Travis Nichols on the Zen of Philip Whalen. "In other words, Whalen’s poetry does not explain itself or offer explanation after the experience of reading its disjunctions. Instead, it holds up its observation and waits for the careful reader to smile in acknowledgment, thus securing a mind-to-mind transmission in the radically lyric tradition of the Buddha." At Poetry Foundation.
Thom Donovan on some consequential poetics after George Oppen. "I would even argue that the situation of poets today, while many of us
take up the mantle of Oppen’s lyrical valuables in relation to his
ideological preoccupations, resembles as much if not moreso those of
writers in the 30s such as Bertolt Brecht, Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser,
Charles Reznikoff, and the Louis Zukofsky of “A – 8” whose works embody
problems of reportage as both the “getting down” of facts, as well as
the critical reflection of those facts through formal discovery,
filtration, and negativity."
At Wild Horses of Fire.
A poetic exploration of the mapping of the human genetic code by Gillian K Ferguson. "Four 'obsessive' years in the making, this poetic exploration of the Human Genome encompasses 1000 pages – over four Sequences - of poems and poetic reflections interwoven with short extracts from interviews, academic papers, science websites, newspaper reports, poetry and books. Ranging from the mapping of the Genome and examination of the essence of its chemical 'letters', to the surrounding ethical issues and practical developments, the project also explores the Human Genome's relation to areas such as religion, medicine, science, ecology and poetry. To reflect its interwoven 'genomic' nature, the project is presented here online as a 'living' work, inviting suggestions, ideas or extracts that might be further woven into the 'genome' of the project in the future." And the whole project is now online at The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life.
Will Hubbard "tackles" Ashbery's "inscrutability" at This Recording: "The amorphous narrative voice of Ashbery is at once Deist 'observer', Christian 'creator', and existential actor, and his transitions between the three are so abrupt, the juxtapositions so sharp, that at any one point in a poem we are hard put to identify the philosophical perspective to which we are listening. The effect, again, is a scattering of the reader’s attention, or a process of distraction in which Ashbery foregrounds the occasion of the poem’s composition in order to draw attention away from the chaotic, unpredictable maneuvering of the non-objective voice."
Charles Fernyhough reviews Simon Armitage's Gig at Telegraph.co.uk. "In his new collection of prose pieces, Simon Armitage shows us that the poet's life is anything but a leisurely one. He doesn't shatter all our illusions about the profession - there is a fair amount of boozing, and 'the armies of Inferiority and Pointlessness' do sometimes set up camp on his lawn - but he does show that there is more to a bard's working week than roaming the wilderness in search of inspiration."
David Ng reports on the "Critic's Voice" panel at Jacket Copy. "What will the critic of tomorrow look like? Will there even be critics? I think Alex Ross provides the best prototype: an expert in his domain (classical music) who writes for a high-ish-brow publication but who also maintains a blog. He is platform agnostic; it's the ideas that count, not the medium."
"Saroyan was the master of the one-word poem. But his works were as musical and meaningful as more conventional poetry, too, and a lot more amusing. The minimal poems were eye openers, ear openers and mind openers, and no one else was doing anything much like them at the time, and no one has since."
"The minimal poems are not just whimsical ’60s trippiness. They’re much more than novelties. This beautifully designed collection contains a poetry that shivers with itself, like something just born. Anyone interested in art made from words should have it."
Richard Hell on Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems in The New York Times.
Linh Dinh on translation at Poetry Foundation. "The best way to criticize an imperfect translator is not to shoot, then bury him in a picturesque forest, but to do a better translation. Doing this, you'll make the imperfect, offensive translation, which you've sucked on and tweaked only slightly, disappear forever from the face of this earth."
Michael Dirda on Mark Scroggins' The Poem of a Life - A Biography of Louis Zukofsky
"But Mark Scroggins certainly makes us understand that the author of "A" is a major poet, and he prods us into wanting to read him. After all, the test of poetry, said Zukofsky, "is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection. This is its purpose as art.""
Langdon Hammer on John Ashbery's Notes from the Air
"Even so, Ashbery’s phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. This sense of freedom is produced by Ashbery’s diction (no American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound) as well as his formal choices."
Kassia Krozser on the surplus value of literary blogs:
"This means that traditional print publications are held hostage to a set of mores that change only when leadership changes. The editor chooses the direction. The editor has final say in what is reviewed and not reviewed. [...] Bloggers, who often live by an entirely different financial model, are covering more fiction (I am most interested in fiction coverage, you see) than print publications can ever consider. [...] Blogs, not held to page limits and print runs, can take risks and explore topics to the degree the writer deems appropriate. "
- AGNI online - An extension of the print literary magazine
- CutBank 68
- John Latta on Elisabeth Workman’s chapbook Opolis
- Andrew Shields on Pierre Joris' English rendition of Paul Celan's Fadensonnen
- Jane Holland on Don Paterson's 'Lyric Principle'
- Publishers are lost online by Nicholas Clee
- Gus Goswell on Les Murray's Selected Poems
- Nick Powell on Robert Hass' Time and Materials
- Jacob Arthur Mooney on Steve McOrmond's Primer on the Hereafter
- Matthew Yeager on Cate Marvin's Fragment of the Head of a Queen
- John Deming on Matt Hart's Simply Rocket
- Ben Mirov on Pierre Reverdy's Prose Poems
- Mike McDonough on Edward Hirsch's Special Orders
- Helen Losse on Forrest Hamer's Rift
- Michael Wells on Jayne Pupek’s Forms of Intercession
- Rigoberto González on Stephanie Lenox's The Heart That Lies Outside the Body
- Frank Wilson on Elizabeth McFarland's Over the Summer Water
- Chameleon Hours by Elise Partridge
- Get Real: Online vs. Print Publishing
- Daniel Green responds to Todd Swift's entry on Canons
- Rimbaud was no genius by Rob Woodard
- With Amy King
- Sleeping and Waking by Michael O'Brien
- You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am by Tao Lin
- The Transformation by Juliana Spahr
- Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008 by Hank Lazer
- New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland
- Pop Smoke & Pray by Frank Barry Smith
- Fyre by Catherine Owen
- Dirty Work by Natalie Simpson
- OCHO #16 guest edited by Barbara Jane Reyes
- Mezzo Cammin Volume 2 Issue 2
- Jobs of the Poets by Michael Gottlieb
- Book Bloggers: The Saviour of Small Publishers? The End of Decent Criticism? Or Unpaid Cheerleaders? by Lisa Glass
- With Jared Smith
- With Gregory Betts
- With Rita Donovan
- Laurel Johnson on Lisa Beatman's Poems From the Factory Floor
- M Wynn Thomas on Alun Lewis' Collected Poems
Joshua Corey responds to Paul Hoover's question of "what it might mean to pursue avant-garde strategies in the wake of the collapse of the distinction between the "inside" and "outside" of American poetry:"
"What we're left with is style: mere aesthetics. And that's not such a terrible thing, if only because of the enormous freedom it offers poets and readers; and because it throws us back upon what Ron recently said in his response to a Poetry Foundation questionnaire [...]: "Whether you are a new formalist or a slam poet, a visual poet or a language writer, the absolute materiality of the signifier, the physicality of sound and of the graphic letter, is the one secret shared by all poets to which nonreaders of poetry seem literally clueless." Ours is a language art, and whatever else we are likely to become as a species, it seems unlikely that we'll become post-language. So there's room for the new—and perhaps, an outside—after all."
Simic stepping aside