Observe and Report

I recognize that subscriptions cost money, and that many poets do not have much left at the end of the month to pay for an issue of their favorite journal. I also admit that I have sent work to many more magazines than I have actually subscribed to. And yet, how many people think twice about downloading a song, an album from iTunes? or getting cable? or going to see Observe and Report? Add all that leisure cash up, you get a few magazine subscriptions. It's not about making money, of course; all the editors I know or have worked with lose cash, out of pocket, year in and year out. It's a matter of community, and support in the form of actually purchasing journals is one way to ensure that the community you value and participate in continues to exist.

-- poet & editor deluxe Nick Twemlow of Canarium Books and The Canary (full interview here)

My word-hoard did this to me

One solution to the "angry, scatological discussion thread" syndrome on poetry blogs is the blog machine. Viz. -

Hello world, this is J B Wock, and this is my blog!
Actually, I am a PHP script , and (almost) every night
I write a short phrase about whatever comes to my mind.

My method is:
- I find a phrase that I like on the Internet.
- I twist the phrase until I'm pleased with it.
- When everything's ready, I publish my post.If you want to try me, just click here.

The irrelevant I: Yet another installment of Make It New, Already!

“Musil once thought he might construct a person from nothing but quotations”. Thomas Mann (of his Lotte in Weimar): “He said it was a rich fabric of references, much of which is compilation and appropriation, exploiting of sources”. The last word should go to Virginia Woolf, the secret heroine of this book, the control in this sample of beings, who once wanted to learn German, the most natural reader and writer of all those on display, a Bloomsbury visitor to Berlin once (Vita’s Harold was at the embassy), a lover of moths, married (like Juers) to a publisher: “Virginia thought the first person singular – the I – was now irrelevant, without audience or echo. This signified a kind of death. Paris fell. I have my morphia in my pocket, she wrote. And wondered, if this was the end, whether she should be reading Shakespeare. The corn was flowing with poppies in it, and she thought it might be her last walk. People were killed in night raids on the English coast. We pour to the edge of a precipice . . . .

-- quoted in Michael Hofmann's TLS review of Evelyn Juers' House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann

"Angry, scatological discussion threads," redux

Anthony Grafton's prediction of the way the internet will inflect intellectual work is timely - especially for anyone who reads poetry blogs, e.g. Harriet. Should blog comments be moderated to reduce the number of inevitable "angry, scatological discussion threads?" The question has occasioned some interesting remarks by Stephen Sturgeon, Editor of Fulcrum:

"The right to free speech and the freedom to ignore disagreeable speech is being cited as the reason for allowing the posting of incendiary comments. Two thoughts on this:

1. Defending the right to free speech implies that words have power: you must let me say what I want because the power of words belongs to anyone who can use words; denying me free speech is therefore an inhumane sort of oppression. To follow this declaration of rights by exploiting the power of words in insult, and then to say that words are easily ignorable and that disagreeable comments can very easily be disregarded, is inconsistent. Either the words have power or they don't. If you choose to use the power in words after you claim a right to that power, you can't say hideous things and, when reprimanded, protest that there is little power in the words.

2. Website comment fields are a new space for the circulation of ideas, and the medium changes the rules for our usual personality interactions. First there is the basic anonymity internet communication allows; a real name might be attached to a message, but the usual social dynamics of actual conversation are totally absent (you can't automatically be embarrassed with the evil eye after saying something too risque, and amend the rest of your conversation, &c.). Add to this the quickness with which comments are posted, which is close enough to real time to give the illusion of immediacy, and which is far enough away from it to enable something closer to monologue than to dialogue; and add to that the element of a large AUDIENCE, and you have a stable environment for verbal violence. Most of what dissuades us from going wild in public is absent from internet communication. Since the mediating influences in talking face to face with someone are not present in your comment fields, since a blog disables the normal social protections we have against free speech becoming tyrannical speech, I see no problem in rejecting messages as they come in when they are unmistakably insulting and derogatory, or when a commenter is using multiple aliases to do . . . whatever that accomplishes.

To sum up, website comment fields much more easily facilitate tyrannical speech than free speech. The grounds of exchange are different than those of a real-life public forum or ordinary conversation, and these differences allow for a solipsistic treatment of others when the moon is full, and for some people it's always a full moon somewhere."

Addendum: Sturgeon himself has now become a target and victim of the comment box.

What angry scatological threads?!?

... "journals will become something like blogs with footnotes: unedited texts, glittering with insights, but also blemished with errors that no informed eye has picked up, and succeeded by angry, scatological discussion threads."

-- Anthony Grafton's prediction of intellectual work in a Web-based world, in Worlds Made by Words

*
If I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and university professors of literature, I would wish that for one year, two, three, or five, we would give up readings. By a reading, I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx's, Freud's, Foucault's, Derrida's, or whoever's — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art. I wish that we'd declare a moratorium on readings. I wish that we'd give readings a rest.

This wish will strike most academic literary critics and perhaps others as well as — let me put it politely — counterintuitive. Readings, many think, are what we do. Readings are what literary criticism is all about. They are the bread and butter of the profession. Through readings we write our books; through readings we teach our students. And if there were no more readings, what would we have left to do? Wouldn't we have to close our classroom doors, shut down our office computers, and go home? The end of readings, presumably, would mean the end of our profession.

So let me try to explain what I have in mind. For it seems to me that if we kicked our addiction to readings, our profession would actually be stronger and more influential, our teaching would improve, and there would be more good books of literary criticism to be written and accordingly more to be read.

-- Mark Edmunson, "Against Readings"

*

Speaking of criticism, stay tuned for the Mayday roundtable.

Any good reader...

Any good reader certainly tries, in Henry James's phrase, to be one on whom nothing is lost. We constantly adjust our expectations, not seeking to find in Proust the terseness of Hemingway, or in Joyce the headlong action of Alexandre Dumas. But it's impossible to wholly put aside our genders, our past experiences, and, not least, our often peculiar tastes. -- Michael Dirda

Pictured: Gérard de Lairesse - Allegory of the Five Senses

NaPoMo Quiz: Why does this famous philosopher look so unhappy?

Answer:

Most contemporary American poetry "is essentially adolescent. Its concerns never really get past that personal subjectivity. Aristotle would say it's not even human. A lot of people would say if you don't get past that level of your personal concerns, you're not even a human being."

We clearly have a problem! (Or: Happy "World Book Day")

Beliefs are not to be respected just because they are beliefs. Societies in which any kind of abrasive criticism constitutes “abuse” clearly have a problem. -- Terry Eagleton, in Commonweal [!]; full essay here.

*
On the other hand... The pigeonholing (e.g. "quietist", "SoQ," "post-avant") poetries-not-poetry approach that echoes round the po-blogosphere these days is surely related to the decline of literary criticism as a responsible practice of poets themselves and even of our so-called critics - who today are mostly bloggers-cum-book-reviewers writ large. Why do we accept "touchstones" instead of ideas?

Stay tuned for a roundtable on negative and other criticism (including yours truly) at Mayday magazine, debuting on May 1st; list of participants here (though see Kent's comments, below).

*
"Over the years, the voice gradually turned into a hipster’s cutting, sarcastic instrument, often so elliptical as to be incomprehensible." -- Aram Saroyan

Pictured: The flat earth, with martyred "Quietist"

This clarifies things considerably.

The Air Force, utilizing data from Harriet, has constructed this useful taxonomic structure. (Click image to enlarge.)

Talk like a Chicagoan!

"Screw your courage to the sticking place!"

Please note that according to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, we should be talking like Edward de Vere!

Another installment of... Of Being Quiet: Stan Brakhage

Aggravated yet again about "Quietude?" Here's some silent poetry film for you from the astounding Stan Brakhage, who came to mind as I was reading Daniel Kane's new book, We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry.

John Ashbery at William Empson's birthday party; and "Why students don't like poetry"

John Ashbery at William Empson's birthday party (click for video).

*
Here's an article suggesting that Ashbery's poems are part of the reason Why Students Don't Like Poetry - "Don’t choose poems so difficult and remote from young students, especially the non-humanities majors. They [the poems] may be brilliant and powerful, but if their brilliance and power requires too much guidance and contextualization on the teacher’s part, they won’t work." Uh-oh!

You are reading inferior texts, kid!

On today's college campuses, you're more likely to hear a werewolf howl than Allen Ginsberg, and Nin's transgressive sexuality has been replaced by the fervent chastity of Bella Swan, the teenage heroine of Stephenie Meyer's modern gothic "Twilight" series. It's as though somebody stole Abbie Hoffman's book -- and a whole generation of radical lit along with it.

Last year Meyer sold more books than any other author -- 22 million -- and those copies weren't all bought by middle-schoolers. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the best-selling titles on college campuses are mostly about hunky vampires or Barack Obama. Recently, Meyer and the president held six of the 10 top spots. In January, the most subversive book on the college bestseller list was "Our Dumb World," a collection of gags from the Onion. The top title that month was "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" by J.K. Rowling. College kids' favorite nonfiction book was Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," about what makes successful individuals. And the only title that stakes a claim as a real novel for adults was Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns," the choice of a million splendid book clubs. {snip} Professor Eric Williamson -- a card-carrying liberal in full tweed glory -- argues that "the entire culture has become narcotized." An English teacher at the University of Texas-Pan American, he places the blame for students' dim reading squarely on the unfettered expansion of capitalism. "I have stood before classes," he tells me, "and seen the students snicker when I said that Melville died poor because he couldn't sell books. 'Then why are we reading him if he wasn't popular?' " Today's graduate students were born when Ronald Reagan was elected, and their literary values, he claims, reflect our market economy. "There is nary a student in the classroom -- and this goes for English majors, too -- who wouldn't pronounce Stephen King a better author than Donald Barthelme or William Vollmann. The students do not have any shame about reading inferior texts."

-- from "Where's the Radical Lit?" by Ron Charles, The Washington Post (full article here)

*
This culture of repudiation has transmitted itself, through the media and the schools, across the spiritual terrain of Western civilization, leaving behind it a sense of emptiness and defeat, a sense that nothing is left to believe in or endorse, save only the freedom to believe. And a belief in the freedom to believe is neither a belief nor a freedom. It encourages hesitation in the place of conviction and timidity in the place of choice. . .

The late Richard Rorty saw irony as a state of mind intimately connected with the postmodern worldview—a withdrawal from judgment that nevertheless aims at a kind of consensus, a shared agreement not to judge. The ironic temperament, however, is better understood as a virtue—a disposition aimed at a kind of practical fulfillment and moral success. Venturing a definition of this virtue, I would describe it as a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself. However convinced you are of the rightness of your actions and the truth of your views, look on them as the actions and the views of someone else and rephrase them accordingly. So defined, irony is quite distinct from sarcasm: it is a mode of acceptance rather than a mode of rejection. It also points both ways: through irony, I learn to accept both the other on whom I turn my gaze, and also myself, the one who is gazing. Pace Rorty, irony is not free from judgment: it simply recognizes that the one who judges is also judged, and judged by himself.

-- Roger Scruton, from his McNish Lecture for the Advancement of Western Civilization at the University of Calgary

Delicious!

Poetry changes. (It doesn't evolve, by the way, like a monkey discovering a better way to peel bananas; it changes, like a monkey discovering that bananas are delicious.) -- Joel Brouwer, Poetry, June 2009

I propose an excise tax on books!

The publisher inherits, or gains from, besides his personal merit, the intrinsic and public value of the text: for, as much by its sublimity, the works of a great name are magnified by the accumulated admiration of readers.

Thus, the [copyright] law does not suppress heredity, for the reason that it cannot, but the revenue itself channels itself toward a third party, or several, who have no claim to it: the law merely proposes to interrupt it.

To effect a transfer.

For whose benefit, certainly, that will take place without any intrusion. You see here the ideal inheritors, substituted for direct filiation by blood. In addition, in the case of literature, there is the particularity that the famous author did not always enjoy, while he was alive, or while his heirs were alive, the financial benefits of his works.

{I propose an excise tax on books!}

The revenue should go to beginners, by way of their literary elders, an impartial representation of the past. Either in the form of prizes for outstanding works, or as help in publishing works still in manuscript.

The only resentment opposing this idea would come from heirs whose rights are violated, and there aren't any. I don't think I'm here presuming on the well-known delicacy of publishers, when I say that none of them will rise up against a tax, in any case minor. Will they be grateful? Perhaps indeed yes, given that the privileges of an incomplete law are susceptible to abuse. The nation will have the opportunity to install, for a moderate price, a system totally worthy of praise.

The public Domain perfectly represents the public square, or some public building. The place belongs to the mass of citizens; it doesn't belong to any one. One doesn't do business there for one's own sake without executing oneself. The speculator who convokes people to the public square to testify to his hard work ceases to be a part of all, and divests himself of a right.

- - Stéphane Mallarmé (tr. Barbara Johnson, slightly redacted here)

Just for Yaks! A NaPoMo quiz!!

Click here, or on the yak, for a special National Poetry Month quiz, courtesy of... me.

Way out people know the way out Dept.

Even the "straightest" of the writers, Robert Lowell, who has never been considered part of an avant-garde canon, broke into new terrain when For the Union Dead and Life Studies inaugurated the confessional mode [sic] and its accompanying relaxation of formal structure. This move was experimental for him...

-- Maria Damon, The Dark End of the Street

(Gloss: Even Lowell could be experimental - for him - but don't worry, he wasn't avant-garde!)

Put this in your NaPoWriMo & smoke it!

(Vladimir Mayakovsky - director, writer and actor)

*
Judith Shklar introduced her book Ordinary Vices by saying, “It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day.” I suppose poets these days aren’t supposed to put their minds to grand tasks - you know, it’s more like write a poem every day for a month. But since it’s not only National Poetry Month but National Uh-Huh month, I thought I’d post something, you know, deep. It's over on Harriet, and you can wade into that pool by clicking here.

I would rather write about prisms and prunes

NaPoWriMo NaSchmoWriPo, let's take words seriously for a moment, shall we?

Click here (or on the pic) for some, um, food for thought.

Fear and poetry

I myself am not clear - despite the general prestige of the word - what, as a term, "poetry" with its entailed implication of "creativity" can now mean in the context of the actual human task. What obligations "poetry" requires. What benefit to the human world the obligation, privilege, or competence named "poetry" - the vocation to "poetic work" - implies or promises. Above all, what knowledge it contributes. Nor shall I answer that question to my own satisfaction. But the tendency of my thought is to consider the term "poetry," as it is now employed, as meaning "sanctioned making." That is to say: "poetry" is now a mystified term. And the mystification of the term is demanded by the social necessity (peculiar to our cultural moment) of concealing the violence of representation as such: eidetic violence.... [M]y avowed unclarity with respect to the "meaning" of the word "poetry" is not, I assure you, a claim of modesty on my part or a gesture of intellectual circumspection, but rather an expression of fear.

-- Allen Grossman, "On Communicative Difficulty," in True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing (University of Chicago Press)

NaPoMoPopQuiz

Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt or perceived. I feel it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation, since one’s deepest impulse in writing (or, I must admit, painting or composing) is to my mind not “I must tell everybody about that” (i.e. responsibility to other people) but “I must stop that from being forgotten if I can” (i.e. responsibility towards subject). When writing a poem I am trying to construct a verbal device or machine which will, upon reading, render up the emotion I originally experienced to as many people as possible for as long as possible. You’ll remember I called it a slot machine into which the reader inserts the penny of his attention. Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved, and that explains why obscurity is so often a disadvantage; the distinction between communication and preservation is one of motive, and I think the latter word gives a very proper emphasis to the language-as-preserver rather than language-as-means-of-communication. In other words it makes it sound harder, which it is! I forget if you asked me whether I thought poetry important: I’m afraid my opinion on it would be about as valuable as that of a beaver upon dams. It’s certainly important to me, but I doubt if the world would miss it much. All the same I can’t imagine how people exist without practising some form of art.

Who the heck said this? Click here for your answer!

Nonsense!

As the famous language poet, Emily Dickinson, wrote:

Much madness is divinest Sense

To the discerning Eye…

There's much madness about "nonsense" in response to an essay by Matthew Zapruder over at Harriet. As I said there, "nonsense" isn't a critical term, not in my book, anyway, and I've no need, in poetry, for instant or even rapid gratification.

Here's Auden on David Jones, whose poems I suppose must seem like nonsense to those who haven't the time or patience to read complicated things:

"It is certainly true that no reader is going to be able to make Mr. Jones's 'now-ness' his own without taking a great deal of trouble and many rereadings of Anathemata, and, if he says: 'I'm sorry, Mr. Jones is asking too much. I have neither the time nor the patience which he seems to expect me to bring to his poem,' I do not know what argument one could use to convince him otherwise. I can only state my personal experience, namely, that I have found the time and trouble I have taken with Anathemata infinitely rewarding."

(Full Auden essay here.)

Stories that aren't being told anymore

I'm interested in stories that aren't being told anymore. I'm interested in what we miss out on when we're constantly looking in our experience of the avant-garde to be rewarded by instances of breaks between high and low, evidence of the decentered sign. What about sincere belief in God? Elves? Magic? Can't we appreciate that?

[snip]

Given that I believe, then, that [...] much of what we consider to be first-generation postmodern art is grounded in a practically visionary tradition [...] questions I applied to my study include, "How did filmmaker Kenneth Anger and poet Robert Duncan think collaboratively about the functions of myth and magic in their work?"; "What is the relationship between the 'serial' poem and the avant-garde 'serial' move series... particularly given the use of the poetic fragment as a unit of composition?

-- Daniel Kane, We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (Just out!)

All systems are the same system: Uh-Huh Month continues

We get the culture we deserve and wish for. One screech screeches: Can poetry matter? Why should that even be a question? It matters if it's casually subversive and alters consciousness without being righteous. It doesn't matter much to me if poetry doesn't matter to much in the great world out there, even though I speak [in my essays] about my work as a poet. Poetry finds its way, sometimes on the sly, and insinuates its powers into our lives: it possesses what D.H. Lawrence calls 'the insidious mastery of song.'

Poetry... like other offerings, is contaminated by the huffy, celebrity-driven ethics of commerce, of peddling and consuming. All systems are the same system. Rumor forges fame, consumers have to be instructed (and really do want to know) what to pay attention to, and so reputations are made, desires shaped and fueled...

I take it on faith that readers interested in the interfusings of life and culture, who believe that poetry brings what we need to know, brings questions we need to ask or conflicts we can't resolve, and who are patient with complexity - such readers don't have to be huckstered or harvested.

-- W.S. Di Piero, City Dog

National Uh-Huh Month

Cruellest month, national poetry month... nah!

It's ...

International Guitar Month, Keep America Beautiful Month, National Anxiety Month, National Humor Month, National Welding Month, National Garden Month, and Uh-Huh Month!

And what is a month but a cento of days?

April 1 is . . . . . One Cent Day

April 2 is . . . . . National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day

April 3 is . . . . . Tweed Day and Don't Go To Work Unless It's Fun Day

April 4 is . . . . . Tell-A-Lie Day

April 5 is . . . . . Go For Broke Day

April 6 is . . . . . Sorry Charlie Day

April 7 is . . . . . No Housework Day

April 8 is . . . . . All Is Ours Day

April 9 is . . . . . Winston Churchill Day and Name Yourself Day

April 10 is . . . . Golfers Day

April 11 is . . . . Eight-Track Tape Day

April 12 is . . . . Look Up At The Sky Day

April 13 is . . . . Blame Somebody Else Day

April 14 is . . . . National Pecan Day

April 15 is . . . . Rubber Eraser Day

April 16 is . . . . National Stress Awareness Day and National Eggs Benedict Day

April 17 is . . . . National Cheeseball Day

April 18 is . . . . International Jugglers Day

April 19 is . . . . Garlic Day

April 20 is . . . . Look Alike Day

April 21 is . . . . Kindergarten Day

April 22 is . . . . National Jelly Bean Day

April 23 is . . . . Read Me Day and World Laboratory Animal Day

April 24 is . . . . National Pigs In A Blanket Day

April 25 is . . . . National Zucchini Bread Day

April 26 is . . . . Richter Scale Day and National Pretzel Day

April 27 is . . . . Tell A Story Day

April 28 is . . . . Great Poetry Reading Day and Kiss-Your-Mate Day

April 29 is . . . . National Shrimp Scampi Day

April 30 is . . . . National Honesty Day

I'll drink to that! (Happy Friday)

If meaning flows backward, why aren't we smarter?

To the Sister I Never Had

“Sleep quiet and smiling and do not hanker / For a perfection that can never come” – MacNeice

Sister that I never had, take the initiative, like Eve, against nature!

If kindness is its own reward then you have been paid, but not repaid

For your love, and because you were never born you are losing your mind

And I don’t know what the best escape for you is other than the gates

Smitten with destruction that lead away from our garden where, when

We played as children, you cradled the mallow – Gossypium, cotton –

In an uprooted case of the slows: I can’t help but think back, think

Back on your telling me that dry light is the best, the very best,

And your saying, When I’m gone, say I was fascinated the whole time!

You asked me about the mean streak in the goyim, about the faith

Of our faithless fathers, about the untranslatable doom of the Yiddish-

Speakers infausting us with their right-to-left letters and flames -

Sister, I respect the ambient and believe in the dove that lifts your eyes,

And I am old enough now to apologize to you for the lies I told

To survive you, and I remember you better than people who really

Lived, or those crows on the wire who taught us Hebrew, got drunk

As a drum on a pennyworth of settlebrain, and who pulled you

Out of the rolling waters so you could sit in the kitchen highchair

Kicking the legs like a little girl… and when you were older, which

You never were, you understood all the things I never said

And taught me a little about how to cook for myself; you made

Sure that there were always fresh flowers on the table no matter what,

And above all said grace before each meal in a strange language.

You showed me how to dress for success, gave me courage

When my haircuts and skin and nose and belly let me, inevitably,

Down, and you required that I be and remain a mensch, in exchange

For which you baked the black-and-white cookies I so adored.

But when the earth froze, making burial difficult, you saw to it

That Kaddish was still said by sons for their fathers, and so

The ritual washing continued, and so on, even though the war

Kept up in which those same sons did things that women could

Neither forgive nor understand, and so they repented giving us

Birth, in spite of which all the prayers got said, and on this same

Subject of the departed I thought it only a small sin to have held

You beautiful even when, especially when, you were angry. God

Why did you make off with the only sister I never had when

There was so much more I could have learned from her, including

How to stay human no matter what? Sister, you hugged me when you

Were mad even when the crust didn’t come out right and your joints

Really ached, and your heart, too, and it’s as if I interrupted

A dreamer saying all this now, and in such relative freedom:

Sooner or later even salamanders stop burning, so my dear,

I throw myself on your mercy now that I can’t get you

To speak! Once, the boy I was tried to explore some of your heart

Which was perched out on the black bowed tension wires running

Though our back yard, and you said Here, and I then and only then

Could comprehend your Bible and cookbook, left open forever

On the table – you were, well, so brutally practical, saying

Sometimes Many hands make light work and sometimes on the other

Hand, Too many cooks spoil the soup, and nothing made you more crazy

Than my being sick, which happened a lot, for which I am sorry.

There was a newspaper headline I saw on the train one day,

I couldn’t see the whole thing but it started out: Science

Uncovers Clue to Mystery of… What was the mystery?

I never found out, which you thought was very funny.

But now that I try to remember you I realize how sad it was that

You spent almost every night teaching yourself how to knit

Impossible dilemmas together… You made yourself into a great

Cook of seething stews and heavy loaves, and above all you loved

To call the kettle black. And when you were tearfully hanging

The X-mas lights that last year we spent together you said

Honey, most Jews have had a longer journey than Odysseus

So put down that book, will you? Which made me laugh

Because our father was born in Detroit, and when you were a girl

You pronounced it Troy: where all the men fell, and somehow you

Tunneled from your nightmares all the way to theirs as well as mine

In successive choirs because you were never born but I was.

Conspiracy theories!

1.) Matthew and Michael Dickman aren't twins - they're the same person, made to look different in photographs. (You heard it here first!)

2.) The inspiration for Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945–1960? Palgrave's Golden Treasury, first published in 1861.

3.) Pierre Martory... doesn't exist! He was invented by John Ashbery. This explains why none of his books have ever appeared in France.

4.) Kenneth Koch actually wrote the poem usually attributed to Frank O'Hara, "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island."

5.) Negative reviewer Jason Guriel was not (contrary to his assertions on Harriet) present at the Six Gallery in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg read Howl for the first time. But Kent Johnson was. He suggested the venue.

6.) So much depends upon a little red rooster. Spring & all.

7.) Jack Spicer stole funny lines from Allen Sherman (they went to high school together).

8.) Nobody reads poetry anymore because it's harder than, say, a Harry Potter novel, plot and all.

9.) The scary conficker thing, embedded into this blog post, was actually created by the same folks who invented Issue 1.

10.) A recent U.S. government study shows that this is the END for poetry... and also the automobile.

All in good fun, eh? Happy April Fools' Day!