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PUBLIC APOLOGY TO MICHAEL NEFF: I hereby publicly apologize to Mr. Neff for the post I made to the Lime Tree on September 24th in which I remarked that he was "well known
for being a dick." Though I clearly indicated in my post that
this characterization was based on hearsay, I concede his point,
made to me in a series of backchannel emails, that to propagate
such hearsay in a public forum and to impugn his character without
first-hand knowledge was irresponsible on my part. October blog switchover will happen this weekend. In waves: George Plimpton, Robert Palmer, Edward Said. Yeah, them beta chaps are good. Go check 'em out at Jack's place. Last night just before I drifted off I read Brend Iijima's and am pretty sure my striped typography dreams were influenced by it. (Yes, I 've brought my computer to my bed. See below.) Ugh. Still sick. Don't catch this, whatever you do. I see the Pope ignored my advice. Thanks very much for the well wishes. I am normally not such a baby. Harold Bloom on Steven King and Harry Potter. Check out George Murray's Bookninja. I'm sick this week with an awful bug. Haven't felt much like writing, so here are some photos.
My Olivetti Lettera 22 whom I adore (and that personification is not accidental--she's quite a collaborator). See Ron's entry for yesterday--I can't get his archive links to work right now.
New York Is Book Country was fun. That's Marion Wrenn, Shafer Hall, and Daniel Nester behind the Painted Bride Quarterly table. Soft Skull was across the street in the same block. Chris Connelly and Jason Schneiderman are somewhere around too.
And have you heard about Alexa? You can review your favorite blogs and sites. You can also explore your fave site's archives via the Wayback Machine. Definitely worth mentioning: David Cameron's chapbook Several Ghouls Hardly Worth Mentioning is being published by Brend Iijima's Portable Press. We ordered some for Shortwave today and should have them in time for David's Frequency reading with Mark Bibbins on 10/5. Y'all come out now, ya hear? I'm getting a kick out of Jonthan Mayhew's BAP face-off. The alphabetical progression pits poets against each other that might not otherwise be compared often, or sometimes two poems by the same poet, or two favorite poets result in a tie of excellence. Who knew this could be so exciting? And thanks, Kasey, for the illustrated link!
I actually like Stan Rice quite a bit. And his paintings were on his book jackets. He eventually published a book of them--kind of a folksy, goth Chagal. ICY GRAVY Icy gravy, From Singing Yet: New & Selected (1996) Now that's more like it: Jordan Davis on BAP 2003 in the Constant Critic. I remember playing my ballerina music box for Elvis when he died, but what to do now?
Look, Ma! Anchors! Dates/review titles are now anchored for easier archive maneuvering. (Aren't I spiffy?) Good Stuff: Canadian book critic Alex Good sheds some diffused light on snarky® reviews and the prohibition against them by The Believer, and also takes on our friend Laura Miller. I'd think I could guess his take on this Houlihan business--both sides. Good Reports is definitely blog rollicious. Also added: See far right column for new additions to the expanding blog roll. If you'd like to be here and aren't, please holler. Speaking of Houlihan, a certain well-known poet and editor said to me yesterday, "She'll regret it. I was twenty-three once too." We went on to talk about how negativity is the easiest response, appreciation so much more complex. The reasons for loving something (or someone) are more difficult to articulate, more nuanced, and sometimes downright inexplicable. And to clarify my own remarks on Miller's review in August, and my remarks on Houlihan's this week, I certainly don't agree with some that these critics should not be (or any critics should not be) writing negative reviews. It's not the criticism but the tone that turns me off, even where'd I might otherwise agree with a well-reasoned argument along the same lines. As my Momma used to say, "A gal just looks plain ugly when she trash talks." Or in another variation, "Why say 'bitch' when you can say 'witch' with a lot more class?" Maybe it's just that once I decide I don't like something, I sort of lose interest, you know? (Except in the case of our prez, whose train wreck of a mouth I can't stop heeding.) But, bitching with bravado certainly can get you in the news, can't it? PASSENGERS The world will burst like an intestine in the sun, --Denis Johnson, The Incognito Lounge "Almost everyone thinks of Doolittle as a poet who also wrote some fiction, as well as translations & memoirs. Yet H.D. published, for all extents and purposes, just a dozen or so books of poetry during her lifetime, going long periods between volumes after the appearance of her first Collected Poems in 1925." link to full text Another example might be Denis Johnson, who wrote four books of poems (The Man Among the Seals, Inner Weather, The Incognito Lounge, The Veil) before writing his first four novels (Angels, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man). Then his short stories in Jesus' Son that became the movie, etc. With Johnson, as with most contemporaries who work in both prose and poetry, the case is reversed: he is definitely a novelist who writes (or used to write) poetry, not a poet who writes a fiction (like Mark Strand, James Tate, Schuyler & Ashbery, etc.) Johnson's poems are terrific, but they aren't read much by the people who enjoy his other books. It's too bad, because they share many of the same characteristics that make his novels so compelling--and in a higher-proof distillation. I don't know that he's written poems lately. Paul Auster, too, wrote poetry first, as did Frederick Busch and Michael Ondaatje, and they're all better known as novelists. I assume some of them abandoned poetry in favor of the more popular (and lucrative) genre. I imagine there are zillions more examples. So I guess the question is can a writer do both well, and even if so, will readers judge the work as equal? Is it safe to assume that the readership for each kind of work would be composed of different readers? H.D. is an interesting case because (for one thing among many) her poems fared better than her novels rather than the other way around. Oh--I just thought of one exception. Thomas Disch writes poetry, fiction (usually sci-fi), and criticism and is well known for all three. And don't forget The Brave Little Toaster! He publishes each type of book under a different variation of his name: Thomas Disch, Tom Disch, and Thomas M. Disch. And Lydia Davis freaks us all out by refusing to call her work poetry. Most of it sure looks like it to me. And speaking of poets who write fiction, I'm still reading the Goldbarth novel. (See center column.) I was planning to comment more extensively on Joan Houlihan's most recent essay, but most folks have beat me to it and it would be needless repetition. I will just say that while she sometimes makes a valid point (her examples of grammatical nonsense are rather convincing in this case--but nonsense can be delightful!), I think her definition of "meaning" is too narrow here. However, she's right that literary journals too often espouse a set aesthetic and offer up the same thing (often by the same poets) in each issue. That's why "New Yorker Poem" is accepted shorthand. But aren't such journals making the same mistake as Houlihan herself? How boring to read only one kind of poetry (or limit oneself to eating only tuna fish)! It's no challenge to find bad examples of any literary mode--the challenge is remaining open to examples of excellent work in various modes. Mix it up a little. It's good for you. Well, the week got completely away from me. I realized this morning that I hadn't yet switched over to the September blog. So here we are. I certainly have enough to do. Brand New Insects lies all over the floor of my newly reclaimed office begging for a reordering. I've added several new poems and omitted some older ones, and off it goes again. The sestina was posted at McSweeney's. LIT 8 is coming together. And though it's not finished yet, we finally have a website. I gave the designer some new graphics files. I hope we can replace this goofy looking writing hand. I'll be adding more to the fledgling blog roll, surely. There are a couple other blogs I visit semi-regularly. Reading Ron is like taking a class. Jim just cracks me up. (PS: My husband says you can be on MY crush list anyway, Jim.) I read Dan's out of vanity (I make the occasional cameo) plus he has a new poet up every week on the main page of Unpleasant Event Schedule. Josh and Jordan are both reading in the Frequency series and always have interesting things to say. A Million Poems?! And I particularly like Josh's idea of using blogs to teach poetry and critical thinking. (David Trinidad had our class keep poetry journals, but the low-tech kind, between covers.) Shappy's the world's best poet/bartender/Elvis karaoke singer and Sam Henderson's drawings are great. And Joseph Duemer, though he probably doesn't remember it, wrote me a very nice letter when I was a baby poet and he was an editor at the Wallace Stevens Journal.
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Recent & Recommended Reading I'm a big fan of Goldbarth's poetry [note: I tried and failed to find "The Psychonaut Sonnets: Jones" online for this link], so it's no surprise that I was thrilled when Shawn brought home his new novel for me. The associative links and artful sidetracking provided by the end notes creates a pleasurable motion, as if one's brain is being rocked. And in more than one sense, it is. I missed him by I don't know how many years at the University of Texas (though I very much enjoyed David Wevill's class). Graywolf did a beautiful job with the book, as always. UPDATE:Ok, I'll admit being a little disappointed. Not that this wonderful
book isn't worth a read--I'd still recommend it--but with the
following caution. My expectations were off. I'm not sure Goldbarth
and his editor did readers a service by calling Pieces of Payne a novel. The narrative portion of the book (the first part, to
which the second part, the footnotes, are appended) reads more
like a short story, and as far as I can tell it is actually a
retelling of a conversation between AG and a friend in a bar.
So the book's an odd hybrid, which the back cover indicates. In
the space where one usually finds the "shelving category," they've
put " ___________________________ Wow. I think this one has to be up there with The Waves and Don Quixote as one of the most absorbing novels I've read. Its structure has lead others to describe it as a jungle or a puzzle, and both words are pretty accurate. The Obscene Bird of Night is difficult to summarize, but I'll give it a shot: For many years, Don Jeronimo Azcoitia and his wife Inés are unable to produce an heir. Humberto Peñaloza, Don Jeronimo's secretary and the narrator of the story, is among the few witnesses of the monstrous existence of Boy, the couple's eventual child. With the help of Humberto, Don Jeronimo hides boy away in a walled community of freaks collected from circuses and street corners. His goal is to raise Boy in an atmosphere in which he will never learn to recognize his own deformities as abnormal. The experiment fails, and grotesquely. Humberto is transformed into a deaf/mute named Mudito and inhabits a decaying Casa with a handful of decrepit nuns and wayward orphans. Mudito is further transformed into an old sexless nun himself, then an infant, and finally returned to a womb of sorts. The shifting persona of the narrator (who addresses his story to a series of women), the jumbled chronology, and the mutability of legend, memory and folktale are among the many halucinatory qualities of the novel. The whole is nothing short of astounding, while the individual sentences (in this translation) are individually beautiful. The Obscene Bird of Night is also a novel about writing: Humberto has been charged with commiting the story of Boy to paper, another failure, and in his guise as Mudito he refers repeatedly to a collection of manuscripts under his bed, collected with the same absent fervor of the old women with their bundles of trash. In the end--rather like the scene in Brazil in which Tuttle is consumed by the bureaucratic paperwork he avoids-- Humberto/Mudito is obliterated in a fire of scraps and "writing paper." Here's an interview with José Donoso. ____________________________ Moldenke is unlucky in love and mock war. Tormented by a know-it-all villain named Bunce and aided by a distant doctorly duo named Burnheart and Eagleman, Moldenke mucks along the best he can with his girlfriend Cock Roberta and his four gradually malfunctioning hearts. And watch out for the jellyheads! A cult classic first published in 1972, Motorman is currently out of print (though the link above will take you to some first editions on Alibris). But we're in luck: 3rd Bed will be republishing this book in paperback next year. ____________________________ Civilization is in rapid decline as the best and the brightest gradually go mad. A group of wealthy, well-educated high-rise tenants revert to their worst instinctual tendencies in an apartment building turned social laboratory. Grusome (and a teensy bit didactic), High Rise is diggable if you're into distopian visions such as 1984 and Brave New World. ____________________________ The Lilith Trilogy (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago) begins after World War Three, after we've managed to completely wreck the planet and most things in it. An alien race called the Oankali intercede to help humanity survive, though the survival they offer comes at an unsettling price. Freakishly erotic, eerily prophetic. Yeah, it's science fiction. What's your point? Butler's a genius. ____________________________ This is Scott's first novel and is one long, luscious prose poem about a widower fisherman and a young female drifter who take a road trip to the beach in search of their lost loves. Mysterious maidens dip their toes in the ocean. An eventual homecoming. Gorgeous. ____________________________ |
Recent postings 10/02/03 Recent Reviews Goldbarth Blog archives _____________ Blog Rollicious Jordan Davis's Million Poems Blog Joseph Duemer's Reading & Writing Dennis Loy Johnson's Moby Lives Jonathan Mayhew's Bemsha Swing Christopher Rizzo's In Place of Chairs Stephanie Young's Well-Nourished Moon _____________
Got something to say about any of this stuff? Please feel free to email me: shanna at shannacompton dot com. I haven't worked out the comment funtion yet. |
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