Interview at the NBCC blog

I've been interviewed at the National Book Critics' Circle blog by Mark Athitakis as part of their series, “Conversations with Literary Websites.” Here is a snippet:

You’ve written that The Critical Flame seeks “to clear a space in this wilderness that is the internet for articulate discussion and learned debate.” However, unlike many literary websites, there’s no commenting capability for articles. How intentional is this decision, and how do you feel the site can spark discussion outside of comment fields?

It's very intentional. Maybe because commenting attracts Trolls (which run up false stats), and moderating comments is laborious. I envisioned Critical Flame as a journal as well, not as a blog, and I decided that comments are the division between the two formats. Comment discussions yield useful insight as regularly as Halley's Comet but only half as often. Oh, that's not entirely true but is sure feels true sometimes. We do encourage letters to the editor, and pass them along to the appropriate author (if possible) or reviewer.

 

It's amazing to me that we have forgotten thousands of years of discussion that happened before the comments field of websites. Discuss what you read with a friend or family member or spouse, in an email or in person or in a letter, or when you post the article on Facebook or to Twitter. Or in response on your own blog. Or write to me. Reach out. Read and then reach out and don't be afraid of other people's opinions. People aren't fragile.

 

Read the rest of the interview at the NBCC Blog!

Literary Terms Suggestion: Vonnegut

Vonnegut n. (váw·nə·gút) A short chapter, not usually exceeding six pages, that is used in the construction of a full-length novel. Often associated with funny, irreverent, lyrical styles of semi-fantastical fiction. Named for the most widely-beloved practitioner of the technique in the twentieth century, Kurt Vonnegut — plur. Vonneguts (váw·nə·gúts); adj. Vonnegutian (váw·nə·gü·shun).

Rae Armantrout @ the University of Richmond

with a hat tip to Ron Silliman

There is No Cheese, Only Types of Cheese

from the Samizdat blog:

‘I've always had a mixed reaction to Silliman's mantra. On the one hand, I think I get what he's trying to say, and I agree with it. I suppose he means that there's no such thing as normal poetry, no entity that is the natural state of the art, from which other kinds of poetry are deviations. In his view, it is with poetry as it is with language. Just as there's no such thing as a version of English that has no accent, there's no kind of poetry that is simply "poetry" in an unqualified state. Those people who blithely say "I don't have an accent" do, in fact, have accenta — it's just that their accenta is the dominant ones in their countries, so they think of their speach as normal, natural, pure, and uninflected by class or region. Speakers of the dominant accent have the privilege of thinking of themselves as normal, and of others as deviants, but this is simply the ignorance and insensitivity that so often comes with power. And those people who might think of themselves as poets, pure and simple, are actually writers of a particular kind of poetry, members of some kind of school of poetry, every bit as much as are the writers of less dominant kinds of poetry. It's just that the dominant group doesn't have to give itself an -ism (imagism, surrealism, dadaism, postmodernism, what have you)

What Silliman objects to is that some people go around thinking that their poetry has no accent. I'm with him on this.

It's at this point that Ron, in a gesture both helpful and, I think, spiteful, provides a label for this kind of poetry — his infamous "School of Quietude." I like the idea of a label, just as I like the idea of people with the dominant accent realizing that they have accents. But labels always seem to cause trouble, since there are always people who feel that the level of generalization is too high (this is a problem with accent labels, too, since few people speak in exactly the same accent). [. . .] Ron's term is particularly bad, though, because it comes laden with a negative judgement from the start, implying that those poets who write this kind of poetry are somehow complicit with the bad guys, quiescent in the face of situations of moral urgency. Also, it has even less buy-in from those whom it is meant to label than terms like "language poetry" and "Cambridge poetry" have had. After all, inlike the "School of Quietude," both "Cambridge poetry" and "language poetry" have at times been used by some of the poets they designate. To make things worse, I've seen Silliman create versions of literary history that essentially project his model of the current American poetic situation (the School of Quietude on one side, the Post-Avant on the other) back in time, claiming a history that extends from Whitman and Dickinson to the Post-Avant, over against a history that extends from Longfellow to the School of Quietude. I don't even know where to begin discussing how messed up this is — it betrays a kind of ignorance of the complex ways literary history and influence work, and it betrays a weird kind of will-to-power, a wish to grab the currently respected names from the past and label them "mine, not yours." ’

“Why has all this happened?”

“Why has all this happened? In general, students and faculty at Yale do not explicitly espouse theory, or particular theorists. But high theory, whatever its merits or demerits, has validated the use of jargon. People who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages. The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism. . . And it is literary theory, of course, which has made us see writers as fallible, blinkered creatures, unaware of what they write. The critic’s job is to expose their blind spots and expound their contradictions. This goes some way towards explaining the scorn for writers that I encountered.”
— Helena Echlin, Arete Magazine

Kirsch vs Zizek: Round 4

“To recap: Writing to [The New Republic], Zizek suggested that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler because his peaceful protest movement ‘effectively endeavored to interrupt’ British imperialism. Now, speaking in an Indian newspaper which most of his American readers will never see, Zizek says the precise opposite: Gandhi was more violent than Hitler because he failed to disrupt British imperialism, and so was objectively responsible for continuing the violence of the Raj. (If Gandhi had taken up arms, presumably, Zizek would consider him less violent, because anything that ended British rule would have been a net gain for peace.) He then adds a grace note — that Hitler was a better anti-imperialist than Gandhi, because he ‘never wanted’ the British Empire to be preserved!”

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Adam Kirsch for raising this again again at The New Republic. I'm in love with the ongoing public spat between Kirsch and Zizek. It's true love. Keep at it, boys.

On Ben Fama's collection, Aquarius Rising (UDP)

In astrology, one's "rising" sign is the public posture one takes with the world: the "face to meet the faces that you meet."A person with aquarius rising supposedly presents a public persona of brash independence, fervently unique, difficult to startle or shock — think of the quirky magical pixie girl of today's hipper rom-coms, i.e. Zoey Deschanel.

Ben Fama's first poem in his new chapbook, Aquarius Rising, titled "Girl," appears to be a series of poetic openings. It is all beginnings, a series of first lines, that implies but never delves into a text. In the poem's structure, it (unintentionally?) mirrors the 2004 Adam Sandler / Drew Barrymore rom-com vehicle, "50 first Dates." Each line connects only loosely to the next, if at all:

"I dreamed you wouldn't let me sleep in your bed

In a phone call they told me the poem was over

I was choking and there was no one to wave to

Beneath me was the sea

A stranger came out of the water"

It might tell the story of a relationship, or might be a fruitful poetic exercise — certainly, it presents a persona of mannered poetics. Fama's chapbook contains ten such poems, all of them striving for a unique voice, with titles that gesture toward astrological signs. They are relatively light, more clever than daring, as in the opening lines of the poem "Tauromachy": "Women of Odessa / I come bearing .gifs" There is a tinge throughout the collection of melancholy, “I don't know / anyone who / ever died / it makes / being human harder.”  But that hardly matters. The poems evoke best a sort of intellectual and poetic intrigue; or, to put it more simply: enjoyment. They generate a kind of loose logic, as a dream structured by the links of language connection (some musical, some semi-logical or sensible). Fama mixes traditional lyricism with vocal, contemporary declarations and phrases:

“To live a serious life
that's a fucked up thing
I would have to rent out a cabin
beneath terrible angels [. . .]”

As with his poem of beginnings, through his jolts of casual phrases, Fama never gives in completely to the seriousness of his poetry. He implicates the medium, and the wells from which he draws, in this un-seriousness. The poems sometimes seem to turn back on our enjoyment and accuse. Gently. Maybe knowingly and with a little nudge. They move into grave questions and out of them, back into a world full of confusion and odd ephemera:

“sometimes the world at midnight seems empty
like an empty room in a sad empty gallery

or the way a white horse
floating in the center of a lake is a full lake

my apartment at midnight is a collage
of wrapping paper and strange feelings

the world thrives on misunderstanding
a cloud full of moods for mature situations”

Christopher Bock on Ben Mazer

“Ben Mazer’s poems find aesthetic unity by arranging their emotional resonances in the themes and variations of the musical phrase, giving both voice and silence to the personal experiences that evade language. What is fascinating about Mazer’s books Poems and January 2008, both released within the same month of April 2010 (alongside The Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman which Mazer edited for Harvard University Press) is not merely the range of the poems therein, but the evidence of the labor intensiveness of the poet’s process. These poems are, in fact, like daguerreotype. There is a complex process at work in which the images are exposed against a flat plane, and through a series of reactions of forms, sounds, images, and meanings, a surface on which that process is left behind becomes both visible and audible.” — Read the rest of this long review by Christopher Bock at Jacket Magazine

from Ben Mazer's collection, January 2008

Philip Nikolayev, my poetry wife,
grazing grizzling graining drizzling granite
where I have been (come enter there, entranced)
these dripping siderains you and I have danced. . .


These numbers numbed, peering in recall
through time-breached windows, falling on a curb
no eye can wither, steadfast reaping walls
adorning weary wishes, the world's gall.


Time and again (as if its vested shards
sense could dismember) resurrected plies
the weary numbers of candescent eyes,
subsisting mathematics of our life.

Obscenely Proud of Myself

for this otherwise minor accomplishment, a 30-second humorous preview of an upcoming Godine children's book, The Lonely Phone Booth:

In Pursuit of the Curtain Rod

a poem by Stephen Sturgeon

A man tracked a curtain rod that blazed through a forest,
and as he furiously traveled, with him there went

the hair of Jesus’ head inching along,
a river of skulls a black girl swam,
bells in the sun at cascade and ring,
tallow swept up from a fast-burning palm,
Britain’s crown jewels stitching one hundred shirt collars,
moldering tree stumps that suckled a boy,
philosophical plants strapped under root cellars,
our dream’s last rest batted to scraps as a toy,
Magdalene’s glance at the petulant sky,
communities of mirrors, flush in séance,
blacksmiths joining the ends of barn hay,
the trial of youth hidden under long pants,
Lucifer’s fingers on the strings of our harm,
conciliatory pause adjudicating blame,
and the mane of the lion flashing after the lamb,

however the night was calm.
However the night was, the night was calm

in the screeching air tearing the road
walked in pursuit of the curtain rod.

As the man followed the rushing curtain rod,
he lingered for danger, and on the way the noise. . .

Read the rest at Dark Sky Magazine!

Study on, Scholar

TONIGHT!

U35 POETRY @ The Marliave
with Nora Delaney & Michelle Robinson
7:00 pm
The Marliave Restaurant and Bar
10 Bosworth Street
Downtown Crossing
Boston

Burt on Poets and the Political

“Writers who overemphasize the power of poetry in particular, or the power of rhetoric in general, to solve public problems risk underemphasizing the power of facts; they also risk obscuring the amount of detail, of compromise, of uninspiring, non-musical work (whether of the bean-counting or of the baby-kissing variety) required to change, for the better, what governments — and what any public political action — can do.”

Stephen Burt from his “Letter to the Editor,” Poetry Magazine July / August 2010

On Suzanne Buffam's collection, The Irrationalist (Canarium)

by Nora Delaney, from the new issue of The Critical Flame:

Buffam’s works in The Irrationalist are less poems than aphorisms and short proddings at ideas of faith and knowledge, perspective and relativity. Their language is unbeautiful, the verse free of obvious technical flourishes. They recall Neitzsche more than Rilke. Always, the weightiest sentiments and phrases are borrowed. Just as we contend with William James in “Placebo,” we come upon Plato and Aristotle in later poems. The philosophers are also joined by scientists: Galileo and Copernicus hold court in section two. And her chosen cadre of artists — Buñuel, Éluard, Picasso, Borges — appear throughout.

This chorus of voices, however, is used to particular effect, revealing with each maxim and axiom how limited human knowledge is. Buffam delights in playing an anti-Enlightenment game: we are truly doomed if we think we can reason through things. The irrational trumps the rational. This motif is most assured in a number of short prose poems that fill out the last third of the book. In her long prose poem “Trying,” for example, Buffam meditates on the strangeness — the irrationality — of a couple trying to conceive a child. Her speaker wonders,

If procreation were a matter to be decided purely on the basis of
rational thought, would the human race still exist? Schopenhauer thought not.

Read the rest of this review by Nora Delaney at The Critical Flame.

On Mabanckou's novel, Broken Glass (Soft Skull)

by Katherine A. Evans, from the new issue of The Critical Flame:

In an article by France Today, Mabanckou is quoted as saying: “For so many years, it [the literature of Francophone countries] has been disdained by the Paris establishment, relegated to small editions. . . The recent literary prizes awarded to French-speaking writers from other countries are a first step recognition, but that’s not enough. Francophone literature outside of France really has to be strong, because it’s one of the major ambassadors of the French language.” This process seems to have begun, and Mabanckou is in good company in his mission. Jean-Marie Le Clézio, Mauritian author and president of the 2006 Prix Renaudot jury that awarded Mabanckou, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, drawing global attention to the world of Francophone literature. The English-language publication of Broken Glass, translated by Helen Stevenson, promises to keep the attention on this group of dynamic and innovative writers.

Read the rest of this review by Katherine A. Evans at The Critical Flame.

One Week! U35 @ The Marliave

Tuesday, July 20
one week from today!
Nora Delaney & Michelle Robinson
7:00 pm @ The Marliave
10 Bosworth Street
RSVP at Facebook

In Defense of the Online Book Review

from the new issue of The Critical Flame:

In his introduction to “The Book” in January 2010, Isaac Chotiner of The New Republic wrote, “The slow and steady transfer of people’s attention to the web is a fact of our culture. And the absence of any site for the serious consideration of serious books is also a fact of the web.” This is a dismaying realization for the young editor of an online book review journal. I had set out to write a serious review of a serious book — but no, Ceci n’est pas un review: my readers consume this at desktop monitors, on web phones and iPads, with laptops perched on their couches. They read this essay, indeed this entire journal, online. And according to Mr. Chotiner, we are all made comical and cursory — or worse, nonexistent — by the apparatus of the internet. We have not even achieved the dignity of failure.

One takes such declarations with a grain of salt. Lambasting the quality of online book reviews is nearly as common, though never as articulate, as mourning the death of print. The most prevalent criticisms — that they lack the depth of research, the rhetorical polish, and the measured tone of traditional reviews — are fair, if overstated.

The internet is a landscape of dilettantes and amateurs, those for whom this literary pursuit is not a career but an avocation. Their opinions may well be unsophisticated, but they are also largely unpretentious, honest, and conversational. They are able to build a trust with their readers that print reviewers somehow lost. And there does exist, beneath the blemishes, some recognizable measure of critical acumen. As Pope wrote, “Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind; / Nature affords at least a glimmering light.”

Online book reviewers are the common readers of our age, and, despite their common flaws, they deserve better than widespread derision — particularly from those whose livelihood depends upon them.

However, just as The New York Review of Books is not judged by the essays of college students, online reviews cannot be judged by the simple majority of blogging bibliophiles. Not every online review is brief, cursory, and superficial. Some glimmering lights burn brighter than others, outshining Chotiner’s extinguishing dictum. Certainly, they are not in the majority — but in what age was the most quality ever found most commonly? Never before in print, and not online today.

Read the rest of this essay be Daniel E. Pritchard at The Critical Flame

The Critical Flame :: Issue 8, July–August 2010

The editors of The Critical Flame are delighted to announce issue number eight, July–August 2010, which has been fondly nicknamed in our sweltering apartment, "The Small Press Issue." For a whole variety of reasons, small independent publishers are near and dear to our hearts — not least because they were and remain the presses most open to supporting a fledgling online book review journal. This will not be the last time that the pages of The Critical Flame are dominated by small independents, but we make a point this month to salute their efforts. Somehow, July seemed the right time to do it.

We hope you are engaged by these essays. More than that, we hope that you remember to actively seek out good literature; take risks on the books you read and on the presses that offer them; and support those behind the work that moves you, from authors and translators to publishers and book stores.

IN THIS ISSUE

Daniel E. Pritchard, founder and managing editor of The Critical Flame, reviews the Open Letters Monthly Anthology :: “Online book reviewers are the common readers of our age, and, despite their common flaws, they deserve better than widespread derision — particularly from those whose livelihood depends upon them.”

Nora Delaney reviews The Irrationalist, a collection of poems by Suzanne Buffam :: “The style itself is paradoxical, almost perverse, since so many of the poems consider inexplicable beauty, awe, and wonder. There is a sharp tension between the iron-tool language of the collection and its anti-utilitarian, anti-rationalist themes. Mysticism trumps reason time and again in these didactic prose poems.”

Daniel Wood discusses the style of Dave Eggar's Zeitoun :: “The prose is not remarkable in any conventional sense. It is clear, muted, and even pedestrian — a world away from the exuberance of Roberto Bolaño, the zing of Don DeLillo, and the lyricism of Ian McEwan — and, for that reason, Zeitoun has attracted a number of offhand dismissals from broadsheet critics.”

Katherine A. Evans reviews Alain Mabanckou's novel, Broken Glass :: “In some ways, Mabanckou’s novel suffers from this cursory coverage of the canon of world literature from Marquez to Joyce to Tzara and Pasternak, but the sampling of authors also reveals the depth and breadth of Mabanckou’s engagement with writers from across the world.”

Poetry de profundis: a few notes

In her recent interview with Open Letters Monthly, the Russian / American poet Katia Kapovich observes a tonal and thematic difference between American and Russian poetry. She sees American verse as being balanced between the sparkling moment and the mundane, of making magic in the everyday; Russian verse, on the other hand, is "de profundis," concerned with extremes, life and death, the big questions and capital-letter ideas.

These are just her impressions, and she would readily admit that they are limited. Still, they stick with me. As a poet and a reader, I am naturally more drawn to the profound idea over the minute but mundane detail. Not as a necessity — there are plenty of excellent poems that revel in the humble everyday, and I enjoy many of them. Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind as a master of minutae who I admire (although my favorite of her poems is either “Crusoe in England” or “Casabianca,” neither of which really fit that description).

Because of their recently published correspondence, thinking about Bishop has me thinking about Robert Lowell, another of my favorite poets. Jonathan Raban recently wrote that Lowell, "brilliantly fused the most intimate details of his own life with the public turmoil of his century." Indeed, in his best work the balance between the personal and de profundis is monumental: I find in the success of this monumentalization of his own life, a life that mirrored so many in lots of surprising ways, and his ability to connect and analyze the profound through language and metaphor; and in his failures, often, there is only a much baser attempt at grappling with either these big ideas or his biography.

But it is also impossible to argue that contemporary American poetry is unconcerned with profound concepts. Many if not most poets are engaged with deconstruction and hegemony, whether they are aware of the influence or not. (These postmodern critiques seem to have become the mere techniques of poetic observation.) They do reflect on some of our deepest ethical issues, often focused on socio-economics and language politics. So much of human experience is given short service by these techniques, though. It seems as if the direct confrontation of the "orphic" in contemporary poetry is considered declasse, dismissed. Not all and every, but many and most — the plurality of American poets shy away from these Russian Novel Concepts.

Or maybe not. Even as I write this post, counter-examples do come to mind. A.E. Stallings, for one, attends to them from time to time. And there are more, certainly. But why this nagging impression of fleeting mundanity then?

From an Interview with Katia Kapovich

OLM: ‘You’ve said before that you’ve felt the goal of many American poets is to find magic in everyday life, whilst Russian poets have this inclination to create poems that transcend, that compress all the magic into one moment. You’ve called it the “orphic” poem. Could you elaborate on that?’

KK: ‘American poetry strikes me as balanced with occasional sparkles and revelations about everyday magic. My explanation for this is American individualism and its “normal” texture of life. Russian poetry, in comparison, might look somewhat outwardly, manic-depressive and “orphic” — a self-coined term — meaning that it’s always “de profundis.” It’s about life and death, war and peace, crime and punishment, in other words, about the extremes with which the Russian novel was preoccupied in the nineteenth century.’

Read the rest at Open Letters Monthly

“Little Soul”

by Hadrian, translated by W.S. Merwin

Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things