Constitution, which tacitly condoned slavery — “importation” of “persons” — without mentioning race.) The success of the civil-rights movement had the paradoxical effect of strengthening this pernicious tradition by making white pride taboo; white politicians had to rely on increasingly subtle forms of coded speech. Roediger is impressed and disturbed by President Reagan’s appeal to working-class white voters, which stemmed, he says, from a “sure command of divisive code words such as ‘state’s rights,’ ‘welfare moms,’ ‘quotas,’ and ‘reverse racism.’ ” ’
It strikes me, as it does Sanneh, that the posturing of most anti-healthcare kooks mirrors the stance taken by George Wallace, and later Reagan, defending us [white] folk from [the non-white poor and] the death panels and the [northern] elites, etc. (I am fairly sure that most tea-party members would express enormous pride in such a comparison.) However, as Sanneh goes on to write, it is difficult to differentiate correlation from causation. In this case, it is just impossible to prove whether extremist conservatives are exhibiting deep-seeded racial fears, or just all happen to be ivory-white: ‘maybe health-care reform is merely one more topic on which Americans’ opinions correlate, however loosely, with race.’
Maybe. Nothing is more surprising — or indicative of the good reasons for skepticism — than an otherwise liberal-minded person who has not read the healthcare reform law, has no idea what it actually changes, yet proceeds to spout extremists' at-best-confused, at-worst-delusional accusations. They hate the bill with hell's own heart for no reason besides fear, and cannot admit of that fear's source. (A more psychoanalytical critic might describe the horror of realizing a dream that was only ever appealing for its status as fantasy; the middle-class white liberal who never desired a more egalitarian reality.) It is a curious reaction. Particularly in Massachusetts, where a far more invasive and liberal statute was signed into law, recently, to no such frothing opposition, by a white governor.
‘This was not a new strategy. Throughout history, the power of whiteness has often been linked to its invisibility: white supremacy lurked in seemingly race-neutral language, unmentioned and therefore incontestable. (Think of the Constitution, which tacitly condoned slavery — “importation” of “persons” — without mentioning race.) The success of the civil-rights movement had the paradoxical effect of strengthening this pernicious tradition by making white pride taboo; white politicians had to rely on increasingly subtle forms of coded speech. Roediger is impressed and disturbed by President Reagan’s appeal to working-class white voters, which stemmed, he says, from a “sure command of divisive code words such as ‘state’s rights,’ ‘welfare moms,’ ‘quotas,’ and ‘reverse racism.’ ” ’
It strikes me, as it does Sanneh, that the posturing of most anti-healthcare kooks mirrors the stance taken by George Wallace, and later Reagan, defending us [white] folk from [the non-white poor and] the death panels and the [northern] elites, etc. (I am fairly sure that most tea-party members would express enormous pride in such a comparison.) However, as Sanneh goes on to write, it is difficult to differentiate correlation from causation. In this case, it is just impossible to prove whether extremist conservatives are exhibiting deep-seeded racial fears, or just all happen to be ivory-white: ‘maybe health-care reform is merely one more topic on which Americans’ opinions correlate, however loosely, with race.’
Maybe. Nothing is more surprising — or indicative of the good reasons for skepticism — than an otherwise liberal-minded person who has not read the healthcare reform law, has no idea what it actually changes, yet proceeds to spout extremists' at-best-confused, at-worst-delusional accusations. They hate the bill with hell's own heart for no reason besides fear, and cannot admit of that fear's source. (A more psychoanalytical critic might describe the horror of realizing a dream that was only ever appealing for its status as fantasy; the middle-class white liberal who never desired a more egalitarian reality.) It is a curious reaction. Particularly in Massachusetts, where a far more invasive and liberal statute was signed into law, recently, to no such frothing opposition, by a white governor.
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