Elite like an NFL Quarterback

Sweet couch.

The Oxford something or other interviews the great and powerful Oz! the English language's finest living poet, Geoffrey Hill. Here is a snippet:

You have famously defended the right of art to be ‘difficult’: would you therefore defend the right of poetry to be elitist?

We have to define what we mean by elitist: considerable confusion will arise unless we can get clear in our heads what ‘elitist’ means. If ‘elitist’ means belonging to some threatened hierarchy of the intelligence then I think that the poet has an obligation to attune her poetry in that direction. There is a largely unknown order of human beings who believe in that impossible thing: intrinsic value. One must work as if intrinsic value were a reality, even though I myself know no way of demonstrating its real existence.

Listen: Ailbhe Darcy and Mark Noonan at U35

Ailbhe Darcy has published poems in Ireland, Britain and the US, and writes critically for a number of publications including The Critical Flame, The Stinging Fly, and Verbal. She recently appeared as part of the prestigious Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. She has a BA in English and French, an MA in publishing and an MSc in development studies, the last of which took her to Zambia to study community media. She has just embarked on a PhD in contemporary poetry at the University of Notre Dame. With Clodagh Moynan, she co-edits Moloch, an online journal of new Irish art and writing.



Mark Thomas Noonan is a poet, playwright, and musician from Ireland, now living in Atlanta, Georgia. Mark's plays have been produced in Dublin, Cork, and New York, and his poetry and other writing have appeared in numerous journals. He recently completed an MA in Ethnomusicology from University College Cork and now works for an independent folk music label.

The Dark Place

from Alternet: I want you to know that the fundamentalist political movement is the beginning of a cultural revolution that will take our nation to a very dark place. You have to understand that this has been methodically planned and is being carried out with the utmost vigilance. In accordance with their worldview, my old friends do not in the least care about what you think. They are against democracy, and they are seeking to end the rule of the majority in our great country.

Daniel Bosch on Daisy Fried's “Torment”

From the May/June issue of The Critical Flame:

“At seven pages, ‘Torment’ is longer and more complicated than many American poems published these days. I want you to read it anyway, maybe because this is so. For ‘Torment’ is also clearer and more direct than much of the verse we see in contemporary magazines. It does not induce meaning under the pretense that it has none. The implications of ‘Torment’ follow logically, almost simply, from its words and sentences and verse paragraphs. Though its language is loaded, morally, Fried has distanced her poem from the kind of poem-of-moral-instruction that has been one popular template for American poets working since the 1970s. I hope without expectation that an acute appraisal of ‘Torment’ might lead to a robust questioning of that moral template, and that perhaps we might even set it aside.”

Read Daisy Fried's poem "Torment" here.

Laura Healy reads Bolaño for U35 at Mass Poetry

Got all that? Laura Healy, whose translations of Roberto Bolaño's poetry is published by New Directions, reads from her newly-translated work, which will be published in the fall.

James Stotts on Stephen Sturgeon

From the May/June issue of The Critical Flame:

‘Schools of poetry, though, are political parties, and Sturgeon’s political gesture is a wink, not flagellation. It is antihegemonical, which is to say, Socratic. In key moments he offers critique: “I do not know the proper tone to take”, we are told in “The Confabulators.” This is surely the alpha and omega of John Ashbery’s prosody, an almost singular concern with register over all other modes of communication. Sturgeon also nods to the tired avant garde: “Just forge my autograph to this warrant / and assume my attendance at the birth.” This is as swift a dispatch of Kenneth Goldsmith’s “uncreativity” as I have seen, and by itself earns Sturgeon a special place in my heart. The banal poet’s wet dream is to be given the credit for the profundities his or her work has no relation to, but to take none of responsibility — ego ad infitum. Sturgeon is quietly stepping out of the shadow of today’s clowns with his ironic asides. He is taking responsibility, but not taking a stand.’

Hilary Plum on Naming and Character in Fiction

A passage to chew over, from the May/June issue of The Critical Flame:

[The characters in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”] name one another, as Mel and Nick and Laura name Teresa “Terri.” [In Noy Holland's story] the horse is Goose, but Pa has also been “goose,” and so has the baby. The girl has no other name than Cricket, which it seems Pa has given her — not as one names a child, but more intimately, as one nicknames a child. The horse is named for his sounds (his voice?), which are like a goose, and yet, Cricket thinks, not. Ma, Pa, and baby are never named otherwise. The world of the story is drawn this closely around the speaker: we are not formally introduced.

The prominence of names in the world as we know it has been replaced by a naming system internal to the story, names as experienced by the speaker. The girl “Cricket” has effectively forgotten her own name and it is never revealed to us. The animals’ names are of the same order as at least some of the human characters’ — “Cricket” becomes a human name; Goose is the name of a horse, but has been, at various times, also a name for Pa and for baby. Holland’s approach to introduction is distinctly different from Carver’s; in this story names carefully disorient as much as they orient the reader. “Rooster, Pollard, Cricket, Goose” investigates the act of naming itself, its power both to familiarize and distance, to be both prize of and weapon against intimacy.

Read the rest at The Critical Flame (www.criticalflame.org)

James Byrne reads for U35 at the Mass Poetry Festival

The Critical Flame :: May/June 2011

ON FICTION

Daniel Green on the Fiction of John Hawkes

“By both articulating a commitment to ‘experimental fiction’ and putting into practice a coherent conception of what such fiction should do, John Hawkes established himself as perhaps the most important experimental writer in the postwar period, perhaps in all of American literature.”

Hilary Plum on Introductions and Character in Fiction

“Fiction introduces a reader (let’s note her as a real body) to a fictive body (character) via a fictive introducer (narrator); the only other body, the writer’s, has departed the scene. An examination of the differences among Stein’s, Carver’s, and Holland’s methods of naming and embodying characters in these three stories may shed light on all that occurs when narrator, character, and reader encounter one another in a work of fiction.”

ON VERSE

James Stotts on Stephen Sturgeon's Trees of the Twentieth Century

“More impressive than his mastered shifting tones and multilayered critiques, though, are his images, which are legion and are allowed to stand by themselves (in other words, ‘What does it mean when things / present themselves; it means, it means that we have seen them; that’s over. That’s over.’) His metaphors, more often than not held together in tension like kite string, pair the profane with the sublime”

Daniel Bosch on Daisy Fried's “Torment”

“At seven pages, ‘Torment’ is longer and more complicated than many American poems published these days. I want you to read it anyway, maybe because this is so. For ‘Torment’ is also clearer and more direct than much of the verse we see in contemporary magazines. It does not induce meaning under the pretense that it has none. The implications of ‘Torment’ follow logically, almost simply, from its words and sentences and verse paragraphs. Though its language is loaded, morally, Fried has distanced her poem from the kind of poem-of-moral-instruction that has been one popular template for American poets working since the 1970s. I hope without expectation that an acute appraisal of ‘Torment’ might lead to a robust questioning of that moral template, and that perhaps we might even set it aside.”

“Our first dance is not going to exist”

From the comment stream at Jezebel (via TBG) on why people tend to marry partners of the same political persuasion:

‘I'm not someone who enjoys having a spirited debate with the opposition in the bedroom. Basically, my politics are founded on the ideas that women are people, poor people are people, gays are citizens entitled to citizen's rights (like marriage), immigrants are not dissolving our White People social fabric, education and health care should be free and excellent, war is not the answer to “honey, where did I leave my oil?”, and the environment is not a massive roll of toilet paper on which we should wipe our collective asses.

‘If someone disagrees with any or all of that, I am not going to get naked for them or invite them to meet my hippie parents. I don't care if they're a Libertarian, a Republican, or a Morflaxx from the Planet Zoob. Hate the poor? Think my womb should have “PROPERTY OF U.S. CONGRESS” stamped on it? Want to continually bomb the Middle East because you've heard they hate “freedom”? Then we are not going to lock eyes over dinner and decide to give this crazy thing called love a chance. Our first dance is not going to be to Ben Folds' “The Luckiest.” Our first dance is not going to exist. I am going to be too busy happily fucking a guy who has read The Second Sex and knows how to operate a vacuum cleaner.’

TBG and I recently realized that the defining feature of our friend group — it dawned on us at one of our famous cocktail parties, actually — is that they are all feminists. They believe women are fully-formed multifaceted human beings who function in our culture beyond subordination and sexuality. Those that don't, don't stick around.

U35 Poetry: Ailbhe Darcy and Mark Noonan

Thursday, May 12th @ 8:00 pm
The Marliave, Downtown Crossing [map]

Ailbhe Darcy has published poems in Ireland, Britain and the US, and writes critically for a number of publications including The Critical Flame, The Stinging Fly, and Verbal. She recently appeared as part of the prestigious Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. She has a BA in English and French, an MA in publishing and an MSc in development studies, the last of which took her to Zambia to study community media. She has just embarked on a PhD in contemporary poetry at the University of Notre Dame. With Clodagh Moynan, she co-edits Moloch, an online journal of new Irish art and writing.

Mark Thomas Noonan is a poet, playwright, and musician from Ireland, now living in Atlanta, Georgia. Mark's plays have been produced in Dublin, Cork, and New York, and his poetry and other writing have appeared in numerous journals. He recently completed an MA in Ethnomusicology from University College Cork and now works for an independent folk music label.