Wittgenstein and "careers"

Speaking of creative types having "careers," I was interested to learn a few things about Wittgenstein's view of the matter from Severin Schroeder's review, published in the March 19th TLS, of Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents, 1911-1951. You'll love this!

"His high opinion of manual labour and his reservations about academic teaching are reflected in his encouragement of his former student Rush Rhees's decision to take on work in a factory, and later, in Rhees's fear of Wittgenstein's disapproval when he had given up his factory work for a temporary post at Swansea University (because his 'welding kept on being bad.')"

I guess it takes someone with an academic career to advise somebody to get a real life. Less competition that way?

Here's more fun stuff about the old master -

He had a big paradigm change owing to an experience with the Italian economist Piero Sraffa, whom Keynes had brought to Cambridge. The two didn't get along that well, but were in touch over a long period of time till Sraffa quit the relationship.

"To a pupil Wittgenstein described how Sraffa broke the hold on him of his earlier view that a sign and what it stands for must have the same logical form - by making a Neopolitan gesture of contempt, brushing his chin with his fingertips, and asking: 'What is the logical form of that?'. Wittgenstein said that Sraffa made him feel like a tree stripped of its leaves."

And looking back over his damaged relationship with Sraffa, Wittgeinstein wrote this:

"The older I grow the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are."

Was he blind??!!

Anyway, the book looks marvy; but the thing is that like most, er, academic books, it's expensive. In fact, it costs as much as the entire multi-volume set of Eigner's poems that everyone says costs too much. I still say it's one of the biggest bargains around.

On irritable reaching...

Kneejerk Poetics sez John Milton is a boring old whiteguy-canonical-too-religious poet who quit rhyme, used Latinate diction, went blind, gave Satan all the good lines, came up with a not-as-good sequel to Paradise Lost (which no one would wish to be a page longer), and was mean to his daughters who wrote everything down for him. His worst sin of all: influencing Robert Lowell.

Nobody in AmPo today would think of Milton as a revolutionary - but that's, in fact, what he was.

Like Shakespeare the son of usurer, Milton devoted many years to thinking and writing about the problem of money - long, long before Pound did so, and more rationally. David Hawkes's new book John Milton: A Hero of Our Time shows how even though Milton wrote in a time during which there was no conception of such a thing as an "economy," he could have predicted our present worldwide moneymess. As for being a revolutionary, Milton made the case for regicide and defended it when it was actually implemented - doing so in a time when there had been no other revolutions in the Western world - and in a place where the idea of throwing out even a tyrannical King (let alone executing him) was virtually unthinkable. He also advocated the separation of church and state, and made the case for legalizing divorce. And of course, in verse, Milton's move away from conventional rhyme - no doubt considered to be yet another dubious career move at the time - is also now taken completely for granted.

So what does it take for a poet to be considered revolutionary?

Anyway, this is from the introduction to Hawkes's book:

"Milton tried to imagine a world completely free of idols. He even tried to bring such a world into existence, in his revolutionary political career. He applied the principle of iconoclasm to everything: to religion, but also politics, to law, to marriage, gender and sexuality to the most intimate feelings and experiences. He practiced iconoclasm everywhere: in church, in the Council of State, in the law courts and, one suspects, in bed. He made iconoclasm his way of life.

And it is here that we find Milton's relevance to the present, day, for ours is an era of the image. Capitalist society is idolatrous to a degree surpassing the worst nightmares of seventeenth-century iconoclasts. It is a cliche of postmodernist philosophy that the distinction between sign and referent has collapsed and with it our ability to distinguish an essential, objective reality beneath the hyper-real world of simulacra that constitutes everyday experience. For example, the concern of today's politics with style over substance, with perception rather than reality, is obvious and undisguised. The rise of the image has often been linked to a relativist, pragmatist morality that can conceive of no absolute, ultimate truth underlying rhetorical signification, and to the spread of popular materialism: the widespread assumption that the world of appearances is the only reality. Its causes have been traced to the growth of the market economy, which depends upon the manipulation of images, and to a change in the nature of money, which has mutated into a non-material, purely imaginary or symbolic form. Images rule our world, and a world ruled by images needs an iconoclast.

Since Milton believed that idolatry was slavery, he would not be surprised to find that virtually everyone in capitalist society is enslaved.

[...]

Milton was that rarest of beasts, otherwise virtually unknown in the modern Western world: a supremely talented artist who also exercised significant political power. The author of Paradise Lost was also Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the revolutionary Council of State. The poet who gave us "Lycidas" was also the government propagandist commissioned to produce the official defense of the King's execution... Milton provides an example, almost unique in the history of capitalist society, of an artistic intellectual's attempt to put his theories into practice."

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After 9/11, the English critic John Carey wrote a piece in the TLS that referred to the violent and angry Samson Agonistes as "an incitement to terrorism" - and wondered whether it should be "withdrawn from schools and colleges and, indeed, banned more generally." So much, remarks Hawkes, "for the notion that Milton's work is 'a monument to dead ideas.' Milton's prose and poetry are just as dangerous and inflammatory, perhaps even more so, in the twenty-first century than they were in the seventeenth."

It is, Hawkes concludes, "the heavy responsibility of each individual student of Milton to decide for himself or herself who are the idolaters of the twenty-first century."

The itch for "kitsch"

The latest AmPo meme seems to consist of tossing around the word "kitsch."

A fine word, and you don't even have to have read Adorno, or Broch, or Clement Greenberg to deploy it these days. (It might be good, however, to have read Kant on the Zeitgeist.) Use it, and it sounds like you're making a statement about values in art, about good and evil, about institutions and alienation. Or maybe Carmen Miranda's tutti-frutti hats. But I don't get much out of it, and don't know what it's shorthand for; what the heck am I missing? What's weird is that the concept itself has to do with repeating things until they become cliched: kitschified, as it were. And the word itself falls prey to this process, as recent blog comments about poetry in translation prove.

But the freshest use of the word I've seen lately is in a letter by T.J. Clark to the London Review of Books about an essay by Michael Hofmann about Stefan Zweig they recently published. Clark has no dog in the ring, he says, about Zweig - but he liked Hofmann's verdict in that piece on Gustav Klimt. And in his letter explaining why, Clark locates a "special place in the hell of reputations" for those who vied for the title of "greatest painter ever" in the early twentieth century. That place is reserved for Kitschmeisters, whom he wonderfully defines as "early specialists in [...] pretend difficulty and 'opacity,' pretend mystery and profundity, pretend eroticism and excess."

Would that we had a T.J. Clark for poetry, someone with a strong stomach who could apply that definition to American poets and poetry!

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Addendum: "Sometimes, to attempt to be provocative, I assert that there is no such thing as Kitsch, that the whole concept is a performance of its own undoing, a kind of Performance Art that can be quite lovely, if rather pointless." - John Gallaher

"He was the first to write about himself in a moderate, confessional manner..."

Who? Baudelaire (pictured above), that's who, according to Jules Laforgue...

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"By now everyone knows how to review a book of translated poetry. First, one says it's impossible. Second, one implies that the translator is an ignoramus, or if that's going too far, that he has missed the plays on words; and then one carps about the inevitable mistakes."

Both of the above from a 1956 book review by Elizabeth Bishop ("The Manipulation of Mirrors") published in The New Republic, readable here.

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I grew up in the stix (which famously nixed hix pix and spawned the likes of Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, and Big Star - along with a bunch of crocheters, apparently), and am therefore bemused to learn of the following study (via Travis Nichols):

Come as You Are: Informal Arts Participation in Urban and Rural Communities - data from the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA).

Among the findings:

Traditional arts venues and institutions such as art museums, galleries, and performing arts centers and companies cluster in urban populations. Eighty-eight percent of nonprofit performing art organizations and art museums are located in urban metropolitan areas, with the top 10 metro areas home to 30 percent of the nonprofit arts institutions. As a result, a third of all urban metro dwellers attended at least one of the main performing arts events tracked by the SPPA (classical music, jazz, or Latin/salsa music performances; opera; musical or non-musical plays; or ballet or other dance). Similarly, 24 percent of urban dwellers visited an art museum or gallery in 2008.

However, an analysis of the "informal arts" offers a more comprehensive measure of arts participation. Informal arts comprise a broad range of "citizen" arts in the forms of folk arts, popular culture, and casual or hobby arts. Informal arts activities captured by the SPPA include: visiting historical parks and neighborhoods, craft fairs, and outdoor performing arts festivals; attending arts events at places of worship and schools; and personal performance and creation of art, such as playing a musical instrument, singing in a choir, or doing creative writing.

When looking at the informal arts, metro and non-metro residents enjoy most of these activities at the same rates.

• In 2008, one in four residents from each type of community -- urban or rural -- visited a historical park or neighborhood or attended an arts and craft fair; one in five adults from both communities went to an outdoor performing arts festival.

• Twenty percent of both urban and rural dwellers attended a music, theater, or dance performance at a place of worship.

• Urban and rural dwellers played musical instruments at the same rate -- 13 percent. Nine percent of each group created paintings, drawings, or sculptures. Two percent performed dance.

• There are two notable exceptions: rural residents were more likely to sing in choirs, sew, weave, crochet, or quilt. Urban dwellers were more likely than rural dwellers to create photography, videos, or films for artistic purposes.

The 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts is the nation's largest and most representative periodic study of adult participation in arts events and activities, conducted by the NEA in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau. Five times since 1982, the survey has asked U.S. adults 18 and older about their patterns of arts participation over a 12-month period.

Source: The National Endowment for the Arts

Big Stars

It was only a while ago that we lost Jim Dickinson. And now we have lost Alex Chilton. I can't begin to explain what it means to have grown up in Memphis with the inspiration of their music and determination, and I'm also remembering Chris Bell, who died so long ago now. I suppose Chilton'd have been displeased to be mentioned in the same sad breath as his former colleagues. And he would have scorned posthumous gushing. But I am taking this moment to remember them all.

I'll be damned if I'll run away from it or sour myself or give in.

What the hell have you done that I haven't done? I've stayed here, haven't I, and I've continued to exist. I haven't died and I haven't yet been licked. In spite of a tough schedule I've gone on keeping my mind on the job of doing the work there is to do without a day of missing my turn. Maybe I haven't piled up a bin of superior work but I've hit right into the center of the target first and last, piling up some work and keeping it right under their noses.

I've interpreted what I could find out of the best about me, I've talked and hammered at individuals, I've read their stuff and passed judgment on it. I've met a hell of a lot more of all kinds of people that you'll even get your eyes on and I've known them inside and outside in ways you'll never know. I've fought it out on an obscure front but I haven't wasted any time.

And I'm not kidding myself that my purpose is to be a great humanitarian. I've kept it coming into the hopper for writing...

What do you want me to do, run for the U.S. Senate?

... I'll be damned if I'll run away from it or sour myself or give in. I will do what I set out to do. By merely existing here I've been able to make myself a rallying point for others. Not that I'm satisfied or, I hope, finished. But I've done it - so far...

My whole duty seems to me to be to continue to exist here and now. My only regret is that I am so submerged with the labor of living that I can't write as often and as for as long a time as I should like to. But to live at all I have had to live as I have been able to do and that has been the most successful and most effective effort it has been possible to make...

It's a tough game. You know that. Once in a while it is possible to make one or two steps ahead. That's about the limit for one life. But the main thing is to keep so that you want to make the step and to keep fighting off the things that would make that spot impossible. It is still possible for me to make a couple of more steps.

Toor a loo, sweetheart.

-- WCW to EP, March 17, 1938; more on poetry and work here; and click here to see which lazy loafer writer played mah jongg all afternoon while ostensibly on the job

Penguin Books on The End of Publishing... and Lady Gaga

(Full disclosure: Penguin Classics killed off my Seneca book some time before publishing, as we know it, died.)

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Click on the pic below and take the "film noir poetry challenge."


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Brought to you by...

Bad Poets from Hola on Vimeo.

Juxtapositions

A juxtaposition of remarks by two writers I really admire and respect:

Tony Judt, "Edge People"

"Identity” is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses. In Britain, the mandarins of New Labour—not satisfied with installing more closed-circuit surveillance cameras than any other democracy—have sought (so far unsuccessfully) to invoke the “war on terror” as an occasion to introduce mandatory identity cards. In France and the Netherlands, artificially stimulated “national debates” on identity are a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment—and a blatant ploy to deflect economic anxiety onto minority targets. In Italy, the politics of identity were reduced in December 2009 to house-to-house searches in the Brescia region for unwanted dark faces as the municipality shamelessly promised a “white Christmas.”

Can poets be bi- or multi-lingual?

In continuation of thoughts from earlier posts here and here, this from Ian Bamforth, "Catchwords 5," in PN Review 192:

In her epistolary ménage à trois with Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva made a radical claim for the universality of the poet. "To write a poem is already to translate - from one's mother tongue into another, and it matters little whether the other is French or German. For the poet, there is no such thing as a mother tongue. To write poetry is to translate."

Responding to a questionnaire sent him by the Flinker bookshop, Paris, in 1961, Paul Celan (who own brilliant translations into the German range from Emily Dickinson to Tsvetaeva herself) denied that poets could be bi- or multilingual. Certainly there was "double-talk" aplenty: ordinary life is full of it. Poetry, on the other hand, "is by necessity a unique instance of language." Celan's task as a poet was to excavate the tongue favoured by his dead mother while making sure nobody would ever mistake him for a German poet.

The translator is not necessarily a traitor, and the act of translation may be the very contrary of an act of betrayal. Unexpected things are often found in translation. The crucial issue is whether the translator is a foreigniser or a domesticator."

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Fiona Sampson, in the TLS of March 5, 2010:

[John Taylor, in Into the Heart of European Poetry] makes the point that, when "a substantial portion of the poetry of seminal" writers has been translated, "if a reevaluation is called for ... it can now be done." It's through translation, in other words, that a particular literature enters wider literary history and can receive disinterested assessment. This not uncontroversial position runs the risk of appearing Anglocentric, and could play into the hands of scholars who believe that only those with expertise in a particular language can have a meaningful relationship with its literature. However, Taylor's book suggests how fruitful and intelligent his approach may be, providing a model in which literary curiosity proceeds by connection rather than retreating from difference. [...] [his criticism] suggests the case that there is to be made for the close reading of translations in general.

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See also this exchange on what is - and is not - lost in translation.

What if everybody wrote a poem at once?

Would it be like what happened, as graphed above, when everyone in Edmonton flushed during breaks in coverage of the Olympic gold medal hockey game? Click here for a detailed analysis.

RIP Omar Shakespear Pound

RIP Omar S. Pound, whose anthology of Arabic & Persian poems is a gem - introduced by Basil Bunting, who wrote: "Omar Pound, selecting just the lines which match his own urbane, ironic manner, flashes a momentary light on many poets, tracing another hue in the web."

Click here or on the photo of him for a full obituary.

My first poetry crush

Like many before me, I fell in love with this formidable woman and her work at an early age... and was never the same again. Read my tribute to her here.

Who was your first poetry crush??

Photo credit: Portrait Photographs (Lang, Violet Ranney), Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Larry Eigner: Hope against Hope... and the Death of Print

Larry Eigner (1927–1996) wrote about 3,070 poems; here's how many appeared in Poetry magazine:

Six Poems, Volume 100, September 1962, Page 359
("Piercing the wall the window..."), Volume 100, September 1962, Page 359
("They would not rent or sell..."), Volume 100, September 1962, Page 359
("The surgical waters..."), Volume 100, September 1962, Page 359
("Ply with chocolates..."), Volume 100, September 1962, Page 359
("the knowledge of death..."), Volume 100, September 1962, Page 359
("Walls or clear fields..."), Volume 100, September 1962, Page 359
Six Poems, Volume 103, January 1964, Page 227
("much space along the/wall..."), Volume 103, January 1964, Page 227
("stand on one foot..."), Volume 103, January 1964, Page 227
("The clock/breaks..."), Volume 103, January 1964, Page 227
("Where is an attic..."), Volume 103, January 1964, Page 227
("50 cars/don't matter..."), Volume 103, January 1964, Page 227
File, Volume 103, January 1964, Page 227
Five Poems, Volume 105, February 1965, Page 313
("the baby cries he..."), Volume 105, February 1965, Page 313
("to make myself a world..."), Volume 105, February 1965, Page 313
("the water dripping..."), Volume 105, February 1965, Page 313
("the green garage door..."), Volume 105, February 1965, Page 313
("empty the apartment..."), Volume 105, February 1965, Page 313
Seven Poems, Volume 108, April 1966, Page 39
("the earth you may as well..."), Volume 108, April 1966, Page 39
("newspaper circling..."), Volume 108, April 1966, Page 39
("blackbird/blue sky..."), Volume 108, April 1966, Page 39
("a penny/in the road..."), Volume 108, April 1966, Page 39
("The dark bird white bird..."), Volume 108, April 1966, Page 39
("the distances are shortened..."), Volume 108, April 1966, Page 39
("sliding down the/bannister..."), Volume 108, April 1966, Page 39
Three Poems, Volume 110, April 1967, Page 18
("the pipes how many..."), Volume 110, April 1967, Page 18
("the feet of Icarus..."), Volume 110, April 1967, Page 18
("the birds/risen to a tree..."), Volume 110, April 1967, Page 18
Eight Poems, Volume 111, March 1968, Page 383
("summer and winter..."), Volume 111, March 1968, Page 383
("The wind-bell..."), Volume 111, March 1968, Page 383
("shadows, birds..."), Volume 111, March 1968, Page 383
("varieties of quiet..."), Volume 111, March 1968, Page 383
("among various hills..."), Volume 111, March 1968, Page 383
("how/are things..."), Volume 111, March 1968, Page 383
("down there in the street..."), Volume 111, March 1968, Page 383
("the tree/roots water..."), Volume 111, March 1968, Page 383
Three Poems, Volume 113, January 1969, Page 256
("the strength of a wing..."), Volume 113, January 1969, Page 256
("dangerous/diving..."), Volume 113, January 1969, Page 256
("the air/stirs..."), Volume 113, January 1969, Page 256
#292 ("in the air"), Volume 115, November 1969, Page 105

Well, after much anticipation, Eigner's four-volume Collected Poems - edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier - is here, and as the publisher's press release observes, his "output and productivity were all the more remarkable in light of the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair for his entire life, the result of cerebral palsy. His instrument (on which he typed with his right finger and thumb) was a manual typewriter, and his medium was the whole world imagined and gathered into the space of each sheet of paper."

The set, which is the most physically formidable collection of poems published in recent memory "preserves the appearance of Eigner's typewriter pages, presenting each poem on an 8.5" x 11" page in an equivalently spaced Courier font that mirrors the poet's own." A heroic decision by the publisher and editors. For aging readers like me, it's a blessing in ways beyond the merely hermeneutical! You can read Grenier's chatty introduction to the poems here. (You'll see what I mean by chatty - it's a change from the usual scholarly dry-as-dust intros we usually get in such books as these.)

Steven Fama has a bone to pick, however, with the way the poems are presented in the brand-new pages. Steven, to my mind, is poetry's most vigilant public defender, in addition to which he's surely among the most attentive readers in terms of the physical nature of poetry books and mags, so I take what he's saying pretty seriously. Make sure you read the comments section of his post if the appearance of poems on the page matters to you. I'd only say that this is a more or less - I'm dangerously generalizing here! - modern preoccupation. The poems of, say, Keats or Clare, came down to us looking the way they do because of decisions entirely entrusted not only to editors, but to compositors; these poets would be good case studies in the origins of our preoccupations with control over the printed page - now, perhaps, a fading issue. What I noticed myself is that there really isn't any "mirroring" of Eigner's page; that would require strikethroughs and other corrections, as well as other artifacts like stains, fingerprints... I mean, cookbook collectors PRIZE those things! - not stuff we'd want in a non-variorum edition, though, eh? Take Steven's critique into account, but if you want to read the man's poems, you'll need these books. (See also Geof Huth's rejoinder to Fama.) And happily, the publication of these impressive volumes helps to belie some of the death-of-print crudola we've been fed lately. Heck, even the president and CEO of Condé Nast - which recently killed off a few popular magazines - has just weighed in with a statement that print "attracts and engages" like no other medium. No kiddin'!

Back to Eigner, I was surprised to see how early on his talent became evident. His early education took place at a Massachusetts General Hospital school for kids with what we now call disabilities (or do we?), where a booklet of his poems was printed (reproduced in facsimile in this CP). He went on in his teens to teach himself how to use a typewriter - and started producing some startlingly mature poems. I'm reminded of the early career of William Carlos Williams, which took off like a bottle rocket after a very unpromising beginning, i.e., the fizzy Keats imitations of his first suppressed book of poems. From first to last, Eigner's a poet, a person, who is tethered to earth - but keeps an eye on the clouds. He is, alongside Pessoa, a quiet king of the quotidian. As he once wrote in a letter to Ina Forster -

"I don't, at that, come across outstanding things in daily life so often, of course, things I put down are likely dull or almost, relatively dull (and I used to 'hope against hope' as a child, during exercises, physiotherapy, and other times, I'm inclined to try and see if I can make use of anything--besides taking comfort from toeholds, I took to all kinds of mottoes, like 'waste not, want not' ..."

Well. It's quite a luxury item, this collected poems. But I adore great big books with lots and lots of poems in them - and I save up plenty of money for books myself by not getting decent haircuts or new clothes. Is that stupid? Nah.

Sorry to have written this in haste; I've got lots of Eigner poems to pore over...

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Speaking of death-of-print, I've not heard much response to the news that Shenandoah will cease publishing as a print magazine, and move online, à la TriQuarterly:

"Shenandoah will publish in its usual format in fall 2010. In spring 2011, there will be a limited-edition anthology of poems published in Shenandoah over the last 15 years. And then will come the biggest change of all. 'For the foreseeable future,' said [editor R.T.] Smith, 'that will be the last print issue of Shenandoah.'

Starting with the fall 2011 issue, it will be entirely online. A paid subscription will be a thing of the past. 'It is perhaps inevitable when we look at what has happened to other literary journals,' said Smith. 'Literary magazines per se are going to have to change their way of conceiving themselves and of reaching their audiences. And this is all tied up in the deep inquiry going on in our culture about the future of print. There is time to make that transition and be an innovator.'"

And speaking of TriQ, its soon-to-be-former Associate Editor, Ian Morris writes, in the new (and redesigned) Creative Nonfiction:

"If I were to found a new literary magazine tomorrow (a dicey proposition these days, no doubt), I'd urge the board to call it A Respected, Widely Read Print Magazine That Pays Its Authors to Publish Them. The enchanted readers of its first issue would open the cover to find this subtitle on the title page: That Also Has a Web Site That Posts Content (Some of It Exclusive) and Has a Lively Blog on Which an Insightful and Engaging Editor Frequently Posts."

He notes that the online journals all seem to be pushing a publication that might be called "An Online Journal That Hopes One Day to Publish an Annual Print Anthology of the Year's Best Work!" And continues...

"Ultimately, the little magazine continues to outlive its obituary not because of the medium or the editor, but because of the most confounding mechanism in any model of literary production, the writer, its perpetual engine of invention."

A Peek under the Lid

Art relies on the conversion of even flaws and defects into positive aesthetic values. It is a strange hymn to stupidity.

-- Anna Kaminska, from a forthcoming notebook in Poetry (translated by Clare Cavanagh)

Also coming soon in Poetry:

An excerpt of "Revelator" by Ron Silliman

A "Q&A" issue, featuring NBCC award-winner Rae Armantrout, Randall Mann, Todd Boss, Donald Revell, Cathy Park Hong, H.L. Hix, Devin Johnston, Robyn Schiff and others

David Biespiel on American poets and their disengagement:

"America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling — both for poetry and for democracy. Because when I look at American poetry from the perspective of a fellow traveler, I see an art invested in various complex, fascinating, historical, and sometimes shop-worn literary debates. I see a twenty-first century enterprise that’s thriving in the off-the-beaten-track corners of the nation’s cities and college towns. But at the same time that poetry’s various coteries are consumed with art-affirming debates over poetics and styles, American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political, and public life."

... with responses from various poets.

Poems by Elizabeth Arnold, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bob Hicok, Matthew Zapruder, Paul Hoover, John Kinsella, Ange Mlinko, Roddy Lumsden
& more...

Other attractions-

A piece by yours truly on V.R. "Bunny" Lang
at the Kennings Editions website
to celebrate the publication of
The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, 1945-1985

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Pictured: Pandora, who else?

Footprints in the Snow

白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白
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白白白白 白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白白
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For more about the poem above, click here!

TLDR

I've long noticed that a great many folks who are interested in poetry don't like to read much; I've blogged about it before. But I would hate to lose even a single reader from my miniscule audience. So - for anybody who found my previous posts on savage wit in Marvell and beyond to be "TLDR," herewith a smaller-scale read.

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"I dont mind the enormous if isn't carried to the point of enormity." -- Ezra Pound to WCW, June 10, 1919