Lydia Davis on Translation's Economy

“The quality and nature of a translation (let’s say from the French) depends on three things, the first fairly obvious and the second two not quite as obvious: 1) the translator’s knowledge of French language, history, and culture; 2) his or her conception of the task of the translator; and 3) his or her ability to write well in English. These three variables have infinite subsets that recombine infinitely to produce the many different kinds and qualities of translations that we have. Publishers selecting a translator seem to proceed on the assumption that the most important qualification is the first. “Let’s ask Prof. X, head of the French Department at Y!” Often they completely ignore the second factor—how will Professor X approach the task of translating?—and certainly the third—what is Professor X’s writing style like? All three factors are vital, but in many instances, if one has to rank them, the third—how well the translator writes—may be the most important qualification, followed closely or equaled by the second—how he or she approaches the task of translating—and it is the first that comes in last place, since minor lapses in a knowledge of the language, history, and culture may result in mistakes that are, in a beautifully written, generally faithful version, fairly easily corrected, whereas a misconception of the task of the translator and, worse, an inability to write well will doom the entire book through its every sentence.”

The above is from Lydia Davis' most recent note at The Paris Review, on the art and task of translation. I'd like to say that her characterization of publishers is unfair; that editors consider and deliberate, weigh advantage and quality, before making a decision — but, I can only speak for one unique small house with a mind for such matters of sums of money. And also because, she has the goods on Norton's edition of Madame Bovary. Tisk, tisk, Norton.

TONIGHT! TONIGHT!

Daniel E. Pritchard
and Susan Barba
Read from their work!
7:00 pm
The Marliave Restaurant
Downtown Boston


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Daniel E. Pritchard reads @ U35

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 28th!
(aka Tomorrow Night)
7:00 pm, The Marliave
Downtown Boston

Daniel E. Pritchard — that's me, ya heard? — will be reading his poems at his own reading series. It was going to happen eventually. You should come, these are great fun. He's reading with the brilliant Susan Barba, publisher of Black Sparrow Books. Have a drink, meet some good poetry-type people, find out the fantastic lineup for the November reading.

Nota Bene: Fredric Jameson

“Interpretation is not an isolated act, but takes place on a Homeric battlefield, on which a host of interpretive options are either openly or implicitly in conflict.” — Fredric Jameson, from The Political Unconscious

“Epistola Cantabrigiensis”

“(Over an old copy of Enemies of Promise)”
by Stephen Sturgeon

I thought I saw you on Arrow Street, rippling

like an infant scarecrow’s burnt-orange rags

or tight in a green-striped sailor’s shirt, cocking

your head side to side against the tearing flyers

stapled onto any wooden things. I may have been unawake,

holding an imaginary and heavy orb in my hand,

because nothing rests there. I do not think so.

Going between two places, I never want to arrive,

and would rather go on perpetually a passenger, passing

through spicy air and scenes of acquaintances spatting,

whose fight, though meaningless, is the only thing.

Or, it would mean as much as anything else,

your alien capacity to void senescence,

my ripped shoes welcoming the mud. Constantly there is this motor

running itself nearly to cataclysm around my ears.

The fact of ears reminds one so deliriously of death, eventualities

come to look the same, parallel lines that meet the way

a pair of hands does, clapping out of the nightmare.

Why should there be a place to go?

Thinking about the UCL variants for The Princess,

I know it is a world of hollow shows;

thinking about Dublin I know this life

is a warm fullblooded life; and I am happy to say

more than ever these have been pitted in a long bout

where neither wins, and they come to exist simultaneously

inside each other, like Balthus and Hogarth—

there is nothing more important than the spot of weakness

that makes good things work. A hatch-door hinge opens

a basement where aquariums splashing with bright fish

are found alongside a poster of Marilyn Monroe

touching her footsole to her knee. You know these,

remember them, tying your white V-neck to the Maple trunk

across the street, leaving, and leaving the rest to the city.

Read the rest at Todd Swift's Eyewear!

Value

Before they try to repeal healthcare reform, every conservative Senator and Representative should be made to apologize to each person whose lives they will be taking away. One by one, at least to their own constituents. Stand there and tell the truth: “Your life doesn't matter to me.”

The movement to repeal — pointless and impotent as I think / hope it will turn out to be — is not surprising, just disheartening. It's part and parcel of a certain attitude toward wealth, grounded in that old pernicious Calvinist ethic: those who succeed do so because they are chosen; those who do not, tough luck — God's just not on your side. The wealthy console themselves with a convenient faith: poor people have done something wrong, must have done something wrong, even if no one knows what it was. They deserve what suffering comes. I just do not know how people live under such an inhumane, wrongheaded delusion.

And I cannot understand how so many of my fellow Americans are able to see the devastation of September 11th, argue that it is worth any high cost to avoid, from soldier's lives to enormous national debt, and then ignore or deny the thousands more who die every single year for lack of health care coverage, or are bankrupted by the cost of saving their lives or the lives of their children. One life is worth more, somehow? One preventable death worth more than another? Tantamount all of it to blackmail: pay up, or face physical harm; leave the Middle East, or face acts of violence; spend your savings, mortgage your home, or watch your wife or child die. We stand up to the mob; stand up to terrorists; and then we cower before an unjust, profit-driven medical system. It is a weakness of our national character.

Maybe voters should apologize as well, or first — as they go to the polls. After all, they elect knowing well what's to come. Line forms to the left. Make damn sure you look those people in the eye.

The Mongoose of Irony

B.R. Myers on Franzen's Freedom, from the Atlantic:

‘Franzen does not take his story very seriously, but the irony is indiscriminate and directionless; he hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically. Nor are we to imagine that a fool or semiliterate is addressing us. The same narrator who gives us “sucked” and “very into” also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang. The reassuring vulgarity follows the flight of pseudo-eloquence as the night the day. Like the rest of these people, Franzen should relax. We don’t need to find a naughty word on every page to know that he is one very regular Joe.’

On Bias & Book Reviewing

A recent Publisher's Weekly article on proportion of women, coupled with the backlash against Franzen and the gender bias in review media, have me thinking about my own role in this. It is very easy to cast aspersions. It's much harder to ask how I, personally, can make improve things. As the Bible tells us, You must remove the lincoln log from your own nose before you can smell mom's pot roast burning in the oven.

Obviously, in regards to publishing, I am a man in the industry: it's really diversifying the joint. And let me tell you, this joint is un-freaking-diverse. PW pegs the current proportion of women in publishing at 70% and expected to rise by 10% in coming years (don't bother asking about race; it's like working in a bag of marshmallows). An industry dominated that thoroughly by one gender is, without question, unjust — as much as the boys clubs in other areas, or the stigmatization of teaching that has largely driven men away from that profession. The population of a healthy industry ought to reflect, to a degree, the make up of our culture; at the very least, in terms of gender. Today. There are just no excuses for this disparity to exist in publishing in 2010, any more than there are in finance [ed: he says word with a certain repulsion].

(Also, as an aside, in that PW article the author writes: “The other issue about women making up the majority of the publishing labor force is that, by default, it brings down the pay scale.” WtF? Seriously. W.t.F. Women making less is not a natural phenomenon. They don't just absorb fewer dollars. It isn't gravity that has men making more than women for the same job: it's other men. Once 80% of your employees are women, and their managers are women, [ed: and they Unionize,] then they'll get what they're owed.)

In regards to reviews, I happen to run a review journal. Did you know? It's rather good, I think. Within the scope of my Tanenhausian powers, I get reviews by asking writers who interest me, by asking my smart, writing-inclined friends, and by saying yes to some of the writers who submit their work. I had hoped — not too hard, being a realist — that my journal would reflect my own more than slightly feminist outlook. It isn't so. In the past nine issues of The Critical Flame, there have been thirteen female reviewers and twenty four male; and as for authors, I'm embarrassed to say, it's worse: only nine female authors to twenty-eight male. This is not nearly good enough for my liking.

So, consider this post a gauntlet thrown as well as an invitation extended (how often can you have both?) to female reviewers out there, or to writers interested in female authors: get in touch with me — info [at] criticalflame [dot] org — and let's make something happen.

Daniel E. Pritchard reviews “Mean Free Path”

“The reason the siren slides is because it doesn’t hit you,” said astronomer John Dobson. He was explaining the Doppler Effect, that phenomenon of physics every urban resident knows by heart: it's the ambulance siren passing on the street, pitch fluctuating according to the waves’ compression as the source moves toward, then past you. It is as natural as birdcalls or the sound of crickets. Maybe more so. “Because it doesn’t hit you” is also, in a way, the definition of Mean Free Path: the average distance a particle can travel before it collides with another object. Movement is central to both ideas, its expression like a refined dance, and its observation, cataloged in measurements and sensory effects, characterized by relationships. Or, as Ben Lerner writes in his new book, Mean Free Path, “It’s the motion, not the material, not the nouns / But the little delays.”

In Mean Free Path, Lerner’s poems assume a panoply of voices and rhetoric that converge in like a spilled-out bag of Skittles. Each line advances until its inevitable collision with another. The importance of delay is emphasized throughout the book, and it is a detail instructive for readers. We are alerted both to delays in the completion of his syntax within the poems — sentences broken by lines from other sentences, “A live tradition broadcast with a little delay” — as well as the importance of our own delay, of slowing the pace of our consumption. The poems are “structured like language / with appropriate delays:” conversational, narrative, at times lyrical, but often interrupted, intertwined, and needful of our lingering. The modifier “appropriate” here is crucial. Lerner struggles openly, as so many poets today do, with the laze and ineffectuality of our common modern language, where action, association, and intention trump actuality and content. Delay is appropriate, then, in each sense: one should neither rush through the text nor pretend the interruptions are not there.

Mean Free Path is divided into four sections. The first and third sections are titled “Mean Free Path,” and consist of a series of nine-line, single stanza poems; the second and fourth sections are titled “Doppler Elegies,” and are made up of poems with three, nine-line stanzas. It is structurally and thematically similar to Angle of Yaw, Lerner’s previous book, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Both are concerned with the connection of rhetoric and ethics, and both alternate sequences of poems in different, fairly rigid forms. Here, the similarities cease. Angle of Yaw echoes Lerner’s first collection, the loose sonnet sequence The Lichtenberg Figures, much more strongly than either of those resemble Mean Free Path.

Read the rest of this review at The Critical Flame!

Hoagland on the Tribes of Poetry (Benjamin is Lost)

Tenser than Israel-Palestine.

‘What do we, as readers, want from a poem? On the one hand, plenty of poetry readers are alive and well who want to experience a kind of clarification; to feel and see deeply into the world that they inhabit, to make or read poetry that “helps you to live,” that characterizes and clarifies human nature. To scoff at this motivation for poetry because it is “unsophisticated” or because it seems sentimental—well, you might as well scoff at oxygen.

Similarly, to dismiss the poetry of “dis-arrangement,” the poetry that aims to disrupt or rearrange consciousness—to dismiss poems that attract (and abstract) by their resistance, thus drawing the reader into a condition of not-entirely-understanding—such a dismissal also seems to foreclose some powerful dimensions of poetry as an alternate language, a language expressive of certain things otherwise unreachable. Perhaps language as a study of itself has ends which are otherwise unforeseeable.

In our time, this bifurcation of motives among poets has become so pronounced as to be tribal. The polarization in premises has been further enhanced by a whole generation of poets who have been intellectually initiated into critical perspectives on language and meaning which render all forms of “recognition art” suspect, problematical—or, even worse, boring. Because the fit between the human mind, the actual world, and language is imperfect, is fraught with distortion, to manifest those distortions in poems has come to constitute a subject matter, even an idiomatic universe of its own, accompanied by a host of lyrical conventions and manners.’

Read the rest at The Poetry Foundation.

Rallies are for Monkeys

As many of you are probably aware, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will host competing rallies in Washington DC on October 30th: Stewart, the “Rally to Restore Sanity;” Colbert, the “March to Keep fear Alive.” And I really can't thank them both enough for this. First, to Colbert for pointing out exactly how insane today's popular “conservative” leaders are (they make a mockery of Conservatism itself); and then to Stewart for expressing, in total sincerity, our collective desperation for reasonable dialogue and disagreement. Good luck!

This also highlights, I think brilliantly, the difference in approach between leaders today on each end of the actual political field. Joe Biden and Barney Frank, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are nothing if not sincere: you may believe they're wrong or fools, but it would be hard to argue that they are being duplicitous, offering beliefs they do not actually hold. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, John Boehner and Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, have the same level of ironic distance from their own words and actions that the real Stephen Colbert does from his stage persona: they are often openly manipulative, clearly espousing untruths and beliefs they can not possibly hold.

This is not to say that the latter are blissfully ignorant, are fools or child-like in any way, any more than one believes Colbert is a fool because the character does not reflect his true self. Rather, these pundits and politicians play, fittingly, the part of Iago: lying, befriending correctly, fabricating evidence, exploiting fears and offering half-truths. They feign offense and then fabricate the weakness they claim to perceive — is not the slow economic growth as much, or more, a facet of their machinations? They pretend affection but do not act accordingly — how does one marry moralizing legislation to libertarian freedom, except in word, and word alone? They manipulate the desperate to gain power — their supporters have real concerns, reasonable fears and issues to address, which are addressed in rhetoric but undermined in policy. (What's the Matter With Kansas? comes to mind.)

Stewart and Colbert play these types to perfection. One is clearly engaged with the opinions he belabors (i.e. the Crossfire showdown), while the other is deliberate and almost surreal in his inventions (i.e. word games on a chalkboard, “reason is only one letter away from ‘Treason’”).

Morten Høi Jensen on Saramago's Politics

Saramago and Fidel Castro, 2003

There can be little doubt that the Portuguese writer José Saramago, who died this summer at the age of 87, will be counted among the foremost novelists of our time. Like that of his forebear Borges and many of his postmodernist contemporaries, Saramago’s writing was characterized by the exploration of elaborate conceits: what would my life be like if I discovered my doppelgänger? Would a simple epidemic of blindness rupture the thin veneer of civilization? What if death ceased to apply its final, terminal touch? Ideas titillated with frightening unease, animated by the exasperating stamina of his sentences and the subtlety of his narration. Saramago’s prose was recognizable at a glance. As the critic James Wood once remarked, no one sounds quite like Saramago. 

It is a shame, though, that at the time of his death The Notebook (Verso, $23.95) should be the most recent of Saramago’s books to arrive in English. A collection of blog entries written between August 2008 and August 2009, The Notebook is a sampling of reflections on world events, literature, philosophy, history, etc. There are moving tributes to colleagues and friends, reflections on the work of writers like Fernando Pessoa and Franz Kafka, musings on religion and the possibility of atheism. His thoughts on Portuguese literature and history are of particular interest. But the most striking passages in this book are Saramago’s reflections on the state of the planet, and his troubling political, facile commentary. 

In Cultural Amnesia, the critic Clive James suggests that Saramago’s notebooks should come with a health warning. Encountering the hyperbole of Saramago’s indignation for the first time, one sees James’ point: “George Bush expelled truth from the world, establishing the age of lies that now flourishes in its place . . . the lies come from very deep down; they are in his blood. A liar emeritus, he is the high priest of all other liars who have surrounded him, applauded him, and served him over the past years.” From such conspiratorial notions, Saramago moves deftly into the application of puerile insults: “Bush, that malignant product of Nature at one of her worst moments.” And though one hardly objects to Saramago’s loathing of Silvio Berlusconi, there doesn’t appear to be much edification in this characterization of the Italian Prime Minister: “this thing, this disease, this virus that threatens moral death to the land of Verdi is a deep sickness that needs to be wrested from the Italian consciousness before its venom ends up running through the veins and destroying the heart of one of the richest of European cultures.” 

Read the rest of this essay at The Critical Flame!

Mark Schorr on Henning Mankell & the Wallander Series

Kenneth Branagh as Wallander

In a Brookline, Massachusetts reading last February, Henning Mankell talked about the motivation behind his famed novels. He said that the first Wallander mystery was, in fact, an exploration of the xenophobia that he found in his countrymen. In the wake of the confusion surrounding the assassination of Olof Palme, Mankell picked the name “Wallander” out of the Stockholm phone directory and began to write police procedurals. In each successive work, Mankell used the character of this Wallander, a typical, anxiety-ridden policeman, as an everyman whose life and career could illustrate of what it means to be human in the face of such global uncertainties.

It seems particularly appropriate that a novelist would choose to study the ways that societies like Sweden — ultra-modern nations that provide an extremely high quality of life — become hotbeds of xenophobia. It shows the dark depths that persist beneath the apparent comforts of the twenty first century. The work of Henning Mankell provides not only a striking representation of the fear of others from within his home country, but an imaginative insight on how it develops on the geopolitical scene.

Growing up in a provincial northern Swedish town, Mankell had an almost daily contact with the justice system. “I grew up very close to our system of justice,” he said. “My father was a provincial judge. We lived upstairs from the court where he meted out justice. In my newest work I created a female judge. The woman had been a Maoist and had to distance herself from her former position.” The author has since spent almost half his life associated with various NGOs in Africa and the Middle East, and he currently works in the Mozambique theater. Living for so long outside of Sweden has given the author an idiosyncratic outsider / insider perspective from which to study his nation. It is this point of view that gives his work its interest. Mankell’s works contain a moral landscape with Sweden superimposed upon it. His novels are not only mysteries in the common criminal sense; they expose the darker secrets of human society as well. 

Read the rest of this essay at The Critical Flame :: September – October 2010!

Tom Lewek on “All the Whiskey in Heaven”

If Ron Silliman exerted authoritarian control over literature, all poetry would be classified according to the two essential poles of that poetic globe: the school of quietude, and the realm of post-avant — and the work of Charles Bernstein would exist as an avant magnetic north. But, while Bernstein is a key figure in nearly all post-avant movements, his work is not hopelessly bound by cold Literary Theory and formal experimentation. All the Whiskey in Heaven, a new selected edition of Berstein’s poems, brings his poetic range to the forefront. As Bernstein himself writes in “Solidarity is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold,”

[I am] a dialectical poet, a polyphonic poet, a hybrid poet,
       a wandering poet, an odd poet, a
lost poet, a disobedient poet, a bald poet, a virtual poet.
& I am none of these things,
nothing but the blank wall of my aversions

writ large in disappearing ink—

By labeling him, in other words, we negate him. By negating him, in turn, we impose elusive concepts on a body of work that always remains elusive. Bernstein’s corpus contains many poetic avenues (not all of them equally compelling), but it is the intersections of these avenues that reveal the movements from clarity to confusion and from voice to voice that make his poetry too myriad to pigeonhole.

Read the rest of this essay at The Critical Flame :: September–October 2010

Sunday Book Review

In order to more directly compete with the single most important competitor to The Critical Flame — the ever-ubiquitous Quincy Patriot Ledger — we've decided to begin publication Sunday mornings. (Unless, of course, it doesn't take.) So on this cool early-Fall morning, check out this barn-burner of an issue, the September–October The Critical Flame!

ON VERSE

Daniel E. Pritchard on Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path: “Mean Free Path is a monumental accomplishment. Lerner has wrenched out of trademark postmodern techniques a poem sequence that is evocative, melancholy, and humane — that last trait redeeming so much that might otherwise feel coldly intellectual or haughty. As with Angle of Yaw, the program here is not a new one, but it is executed to perfection; and, in its high quality, the poems feel as if they break new ground.”

Tom Lewek on Charles Bernstein’s All the Whiskey in Heaven: “By labeling him, in other words, we negate him. By negating him, in turn, we impose elusive concepts on a body of work that always remains elusive. Bernstein’s corpus contains many poetic avenues (not all of them equally compelling), but it is the intersections of these avenues that reveal the movements from clarity to confusion and from voice to voice that make his poetry too myriad to pigeonhole.”

James Stotts on Paul Killebrew’s Flowers: “In this political age of Muslim (and various outré) fundamentalisms, ignoring the poetries of disjunction is irresponsible. To deny the beauty of the absurd is always unwise, but right now logics beyond sense form a supercharged locus of critical, humane thought. And it would be wrong to ignore Paul Killebrew.”

ON NONFICTION

Morten Høi Jensen on José Saramago’s The Notebook: “This unchecked cacophony is typical of what The Notebook has to offer; all the more characteristic is Saramago’s complete, almost willful abandonment of nuance. However, these traits should not be altogether surprising. Saramago enlisted in the Communist Party in 1969 and remained a lifelong stalwart. He clung recklessly to a political ideology that disappointed its followers at every turn.”

ON FICTION

Mark Schorr on Henning Mankell’s Wallander Mysteries: “The themes of Mankell’s fiction remind one strongly of Thomas Mann. Mann detailed the landscape of Europe both anticipating and responding to the Second World War; like Mann’s novels, the Wallander mysteries are au courant — Mankell’s backgrounds range from World Cup soccer to contemporary politics. Recently, Mankell was one of those arrested on a flotilla attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Palestine: it would be no surprise to find that moral landscape in a future book. Its page-turning qualities not withstanding, Mankell’s police procedurals are continually turning up new corners of the broader moral landscapes of modern culture.”

The Problem: High Volume & Low Interest

He loves him some George Oppen.

At Bookslut, reviewer Josh Cook writes about ‘The Problem with American Poetry.’ He argues that the ‘vital drive for the destruction of the old and the creation of the new is absent.’ I'm sure that Ron Silliman and the Funky Bunch would have a few things to say about that — probably agreeing and disagreeing at the same time.

We know (rather than suppose, surmise, or feel) that poetry does not sell well and that more poetry / writing is being published / made public now than ever before: these are quantifiable facts. The proliferation of DIY poetry may be the cause of poetry's larger cultural decline — if so, there's not much to do or say about it. Cook writes, ‘the ease of publication plus the general erosion of the private sphere of life has created a glut of published therapy poems, works that, though useful in processing the particular emotions of the poet, contribute nothing whatsoever to the general progress of the human endeavor.’ One might also argue, counterintuitively, that ease of publication itself erodes public / private distinctions. In either case, we cannot go back.

Now we move from the firmament of fact into torrents of interpretation. I think I'd agree with Cook that the poetry ‘scene,’ as it were, is pretty isolated; not only isolated from the wider reading audience, but even (and related to the former) within itself. I emailed another group of Boston poets about publicizing my reading series, U35, and the response was, ‘No, we have enough friends.’ (Actually, they wrote back that it, ‘would need to be in the direction of more potential interest & overlap rather than less.’) But still: really? Our audience would, what? — contaminate the room? No need for more readers, differing aesthetics, or opinions here, thanks: we're Navelgazing, all the way to Stagnant Town with a long layover in Solipsist Junction. A larger more solidified community of poets and readers (as opposed to sects comprised of styles / schools / clubhouses) would be good for verse culture. If that isn't possible, how can we expect readers to feel welcome?

You don't get Robert Frost? Seriously?

I am also constantly being confronted, in otherwise well-read people, with the lazy ignorance of ‘I don't get poetry.’ As if it were a VD, or HBO. You don't get Robert Frost? There is something seriously wrong with you. Two roads diverge in a wood — this is just beyond your capacity for metaphor? Alright, you don't understand Flarf: that just means you don't think the in-joke is funny from the outside. I'm right there with you. But there are so many poets who have written so much beautiful work, and you can't shut up about Freedom (which I'm somewhat sure is fine, and the NYTBR won't regret that Tolstoy thing at all in five years). Get over it, you're missing out. Here, read some Geoffrey Hill.

Where was I? Right, Josh Cook, who writes, ‘In general, poetry has the potential to change society. I refuse to ask any less of it.’ Many poets, particularly those on the experimental side of things, would say that this is exactly their goal. At least in part. But poets most likely to say that are also the ones who are most likely to, at one end, eschew any craft at all (political rant as verse) and on the other, cling to opaque techniques and scoff at the lyric tradition and communicability. I'm not sure that poetry should be thought of as a tool for the improvement of society; but, by virtue of its relation to language, it is of the same essence as thought, and, as well, our identities. The availability of language production has created a little boom, and a low-interest bubble (a la the housing market) — but it won't last either. The refinement of language that one finds only in verse is — not, ‘necessary’ per se — but, perhaps, far too important to lose.

Destroying the past is not the issue, though. Writing for today, in the realities of our culture and in response to those realities, might be. Not ultra-academic concepts put to verse; not the gentle scenes of yesteryear recycled; not a poetry of empty pop rhetoric: verse that is urgent, explosive, meaningful, honest, emotional, etc. (or none of these, or some other arrangement or set of qualities).

“The Long Wharf,” by Ben Mazer

featured today at Poetry Daily:

It takes awhile to walk through the long wharf
which is enclosed against the elements.
Purveying the connecting properties
to the new lease, our party sauntered there,
in the bright glare of light deflecting night,
the Chinaman, the Frenchman and the Swede
(each in a pressed suit, just off an airplane,
and eager to get back to the hotel,
to sink in privacy into a drink
in a bright glare of light deflecting night),
their uninformed eyes taking little care
(the tour was peppered with such agent's talk
as never hesitates in its intent,
was not designed for one to really look),
while the collector of fine bric-a-brac
who counted millions in the warehoused goods
rubbed off a bit of calculating pride
on objects he could not commit to sell,
stealthy foundations of his capital:
each type of bottle from each type of year,
each printed calendar that was produced,  [. . .]

Read the rest at Poetry Daily!

Happy Labor Day

This is My Rifle, This is My NYTBR

Slate finds that:
“Of the 545 books reviewed between June 29, 2008 and Aug. 27, 2010:
—338 were written by men (62 percent of the total)
—207 were written by women (38 percent of the total)

Of the 101 books that received two reviews in that period:
—72 were written by men (71 percent)
—29 were written by women (29 percent)”

Close reading with Fredric Jameson

 a review by Eric Bunson at Powells:

“The same critics who complain about Jameson's reading habits are usually the first to attack his complicated style. The term Jamesonian is, in some hands, the derisive shorthand for opaque academic prose (a happy coincidence perhaps that it sounds a lot like "Jamesian"), and it sounds better than the other options (Spivakian, Butlerian, or Bhabhaian). In 1996, Jameson won the third annual Bad Writing Contest (sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature) for "the most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book". When issuing their verdict, the judges explained that Jameson "finds it difficult to write intelligibly and impossible to write well". Contrary to what his opponents might say, Jameson's theoretical divagations on culture are eminently grounded in the texts he is reading (if sometimes the connection is more explicit than others). Theory, for Jameson, is not a way to distance himself from the text. Rather, it is theory that makes close textual interpretation possible, it is a mode of intellectual engagement that allows us to think about the dialectical relationship between the social, political and economic system and the text.

Theory, in other words, is not incompatible with cultural interpretation, of which literature is a part. For Jameson, it renders transparent the ideological forces that lie waiting in the form and content of every work we read.”

Imagine the Suffering of Others

Steve Almond writes about the VQR mess, and everything else, at The Rumpus:

“That’s what most editors and agents dream about – that one story or novel or memoir they can’t dismiss. And we all want to write it. We all want to summon within ourselves such a voice, such courage, such attention to pain and beauty. But most of us fail. Our days rank as failures. And so we send out work that — as Genoways did me the great favor of pointing out — doesn’t honor our talent. And who do we blame? We blame the editors and agents, who are often merely stand-ins for the parents and siblings who thwarted us long ago.

[. . .]

Please don’t pollute this comment thread with garbagio about VQR. Go somewhere else for that. Seriously. Genoways isn’t the point. We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others. One way to do this — the best way — is via our imaginations, via storytelling. It’s our job to help spread that particular virus, in our work and our lives. The point isn’t to take sides. There are no sides. There’s just the one side. And we’re all on it.”

“Regret” and “Essence of Grandpa”

Even As We Speak

a poem by Ben Mazer, from Open Letters Monthly:

“THE MOVIES. HOME LIFE. CHILDHOOD. PAST CENTURIES. FACES AND TALK. PAINTINGS AND SENSATIONS. STUBBORN SHYNESS. BRIGHTBIRDS FLOWERING MORNING. ORSON WELLES. CITIZEN KANE. MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. DAVID COPPERFIELD. TREASURE ISLAND. THE KID. ORPHANS. POPPY. MISTAKEN IDENTITY. LIGHT IN THE HALLWAY. ROSES OF DAWNING OVER THE SHOULDER. POE. POE. NOT EVEN DARKNESS. NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK. AND THERE IS NO TIME, NO TIME. NO. WITH THE CAT HOWLING TO BE LET IN. NO NEED TO WRITE. ONLY THIS WHAT I’M TELLING YOU. TELLING MYSELF. THERE IS A BEGINNING TO ALL THIS. AN OCCASION. SCOTTISH BAGPIPES ARE ITS EQUIVALENT, BUT IT BEAMS DOWN IN SPECKLED LIGHTS. SPOKEN LIGHTS. I WOULDN’T SAY. GOAT LIGHT. SAWDUST. WINDMILL. GATHERING. OR SILENCE OF TEARS, LIKE RAIN ON THE HILL STREET, HOVERING OVER THE GREEN GRASS, SILENCE OF NEIGHBORS, SILENCE OF BEETHOVEN. CHARLIE’S SALOON. PASTRAMI, CORNED BEEF, ROOTBEER AND A PICKLE. FRENCH FRIES. MOM AND DAD. SISTER. NIGHT OUT. THE STRANGE SUNRISE, OR WAS IT SUNSET, COVERED OVER THE TEAR OF THE EYES OF THE CHILD. ONE EVENING IN A DECADE. IN THE TRAFFIC TRUCKED OUT OVER THE MOMENT. OVER THE BRIDGE AND THE TRAFFIC AND THE WEATHER OF THE MOMENT. WHERE THE SHADOWS GRIND INTO A COLOR THAT ONLY YOU AND GOD SEE, OR ONLY YOU SEE, BUT IF GOD SEES IT, OR IT IS LIKE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE SEE, THEN IT IS AS IF IT WERE RECORDED IN A CALENDAR, BROADCAST, TRANSCRIPT OR PERPETUAL TRIBUNE IN THE STADIUM OF EXISTENCE.
[. . .]”

Read the rest at Open Letters Monthly. . .