Popeye (a.k.a Jordan Knight)

That's right. Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block.

From the Boston Phoenix slideshow history of American graffiti. Read about how street art developed and stayed different in Boston: "In other places, a lot of people were more into the hip-hop scene. Here, most of us were listening to hardcore and going to shows at the Rat."

Two Poems: Ferry and Hecht

Slate is featuring a poem of the week by David Ferry, "Soul." And Poetry Daily is featuring "A Hill" by Anthony Hecht today. On antoher totally unrelated note, I thought you would like this video:

UK Rapper vs Private Health Care

Mark Strand @ Boston Review

Boston Review has a portfolio of prose poems by Mark Strand, along with a brief commentary by Nicholas Christopher. Look for a new chapbook by Strand from Monk Books. Christopher writes, "The most alluring qualities in Strand’s early lyrics—clean lines, taut narratives, and carefully framed mise-en-scènes—also mark his most recent poems, which, with a deepened pathos and heightened polish, work over a good deal more of life lived, sights seen, women loved, children grown, friends dead or dying, and the author’s own mortality. The breadth has widened, but the timbre remains distinct; the earliest and most recent poems mirror one another, sometimes uncannily so."

Sturgeon Reviewed @ Big Other

Amber Sparks at Big Other writes: "Sturgeon’s book was a surprise in the best possible way. I sat down to read it and realized immediately that I was staring at a small selection of serious talent. Sturgeon’s Trees is much more than a debut. It is a revelation, an entirely new thing, and at the same time feels a bit like coming home. That’s because Sturgeon’s voice is part prophet, part fierce cynic — a synthesis of Blake and Eliot, with a bit of Stevens in there as well. These poems are difficult, nourishing examinations of perception, of memory, of culture, of love, of connection and loss and disillusionment."

Listen to the recording of Sturgeon reading in January at U35
(it's free, you just have to Tweet or Facebook about it):

STEPHEN STURGEON @ U35

Interview with Stephen Sturgeon at Dark Sky

An interview at Dark Sky between Stephen Sturgeon and Ted Powers.

TP: You quote Wyndham Lewis in the beginning of the collection: “There is a point beyond which we must hold people responsible for accidents:”. Where do you see that point being? Does that threshold exist in your poems?

SS: Both of the epigraphs to this book, the one from Thomas Hobbes and the other from Wyndham Lewis, are about “accidents.”

One way to start talking about this is to quote from that essay by W. K. Wimsatt from the 50s, “The Intentional Fallacy.” It begins with a series of propositions about the relevance and importance of an artist’s intentions to the viewing and interpretation of an artwork, and the first proposition starts, “A poem does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out of a hat.” I like to think Wimsatt was being disingenuous when he wrote that, because the statement does not at all line up with how poems frequently get written, and if Wimsatt thought it true, I find it hard to pair with his good insights elsewhere. Poets take words from outside of their heads constantly. To say otherwise would be to deny something as basic to poetry as allusion, to forget poems like Wordsworth’s “We are Seven,” to invalidate Hugh MacDiarmid’s “Perfect.”

Examples go on. The point is that a poet’s accidental discovery of words that originated from an alien head is an elemental part of writing poems. And that creates a problem. If a poet uses words that are not his own, is the poet not responsible for what the words say, for the consequences of the words? If using one’s own words is not required for the writing of a poem, is the arrangement of alien words into line breaks or stanzas or paragraphs what writing a poem actually consists of? The problem was (maybe inadvertently) taken up recently by practitioners of Flarf and Conceptual Poetry, who tend to take readymade text off of the internet, arrange it (or not), and say they’ve made a poem.

To get to the end of this, I think that there has been a trend since Barthes to regard works of art as the expressions of cultures at large and not the makings of individuals. As a consequence, identifiable culpability inevitably gets thrown out the window. Join that with the importance of accidents to the writing of poems and you start to see a case for letting artists off the hook for what they do. But I don’t believe it. It’s all excuses. Artists are responsible for their creations, regardless of what went into making them. It’s said better and shorter by Geoffrey Hill: “Add that we’re unaccountably | held to account;” (though he’s writing there, I think, of other things).

I’m starting to be disingenuous myself, though, in acting like the only reason an artist would want to become disassociated from an artwork is to hide from retribution. There are quite good, other reasons for an artist to want to disappear, to insist on disappearing from a work of art, for readers to insist on seeing a poet as nothing more than sociological vapor, and William H. Gass goes through the varieties of these reasons adroitly in Habitations of the Word. He does go on to say though that anonymity “may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it.” To my head, this is the final reality, one that any aesthetic theory that depends on the diffusion of authorship or artistic responsibility will break up against.

The Lewis quotation ends with a colon, which is fortuitous, because what follows is my poems.

There are other things to say about this. I don’t want to be overlong.

---

Suffice it to say, you should all buy Stephen's new book, Trees of the Twentieth Century, and listen to the recording of his U35 reading in January (it's free, you just have to Tweet or Facebook about it):

STEPHEN STURGEON @ U35

U35 TONIGHT

Adam Fitzgerald and Liza Katz
7:00 pm :: Pierre Menard Gallery, Harvard Square
Free and open to the public.

Adam Fitzgerald is a graduate of Boston College, the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and the Columbia MFA program. He is editor of the Maggy Poetry Magazine, and his writing has appeared in a numerous journals.

Liza Katz is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in The Critical Flame, Clarion, Exit 13, and North Central Review. She is at work on a book-length essay entitled Bridging the Gap between French and Francophone Literature.

U35 Poetry is a reading series founded in 2010 to highlight the work of poets under the age of thirty five and to build a stronger, more coherent poetry community in greater Boston. All are welcome to attend. The series was selected as one of "Boston's Ten Best Distractions of 2010" by the Boston Globe, alongside UFC and indoor trampolines.

Common Threads: 10,000 Readers, 7 Poems

National Poetry Month is coming up in April, and Massachusetts Poetry has an ambitious program for the state that perhaps has produced more poets than any other in the nation. During April, in libraries, schools, colleges, book clubs, senior groups, bookstores, and specially organized potlucks, the organization hopes to have 10,000 Massachusetts citizens reading seven poems by seven poets who work currently or have worked in Massachusetts. The program, called Common Threads: Seven Poets and a Wealth of Readers, will be a run-up to the third Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem on May 13th and 14th.

In celebration of Massachusetts’ rich literary heritage, Common Threads is an easily digestible way to introduce people of all ages to an important part of our culture and to the beauty of poetry. As S. D. Mullaney says, “Poetry is a living art form that reflects our times, past and present.” Mullaney, author of Follow the Wolf Moon, is pursuing his MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is one of two people working on the logistics of the project, which includes putting together a kit for any group interested in participating. According to Mullaney the kit includes a copy of each poem, an audio clip of the poet reading the poem (or another poet reading on behalf of the deceased poet), a brief biography, and discussion questions designed to enhance the reading and listening pleasure of the audience. Mullaney will be working with Kevin R. Morrissette to record the poems and create the discussion questions.

The poems include:

• “In the Waiting Room” by Elizabeth Bishop
 • “The Lost Pilot” by James Tate
• “Occupation” by Suji Kwock Kim
• “Vita Nova” by Louise Glück
• “New England Ode” by Kevin Young
• “Samurai Song” by Robert Pinsky
• “Love Song: I and Thou” by Alan Dugan

If you’d like to be involved in promoting Common Threads, sign up for the program here.

Mojie Crigler on the fiction of Lawrence Sutin

Laurence Sutin’s writing caught my eye initially because he’d authored a biography of legendary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and I am one of those PKD fans who finds the man’s life and the phenomenon of his work — his books, the screen adaptations, the sometimes cultish following — as interesting as his fiction. I bought Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1989) but doubt that I ever read it cover-to-cover. Instead, it was a book that I habitually plucked from my bookshelf to read in no apparent order, the path to wherever I’d been headed diverted for maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour.

The book could be read that way. The reader could drop into beginning, middle or end and be assured of finding a nugget. Sutin had to overcome suspicion from those who knew PKD before they would sit down for an interview, but having a book contract gave him credibility. Sutin’s sense of being entrusted with memories permeates the book. Each anecdote receives due care and attention. The one that has always stuck in my mind is from PKD’s days as a struggling writer in Berkeley, when he and his wife were so poor they ate horsemeat, and PKD’s deep shame when one day the pet store salesman (who sold horsemeat as dog food), said, “You’re taking this horsemeat and you are eating it yourselves.” The story affects me because a) I am always taken by early stories of artists, especially writers, sacrificing comfort and/or dignity as they make their way to a future which for them is uncertain but which I know will be worth the travails; b) being poor but living in a Berkeley bungalow is like paying $35 per month for a SoHo loft: it’s hard to believe America was ever so cheap; and c) horsemeat? The book is bound by Sutin’s respect for the work of being a writer — not just the pen-to-paper work, but also the work of living.

Sutin as protector of memories comes as no surprise. For his second book, Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance (Graywolf Press, 1995), Sutin interviewed his eponymous parents, both survivors of the Holocaust in Poland. He edited the interviews (Sutin is credited as “author-editor”) and the narrative alternates between the voices of his mother and father. This time, the book made me its audience. I didn’t linger leaning against the bookshelf reading in a haphazard order. Rather, from the moment I started to read the book, I could not put it down. I finished it in two long stretches over two days, barely moving from my armchair, ignoring hunger and the ache that developed in my neck. The Sutins’ story of atrocities and survival is, simply, stunning. After reading Jack and Rochelle, I felt that I knew them. I wanted to be an honorary member of their family. Some passages echoed in my mind for days — they are still echoing. . . .

Read this rest of this review at The Critical Flame.

Abigail Licad on Elizabeth Willis’ Address

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare has Theseus describe poetic undertaking as that which “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” It is therefore fitting that Elizabeth Willis titles her fifth collection, a study of poetry’s role in society, Address. The book’s poems mine the multiplicity of meanings and associations behind its single-word title, and while doing so they contemplate the ineluctable link between poetry and politics, art and civic awareness, and the necessity for collaborative examination of political matters that affect us.

Willis’ associative leaps and juxtapositions astonish and probe, often testing its reader of his or her own demand of history, art, and current events — one may, as this reader did, bow her head in shame after recognizing only a small number of “witches” in the poem “Blacklist,” which refers to literary and political personalities from Ronald Reagan to Sappho and Maria Tallchief. The book will present a challenge for most readers, even perhaps for those well-versed in language poetry (a strong influence on Willis as she discussed in an interview with Mark Tursi), and I wonder how much any general reader can harvest of the poems their various significations without a strong grasp of avant-garde poetic movements and Willis’ own idiosyncratic research interests.

Willis has written extensively on Lorine Niedecker, a “regional domestic” poet who, influenced by Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky and Imagist poet Ezra Pound, wrote in terse form using quotidian imagery, reaching the height of her popularity in the 1960s. Willis admires Niedecker for her rendering of everyday working-class and folk preoccupations in modernist aesthetic, and for what she perceives as Niedecker’s affinity for socialism. Niedecker’s influence on Willis can perhaps be recognized in Willis’s own view of the power of poetry as an arena for political critique, and in many ways Address is a very political book, particularly in its stand against our post-9/11 political climate, and in the way the collection forces readers to engage charged views to which they may not be sympathetic. . . .

Read the rest of this review at the new issue of The Critical Flame

THE CRITICAL FLAME :: Issue 12, March-April 2011

Letter from the Editors: Women in Magazines
“Many in the literary community are reluctant to consider any standard besides quality. I'm not of that mind, but it should not be belittled either. Ideas of aesthetic judgment and quality are not meaningless: but they are communal projects. All of us in the literary community make evaluations together, through open debate. One critic or publication does not set the standard for excellence alone. When a group is excluded, as women are today, as many groups are today, by whatever systemic apparatus, the power of our shared values erodes.”

ON VERSE

Abigail Licad on Elizabeth Willis’ Address
“Willis’ associative leaps and juxtapositions astonish and probe, often testing its reader of his or her own demand of history, art, and current events — one may, as this reader did, bow her head in shame after recognizing only a small number of ‘witches’ in the poem ‘Blacklist,’ which refers to literary and political personalities from Ronald Reagan to Sappho and Maria Tallchief. The book will present a challenge for most readers, even perhaps for those well-versed in language poetry (a strong influence on Willis as she discussed in an interview with Mark Tursi), and I wonder how much any general reader can harvest of the poems their various significations without a strong grasp of avant-garde poetic movements and Willis’ own idiosyncratic research interests.”

ON FICTION

Mojie Crigler on the Fiction of Lawrence Sutin
“Tracing the effect of the book on its audience (‘One of the readers of When to Go into the Water was a former UFO abductee named Claude. . .’) shows the ripple effect of the ‘unremembered’ Hector de Saint-Aureole who, like every author, will never know exactly who will read his work or how it will change them. All the characters remain ignorant, equally so, of the continuing lives of their actions.”

ON NONFICTION

Liza Katz on World Literature in French
“Is France still at the center of the French-language literary world? Or, to ask a broader question, is there a center at all? In the fall of 2006, five of the seven major French literary prizes were awarded to foreign-born writers. A manifesto penned by forty-four French-language writers the following year declares: ‘The center, from which supposedly radiated a franco-French literature, is no longer the center [. . .] the center, these fall prizes tell us, is henceforth everywhere, at the four corners of the world.’ The need to assert this claim, combined with the fact that literary works in the francophone world are still ultimately measured by the standards of French prizes, indicates that such a dramatic change has yet to reach completion. But trends show that the center is beginning to dissolve.”

Interview with Timothy Donnelly

Guernica: Many of the poets you mention as influences, or who are outright mentioned in the book itself, are Romantics: Keats, Shelley, even Stevens. Do you see a Romantic influence playing out in your work at all? Are you a Romantic?

Timothy Donnelly: I think in some pretty fundamental ways my sensibility is romantic, I'll admit it — probably primarily in my understanding of the imagination as the supreme mental faculty. I don’t think that this is necessarily a good thing, either, not always — I think there’s a lot of imagining taking place that pretends to be cold hard reasoning, and the effects can be disastrous. The very beginning of my long poem “Globus Hystericus” means to address this:

A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from
factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag
me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect

massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants
havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed-
fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell

and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger
as they inch up stems.

The “vehicle” here is the imagination, and the idea I have in mind is that while it can, on the one hand, relieve us from the deadening force of habituation and maybe even from certain kinds of privation, it can also operate in toxic, dangerous, destructive ways. While I most often experience the imagination in my day-to-day life as a source of pleasure and even liberation, I know that it can also provoke endless misconstruction, folly, paranoia, delusion, mischief, etc. Mostly I feel it’s our responsibility to acknowledge that so much of our lives are, in a manner of speaking, imaginary, and we trick ourselves — as others trick us — into thinking otherwise.

Ba mhaith liom bruíon le d'athair