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    Default Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

    1.A

    A SHORT, HIGHLY PERSONAL OBSERVATION COMPLETELY LACKING IN EXAMPLES WHICH I COULD HAVE NEVER HAVE MADE THIRTY YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS A YOUNG POET STILL LIVING IN NEW YORK, BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH TO KNOW IT WAS TRUE. BUT I DO NOW.
    BY MARTIN EARL

    W.H. Auden once said that he always felt that he was the youngest person in the room, even at an older age, when this was certainly not the case. I’ve felt similarly while blogging, especially when being reprimanded by commentators half my age. This could have all sorts of explanations. But for the moment let’s file them under “Monkey Glands”, aka W.B. Yeats. Today, I have a more pressing issue at hand, a comment on the younger generations of scriveners; or to reverse Auden’s impression, all of those younger than myself and involved, in one way or another, in the palimpsestic quest of poetry. I mean poets in their twenties, thirties and forties – fifty being the cut-off date.

    Of course, there are exceptions but for the moment I am intent on generalizing. In the field of poetry, women make better bloggers than do their male counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the women are clearly superior. Not only is their poetry more ambitious and achieved but their criticism is more daring, their originality of thought deeper and their wit more honed.
    Why should this be? One reason perhaps (and this is undoubtedly one of those clichés for which I will be run out of town) is that women have an ontological connection that men don’t have to making and creating, to nurturing form out of raw materials: out of themselves, out of language and out of the ground, in the sense of both lettuce patches and the Heidegerrean notion of fundamentum absolutum, or der grund. Heidegger posits a reversal of the Cartesian first principle and says “I am therefore I think.” This stands in well for the difference between male and female sensibilities.
    Traditionally discouraged or prevented from taking part in social paradigms of creative expression (with the exception, of course, of motherhood) women have learned patience, the art of autonomy and a capacity for restraint. Related to these qualities is the fact that they are more open to difference, generally more tolerant, and less threatened by the mechanisms of authority: those mechanisms that are found in traditional knowledge structures, traditional language structures and traditional institutional structures. Since historically women have had to defend themselves against the power emanating from these structures, their mastery and insight into the workings of power is deeper. Likewise, women’s competitive instincts are more subtly attuned to the task at hand, the medium they are dealing with, the objectives of a given project than they are with the impression they would like to make upon the world. This comes from ease with self-effacement, which in artistic endeavors results in a more thoroughgoing capacity for immersion in the project at hand. They are more apt to experiment in ways that produce organic forms for expressive purposes rather than try, as men so often do, to trick language into duplicating the will. Because women are generally more sensitive to others, they are more sensitive to the needs of the poem. Because they are more coherent, grounded and possess a higher degree of self-knowledge at a younger age, they are better prepared to resist the influences of their teachers, their education and even the expectations of the medium they are working in. Hence they are more original.
    Decades of work by women to open new formats, create equalities, to encourage creative and intellectual work, to valorize the special experiences of women (both material and intellectual), and to formulate a critical framework for understanding the various forms of oppression woman have born, and continue to bear, is, in my opinion, and in my special field of concern (poetry and literary criticism) also responsible for the health, innovation and continuing wonder of the medium. But it is not the whole story, and it is time to move on, away from theory and back to practice. On a practical level, that of making and reading poems, male poets now have more to learn from how women work, and from what they are saying and creating than vice versa.
    And yet in spite of what I say above (characterizing women’s experience, perhaps inaccurately, and seeing their poetry as having benefited from that experience) I have never been comfortable with the designation “women’s poetry”, or with any of the other normative appellations that marked 20th century discussions on the subject and that led to misleading typologies and atomizations. In fact, I follow Berryman’s cue in not distinguishing between British and American poetry – and I carry that further to all poets writing in English: Irish, South African, Indian and West Indian, Australian etc. (two of my favorite poets, John Kinsella and Less Murray, are from down under).
    I’m even uncomfortable (since I live and work in a polyglot setting) with classifying poets or their poems by language. To pit French poets against German poets seems hardly useful when we finally arrive at the poem itself. My Portuguese colleagues, some of whom I’ve translated, are essentially doing the same thing that I do when I write a poem. The fact that they are writing in Portuguese doesn’t matter in the end. Of course different situations produce different poems, but this is a question of topicality and character and follows no scientifically consistent pattern. When I have to use categories I prefer them to be as large as possible and related to historical conditions, which effect poets in an aleatory fashion. I recently argued that postwar Central European poetry was stronger than that produced in Western Europe over the same period, but these are supranational categories and have more to do with how two different political systems effected creativity in a variable and highly unorganized fashion. Just as women, over the last three centuries, have had more hurdles to overcome than men when it came to legitimizing their status as artists and poets, Central Europeans had far more difficulties creating poetry and publishing freely in the postwar period. Perhaps a degree of resistance helps in the creation of art. Be it as it may, it is the art that we must finally look at, independent of even the most sweeping categories.
    (cf. http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemag...ntais-earl.pdf )
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  2. #2
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    This is not to say that poets should not use (if such were possible) their special experience, experience that can derive from many things: location, language, race, gender, poverty, wealth, temperament, what they read and what they don’t read, or whatever. But for the reader or the critic to use these experiences taxonomically corrupts our capacity to evaluate poetry at the level of the poem.
    By looking at poetry qua poetry we are more apt to read more sensitively, praise more accurately and winnow more decisively. But just in case you’ve missed my point, I think we’d all be the better for paying serious attention to the poems now being made by poets who happen to be women, and trying to figure out why they’re so good.
    COMMENTS (111)
    1.B
    On May 19, 2009 at 10:20 am Michael J. wrote:
    I find that the moment one says “there are exceptions”, the act of generalization becomes a fallacy. It is impossible to generalize unless you are willing to deal in stereotypes and false structures.
    I grew up in a family of women, a house of women. And when I say this, I don’t mean we were outnumbered by a small margin… I mean we equaled 3 or 4 other men in the range of 50 women. If that. And if I were to remove those other men, I was usually alone with upwards of 15 women at a time.
    But I agree female creatives are way more fascinating to me than my male counterparts. I recently bought Sandra Beasley’s “Theories of Falling” and Olena K. Davis’ first book “And her soul out of nothing”. They should arrive this week. But they aren’t the only ones tickling my poetics.
    Anyway… I really don’t think it comes down to simply male and female, though we have our differences… but those differences, I am realizing, are less inherent.
    You could view me as the exception, meaning, I am very in touch with my feminine side — what does that mean? Nearly all the personality qualities you may associate with the feminine, you could see in me. Same with the masculine. Which then tend to cancel each other out and simply allow one to be themselves, without the need to tag certain qualities with “masculine” or “feminine”.
    And if I am then viewed as an exception, I am not special enough to believe I am *the* exception. This means there is another, and if this is two, there is likely three, and so on and so on… which then possibly leads us back to the phrase: there are exceptions, but I will deal in generalizations…
    It is possible then that when people say this, they are saying (obviously, I guess) generalizations outweigh the exceptions… of course, this is impossible to account for. As generalizations exist in this outer realm of opinions and wants and other things…
    You did mention personal experience coloring ones self and in turn ones work… which I agree with…
    And I haven’t attempted to answer your original question — why are women creatives so enticing (read: popular?) these days when put parallel with the male creatives…
    Maybe it is the swing of times that we, males that is, are truly and finally noticing such things? Maybe there are more women on the position to give notice to other women who may go unnoticed? (this I want to doubt, because I’d hope art is the only space where such prejudices and sexism do not exist… but this is only a wish, as I have seen mass amounts of ego and childish antics involved in poetry when I used to perform with a poetry group).
    I feel I am contradicting myself here.
    It is very likely we are all exceptions…
    I dunno…
    On May 19, 2009 at 12:14 pm Zachary Bos wrote:
    The will to debunk this post point-by-point has been leached right out of me by the solar intensity of the poor reasoning on display. Among the topics misunderstood are ontology, gender, Heidegger, instinct, creativity, and logic. Pious affirmations of generally agreeable statements do not give shoddy thinking a pass. To self: is my hyper-critical response a masculine trope?
    On May 19, 2009 at 12:20 pm Joseph Hutchison wrote:
    Michael J.—I take exception to your statement about generalities and exceptions. We can all agree that there are mammals, and that mammals are distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of their young, and by giving birth to live young. The platypus and the spiny ant-eater are exceptions: mammals that lay eggs, i.e., monotremes. The problem is not with the generalities; the problem is that our systems are not completely congruent with the world.
    This is part of Martin’s point, I think: in a world where gender equality is assumed, we still find women writing stronger poems. By “we,” of course, I mean Martin and me; I share his feeling but know as well as he does that it’s highly personal and subjective.
    Nevertheless, I think what Martin says is true about the superiority of women poets, especially in certain “camps.” I’ve especially felt this when criticizing so-called Language poets for their many weaknesses. I always have to insert the caveat that I admire several poets in that camp, and that for some reason they are all women. (Not that I admire all female Language poets!) I too wonder why this should be so. But I’m a poet and a reader, not a critic and certainly not a theorist. So I’ll have to wait for someone with talents in that direction to suggest an answer….
    On May 19, 2009 at 1:27 pm Daniel E. Pritchard wrote:
    I’m interested to know who the women are to which you refer. (Also, I think it’s accepted generally that anyone over 40 isn’t young anymore, by any standard except comparison.) Also, though my memory may not serve me, I recall that in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the most popular and well-respected authors, essayists, and poets were women, though few have persisted — how would this be a substantially different phenomenon?
    On May 19, 2009 at 2:02 pm thomas brady wrote:
    Who is this mysterious gunslinger leaning quietly against the wall?
    Be still, my heart!
    On May 19, 2009 at 2:51 pm Desmond Swords wrote:
    I think this measuring the contemporary quality of one’s writing based on gender, contains elements of both truth and fantasy, but is ultimately a defective and redundant position to put forward.
    Consider the following statement, which is the exact same as Jason makes, but with the genders reversed:
    “Men make better bloggers than do their female counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the men are clearly superior.”
    The comedian in me calls to mind a (good looking and cunning) pal i knew when i was in my mid twenties, who donned a right-on cloak of ultra PC Femminism when in his university years.
    any (often totally innocuous) comment which he construed as sexist and/or insulting to women, even when the (inevitably) student-men making what he considered to be such, did so in innocence and even if though most others would not see the anti-woman slant — my pal would stand up for the sisterhood and generally sing to the skies of his battle for the gals.
    But in reality, it was all an act he engaged in purely to ingratiate himself with the women, in order to pursue a thoroughly male agenda of bedding as many women as he could. And it worked. he got a name as the metro-sexual all caring fella, amongst early twenties women and when this three year period of his life finished, went back to being the sexists git i always knew.
    My own background is, i was reared with four sisters, three older, one younger and myself and my father, the only men.
    Currently i have seven neices and three nephews, all seven necies arriving on the scene before the nephews. Growing up, i was effectively a token girl in the sense of having no brothers.
    ~
    I think the Amergin text i have been banging on about, which explains what Poetry is, the fundamental of it, that 50% of all humanity will be born with the poetic gift, can be appropriated to this debate.
    Rather than reversing it and elevating Woman to the position Man previously held in the delsion that He was God, my learning has brought me to making Jason’s statement this:
    “wo/men make better bloggers, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the wo/men are clearly superior.”
    This is true 50/50 gender neutrality.
    Our mind is neither male or female, but a s/he and once we transcend gender, come to understand it in these plain terms. The bnest writing is gender neutral, a third person eye speaking for all pronouns.
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 06-20-2015 at 12:15 PM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  3. #3
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    2A

    On May 19, 2009 at 3:12 pm Colin Ward wrote:
    Martin,
    There may be another perspective to this. In the print world, among living poets we tend to see men dominating the scene: Cohen, Ondaatje, Heaney, Hill, Walcott, Collins, etc. By contrast, a poll of internet poets had all four top spots taken by women: Grinnell, Griffith, Carter, Copeland, plus Lindley (6th) and Kelleher (10th)–and this was before Kristalo arrived on the scene!
    Others will judge which media or process can serve as the better meritocracy, now or in the future.
    Best regards,
    Colin
    “If you don’t think your work is competing against the works of others you’re probably right!”
    – Elizabeth Zuk
    “Even a burning flag has to be waved, if only to put out the flames…”
    – Dale M. Houstman
    -o-
    On May 19, 2009 at 7:23 pm Pris Campbell wrote:
    I’m a female blogger/poet over 50 and I don’t feel any gender superiority at all. It’s true. Reverse the gender in this post and we women would be screaming ‘chauvinistic!’.
    On May 19, 2009 at 9:40 pm Steve wrote:
    Dear Colin Ward: who are these Internet poets described in your poll? they’re not the poets I know from the Internet. Can you post a link?
    Dear Martin: Provocative, certainly; but I wish you would name some of your favorite younger, or “younger,” poets. Do they all write about experience that has historically, or biologically (e.g. parturition) been the province of women? Some women poets write about things like parturition, which men can’t do (Elizabeth Alexander has a whole sequence); some women poets seem to be undertaking ecriture feminine (Larissa Szporluk, sometimes); some women poets write about topics traditionally considered feminine– sex, beauty, the beauty myth, raising young children, managing a household (Laura Kasischke! Laura Kasischke!); and some women poets, most of the time, don’t do any of those things (Kay Ryan, Lucia Perillo, many many others). Does your claim apply equally to all four categories? If so, why? If not, isn’t it just a claim that we seek out, and should seek out, contemporary poets whose topics and approaches are under-represented in the literature of the past? (As we should.)
    On May 19, 2009 at 10:04 pm Reb Livingston wrote:
    Well I feel all kinds of superiority and not just because of my gender, but that’s a start. Heh.
    I concur with much of what Martin Earl has written, of course he can get away with writing it and not being labeled as bitter or a ball snipper.
    What I mean is that as an editor, I too have noticed a trend in the submission pile. On *average* I find the work of contemporary female poets to be more daring, original and interesting. My magazine receives more submissions from men (about 10-15% more), but it publishes more women. Years ago when I first noticed this, I was surprised. All along I thought I preferred male poets. I owned more books by them, was definitely more familiar with their work from major literary magazines and from my education. Turns out I was incredibly ignorant.
    So when certain editors talk about the “number troubles” I don’t understand why this is even an issue. Are these editors living in a cave?
    One can chalk up my observations to my taste and bias, which I most certainly have, like every other editor and poet.
    Reb
    On May 19, 2009 at 11:21 pm michael j wrote:
    Reb, and other Editors out there,
    If you were to remove the names from submissions (unless this is done already), do you feel you’d naturally gravitate towards female writers? Very curious to know.
    ___
    All this talk of child raising and such, is, to me, a stereotype which frustrates me. Men can raise child just as women do. The pregnancy aspect is agreeable. No man (except the fictional character Arnold played in that one movie where he got pregnant) can ever experience pregnancy. The genetic/instinctual chain-link which rises from the bottoms of the stardust which binds us will eventually explode from the creative mind. It is inevitable. And this does, possibly, provide a different slant to ones work.
    Though the specific experience of being a woman can’t be recreated, meaning — shoot, you know what I mean — but the oppression can be. That type of experience can be. On many various levels, no?
    If I am reading the article correct, Martin is wondering if this is why the work is more daring. Or, rather, one of the reasons. Good question. The natural instincts instilled in us seep into our work, most definitely. Creativity is one of those deeper, ancient things.
    But I dunno, I think the better way to approach this is where you almost went but stopped, “On a practical level, that of making and reading poems, male poets now have more to learn from how women work, and from what they are saying and creating than vice versa.”
    Approach it from why male’s aren’t doing the daring work to figure out why females are. I think I’m gonna attempt that. Thanks Martin!
    And did anyone else find that portrait genius? How the hands are held, with the head cocked, she is purely an adult woman. But with the foot soles touching, her legs slanted like that, she is purely a young girl.
    The juxtaposition makes me keep staring at it.
    On May 19, 2009 at 11:59 pm Reb Livingston wrote:
    “If you were to remove the names from submissions (unless this is done already), do you feel you’d naturally gravitate towards female writers? Very curious to know.”
    Yep. Like I said, I began the magazine believing I preferred male poets. It wasn’t until after a year of publishing different poets each week that I “looked at the numbers” and realized my preference leaned otherwise.
    Not sure why this is such an unbelievable or questionable concept. I’m trying to be honest and open here regarding my editorial leanings as I best understand them. If certain poetry magazines dropped the malarky of “we only publish the BEST regardless of . . .” and were more open/aware of their own leanings, whether it be style, subject matter, etc., I’d have much less of an issue with them. If the editors came clean and said something like “Well, we’ve been publishing for 20 years and 75% of the poems are by white men and 65% are narrative, so we must at least have some unconscious editorial leanings in those directions.” But no, instead they blame it on women having babies or being too shy to submit or lacking a certain kind of ambition. Because as editors of course they have no control what appears on their pages!
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    2B

    On May 20, 2009 at 9:31 pm Desmond Swords wrote:
    Actually Marty my arl ramblin mahn,
    you are right.
    At least, going on the poems in an edition of a British e zine i recently read, edited by a woman, with around 80% of the poems by men, and with a preponderance of authoratitive philisophical all seeing all knowing narrator ‘I’s going for the majestrial note and not pulling it off.
    The few women that were in there, by contrast, there stuff was much more creative.
    The blokes tended to try to hard to be God, and in British poetry, the legacy of Larkin (a misanthropic man with racists leanings obsessed with swearing and with a massive complex about women) who introduced or at least made the the eff word acceptable as a poetic one – is the wrapping of mundane events (catching a bus, having a dump on the crapper) in a conversational prosaic style and then a stab at high blown lingo, evinced in the Larkin’s sun-comprending glass and nothingness schtick.
    Unfortunatley, it just comes across as posey twaddle by straight faced blokey bores.
    The gals gear though, was less ambitious – didn’t want to tell us the deepest fundamental secrets of the universal knowledge in a poem about a fridge- but instead seemed to spiral about in and around the concept of poetic expression in general, per se, vis a vis, a bit more jiggle, phwaor ‘n oomph Marty me arl god-like knower.
    On May 20, 2009 at 10:02 pm Colin Ward wrote:
    I tried posting a version of this yesterday but it didn’t show up. If it does so belatedly, I apologize for the double post.
    Martin:
    No, I don’t think you’re prejudging at all.
    Incidentally and for what it’s worth, those interested in gender differences in writing who haven’t seen this site might be amused:
    Gender Genie:
    http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php
    Steve:
    Dear Colin Ward: who are these Internet poets described in your poll? they’re not the poets I know from the Internet. Can you post a link?
    The “Caught on the Net” poll was taken a few years back. The site is defunct now but, fortunately, I kept a copy of it, which I can email you if you’d like. The question posed was: “Suppose there were an anthology of poems by the best online English language poets. Whose work (other than your own) would you like to see included?” The respondents were members of the more serious, expert internet venues: Poetry Free-For-All, Gazebo, Eratosphere, and Usenet (the web’s evil twin). Here are the URL’s for these moderated critical venues:
    The Poetry Free-For-All:
    http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/
    Gazebo in Exile (this URL is about to change):
    http://thegazeboinexile.iforums.us/
    Eratosphere:
    http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/Ultimate.cgi
    QED:
    http://www.qedpoetry.com/
    All of these sites have thriving discussion and theory forums within them. Members are often called “workshoppers”, but that is something of a misnomer; many members spend more of their time discussing poetry–much as we see here, but with the ability of all members to initiate threads and edit their posts–than posting or critiquing individual poems. One caveat regarding PFFA in particular: behave yourself and bring your best game.
    To access Usenet you need to install a newsreader program (e.g. Free Agent); the two most active newsgroups are rec.arts.poems and alt.arts.poetry.comments. One has to wade through a lot of trolls to get to the good stuff, though. N.B.: webbers (among whom workshoppers and bloggers are subsets) and Usenetters form two very different communities, often oblivious to each other.
    As for the poets I mentioned, I’m not really qualified to write their bio or CV but here are some impressions and what few facts I know:
    Professor Claudia Grinnell is perhaps better known as a fine critiquer. I believe she was one of the founders and administrators on QED–one of the smaller advanced online workshops. Claudia hasn’t been very active lately.
    Britisher Margaret A. Griffith, aka “Maz”, is the author of “Studying Savonarola”, a poem that might be trotted out when onliners speak of the best poems of the 21st century, whenever anyone says that free verse “isn’t poetry” or that stunning romantic poems aren’t still being written. When Carol Ann Duffy was named as Poet Laureate more than a few internetters wondered if selection committee members shouldn’t be subjected to mandatory drug testing. Maz is a member of PFFA, Gazebo and Eratosphere.
    Julie Carter is “the sonnet lady”, active on Usenet, Gazebo and Eratosphere. She’s also a huge baseball fan.
    Kim “K.R.” Copeland is arguably the most consistent, quirky and interesting performer. She seems to post mostly to Gazebo.
    Rachel Lindley is a very good theorist, along with the likes of Howard Miller (PFFA), Robert MacKenzie (PFFA, Usenet), Harry Rutherford (PFFA), and, of course, Peter John Ross (Usenet). Her articles on PFFA’s “Blurbs of Wisdom”, especially those on the topic of sonics, are a must read for any serious student of the art form.
    http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/forumd...aysprune=&f=34
    Rose Kelleher is a solid performer whose stock, like Ms. Copeland’s, may have risen in recent years.
    D.P. Kristalo (Poets.org, Gazebo) wrote both “Beans” and “Joie de Mourir”. Need I say more?
    Francesca Sweeney-Androulaki (Gazebo), Jennifer Reeser (Eratosphere), and Sarah Sloat (Desert Moon Review) are others well worth Googling on a rainy afternoon.
    If anyone is curious, humourist Sam Home (Gazebo & Eratosphere) topped the male poets. Robert J. Maughan (Usenet), Frank Matagrano (Gazebo), Andrew Kei Miller (Usenet, Gazebo), Oswald LeWinter (Gazebo, Zoetrope), Jerry H. Jenkins (Usenet) and Dale Houstman (Usenet) are other familiar names to those internetters outside the blogosphere, at least.
    I hope this albeit sketchy overview helps, Steve.
    -o-
    On May 21, 2009 at 10:34 am gmc wrote:
    “..as man won’t be male
    and woman won’t be female..” (gospel of thomas)
    what kind of poet are you, dear martin, whose memory is like a hole full of kaleidoscopic souvenirs?
    what you call man and woman are simply male and female, anything else, and your text is like an hallucination of yours, not less, not more.
    (sorry for my bad english, but i’m not english-speaking born)
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Comments anybody?
    As can be readily seen, the field of writing classed as Poetry is massively broad and deep!
    With as much controversy as is life in general and the world at large!
    I found the admission about the better contemporary poets being female quite enlightening and one I must delve further into to verify if made as a sound judgment. I do not negate that as a possibility but have not enough knowledge of contemporary poetry as I do of the classic poetry of the giants known and praised the world over..
    Be it readily admitted that I do not attempt to mimic other poets be they famous or even talented unknowns.
    I stubbornly follow my own path and measure in my writings be it for good or ill. . Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 06-20-2015 at 12:33 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot View Post
    Comments anybody?
    As can be readily seen, the field of writing classed as Poetry is massively broad and deep!
    With as much controversy as is life in general and the world at large!
    I found the admission about the better contemporary poets being female quite enlightening and one I must delve further into to verify if made as a sound judgment. I do not negate that as a possibility but have not enough knowledge of contemporary poetry as I do of the classic poetry of the giants known and praised the world over..
    Be it readily admitted that I do not attempt to mimic other poets be they famous or even talented unknowns.
    I stubbornly follow my own path and measure in my writings be it for good or ill. . Tyr
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    continued from previous stopping point......

    3A. On May 24, 2009 at 12:21 am Terreson wrote:
    Man, this thread is so rich it makes me want to go out to a local Mexican restaurant, a favorite watering hole among local professionals, and order two top shelf margueritas. Initial blog entry is juicy. The ensuing conversation with its ideological lines drawn fascinating. And, rather to be expected, there is Thomas Brady championing the poetry of Millay like some good feminist. Elsewhere on this forum he has expressed perfect dismissiveness of such women poets as H.D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Laura Riding. But that is all silly stuff, perfectly inconsequential.
    Martin Earl, here is what I get from your blog entry. Mind you, I am having to dig a little here. Your entry relies a bit much on short-hand for its thinking. You are not saying, categorically, women are better poets than are men. But you are saying there is a certain capacity for poetry, and for poetry comprehension, women poets have a main line to that men poets do not constitutionally have. And I agree. (It would have been beneficial, by the way, had you made the effort and given the examples you said you wouldn’t. That you don’t amounts to a laziness.)
    From your comments I am figuring you are over fifty. So am I. I read your post and I think: is he just now coming to the tidal turn in poetry women have always, always made? Your discovery, while it may be new to you, is really not all that new. Speaking for myself, I say flat out the big discoveries I’ve made in poetry, and in writing in general, have always come at the hands of women writers. H.D., Colette, Riding, Dickinson, Sexton, Heloise, Madame de Sevigne, Lady Murasaki, Italian folk poets of the strege tradition. These are the poets and writers who’ve taught me the essential things. They happen to be women. The exceptions to the rule have tended to prove the rule: both Rilke and Goethe.
    There is a story Robert Graves tells. He is speaking of Sappho whom he considered about the greatest poet who has ever lived. He felt she gave perfect voice to The Lady of the Wild Things.
    “Sappho undertook this responsibility: one should not believe the malevolent lies of the Attic comedians who caricature her as an insatiable Lesbian. The quality of her poems proves her to have been a true Cerridwen. I once asked my so-called Moral Tutor at Oxford, a Classical scholar and Apollonian: ‘Tell me, sir, do you think that Sappho was a good poet?’ He looked up and down the street, as if to see whether anyone was listening and then confided to me: ‘Yes, Graves, that’s the trouble, she was very, very good!’ I gathered that he considered it fortunate that so little of her work had survived.”
    I am glad for you you’ve come to what you’ve come to. Maybe it is important to put it out yet again. On the other hand I got to say this. One Sappho, one Dickinson, one Millay, one Sexton, one Pattie Smith no more makes a poet than one Eliot, one Crane, one Lorca, or one Neruda.
    Anyway, your picture amounts to an idealization of women I am not sure Jane Austen, George Eliot, Colette, or Simone de Beauvoir would cotton to. While I note the biggest lessons I’ve learned have come at the hands of women poets I also note the majority of women poets are no less or more mediocre than their male counterparts.
    Terreson

    On May 24, 2009 at 9:39 am Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
    The only champion a good poet needs is Father Time.
    Ask Emily and John.

    On May 24, 2009 at 11:20 am thomas brady wrote:
    Terreson,
    So I’ve been hoisted by my own petard?
    “there is Thomas Brady championing the poetry of Millay like some good feminist. Elsewhere on this forum he has expressed perfect dismissiveness of such women poets as H.D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Laura Riding.”
    Your strategy is insidious, Tere, this damning with faint praise all women poets, dooming every last one.
    If one ignores the light-years of talent separating
    Edna St. Vincent Millay, author of half of the 10 best sonnets ever written in English
    and
    H.D., Pound’s GF,
    Marianne Moore, Dial Clique editor and supporter,
    Laura Riding, Fugitive club member and Robert Graves’ GF,
    then one is merely damning with faint praise ALL WOMEN POETS. This is a TRICK by the male status quo: include a few women (a GF, why not?) whose poetry is laced with FAILURE, and by doing so blur all distinctions so that it is assumed critical rigor is not even necessary when it comes to women.
    As I said before, if Millay is thrown under the bus, no woman is safe.
    There is plenty of documentary proof for what I am saying. Millay actually felt a kinship with Poe, who was abused by the same envious, low readership, fragile, ambitious, Modernist clique, and there’s a plethora of evidence to back up these facts.
    Tere, you like to believe, with Mr. Fitzgerald, that poets are superheroes who don’t need critics and that criticism is mostly an annoyance and a sign of impotent envy, but I’m afraid this is a childish belief; a few well-placed notices can destroy a poet’s reputation, especially if she is a woman.
    Thomas

    On May 24, 2009 at 1:16 pm Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
    Hey…don’t drag me into this sordid affair.
    I’m just a simple, didactic, philosophical Nature poet, remember, Thomas?

    On May 24, 2009 at 2:16 pm thomas brady wrote:
    You can’t wriggle out of this one… Mr. Wordsworth!

    On May 24, 2009 at 4:50 pm Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
    Actually, Thomas, I’m a lot closer to your hero, Eddie Al, than I am to all these others.
    Especially in the drinking department. :-)
    I’d be happy to declare my own heroes here but the only ones I can come up with are William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Lao tzu and E.E. Cummings. Oh, and Bob Dylan. Oh, yeah, and Charles Darwin, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Copernicus and oh, that’s right, Shakespeare and Keats and Whitman. And did I mention Dickinson, Lindsay, Snyder, Frost, Plath, Wright, Roethke, Merwin, Yeats, Millay, Stevens, Eliot, Williams, Pound, Bishop, Lowell, Crane, Patchen, Rexroth, Moore, Ashbery, Creeley, Bly, Sexton, and everybody else who ever taught me how to think?

    On May 24, 2009 at 7:08 pm Terreson wrote:
    Thomas Brady says:
    “Edna St. Vincent Millay, author of half of the 10 best sonnets ever written in English.”
    On whose authority, please. The sonnet in English has been pursued for a good 500 years. 5 out of 10 best sonnets in English might be a bit of a claim even for the most ardent of Millay’s enthusiasts.
    Thomas Brady says:
    “There is plenty of documentary proof for what I am saying. Millay actually felt a kinship with Poe, who was abused by the same envious, low readership, fragile, ambitious, Modernist clique, and there’s a plethora of evidence to back up these facts.”
    I look forward to reviewing the documentation.
    Thomas Brady says:
    “Tere, you like to believe, with Mr. Fitzgerald, that poets are superheroes who don’t need critics and that criticism is mostly an annoyance and a sign of impotent envy,…”
    Actually, I view the case of critics in a much less flattering light. They put me in mind of cowbirds (species: molthrus), whose parasititic habits have become a seriously impacting disruption in the natural history of other bird species, what with their learned behavior of laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. Now there is an objective correlative for you.
    Terreson

    On May 24, 2009 at 10:56 pm Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
    I forgot Shelley, Tennyson, Byron, Pope and Poe. And that’s the thing, Thomas. It’s like a smorgasbord, a cornucopia of flavor and styles, ideas and thought. No one selection is any better or more delicious than the other, just…different. Different people have different tastes.
    You don’t like the fish, try the beef. Don’t like the crab, try the steamed peas and lamb.
    It’s an unending buffet for the mind, the whole world in a sauteed kipper. It’s poetry!

    On May 24, 2009 at 11:16 pm thomas brady wrote:
    Nice list.
    Yea…Einstein’s great.
    Your point?

    On May 25, 2009 at 1:06 am Terreson wrote:
    Because the interest is vital to me, I keep trying to make sense of this blog entry and subsequent exchange. It would help this reader tremendously if ya’ll blog starters would learn the Montaigne lesson, learn the art of the essay, and compose your thoughts before composing your words. But so it goes.
    I am thinking this is what the thread is about, how Martin Earl caps his comments:
    “By looking at poetry qua poetry we are more apt to read more sensitively, praise more accurately and winnow more decisively. But just in case you’ve missed my point, I think we’d all be the better for paying serious attention to the poems now being made by poets who happen to be women, and trying to figure out why they’re so good.”
    This is the substance of the post, right? Or that serious attention should be given to women poets writing today because they are so good. If this is the proposition I can go with it. I regularly meet in online venues (women) poets who rock me, knock my socks off clean into the washer, who show me something new in rhythm, syntax, and sense. And so I must wonder just how familiar the blog’s author is with the scene, which has pretty much shifted from print to screen.
    And I must wonder about something else too. At least in America, women poets have been shifting the scene for a long, long time, or for a good hundred years. The proof is in the popular anthologies of poetry. (You got to love the dialogue we guys and girls got going.) So again I am wondering. Am I allowed to reach back to Lola Ridge, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Grimke, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Hazell Hall, Georgia Johnson, or do I have to put my sights on young women poets working today?
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
    The Occasion of Poetry
    BY REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL

    Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Rebecca Gayle Howell’s poems “Every Job Has a First Day” and “Something’s Coming but Never Does” appear in the June 2015 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.]


    In my twenties I had the good fortune of living in my homeplace, Lexington, Kentucky, a town that hums with the company of neighbors, many of whom are makers. In those days we were all in it together—literature, I mean. It never mattered who was accomplished and who wasn’t. On any given week at any given reading at the local bookstore, a wanderer-in might sit unawares next to Nikky Finney or Maurice Manning; when a big country laugh rolled out the back room, only some of us would know it was Wendell Berry, at it again with his buddies. If it was a warm night the doors and windows would be open, and as you walked up the block toward the door you’d hear against the noise of cars and katydids all the talk and remembering. If winter was with us, you’d open to the quiet an instant racket I only know to call community, and you’d heat yourself by it alongside the rest of us slap happy souls until some tired someone turned out the lights.
    I helped edit a local literary magazine during this time, and when I wrote Wendell to ask him if I could publish a poem of his, I didn’t give it much thought. I mean I knew Wendell, but I didn’t understand who Wendell was (I had to leave Kentucky to find that out). What I wanted was to publish a poem worth reading, and I knew where to look for it. Whether you know Wendell or know of him, it doesn’t matter: he’ll write you back. On the long sheets torn from his yellow legal pad, he’ll return his thoughts to yours the morning following your letter’s arrival, and he’ll sign his, Your friend. In response to what, under more worldly circumstances, would have been a garish request on my part, I received a sheaf of twenty or thirty poems from which I was encouraged to choose as many or as few I saw fit. He wrote that he wouldn’t be surprised if there was nothing for us in the pile, that it was all occasional verse, that he was, more or less now, an occasional poet, a poet who wrote occasionally.
    Occasional poetry has a long convention of pageantry—poems hired out, commissioned to celebrate, mourn, or in some way put a pin in a particular instant of history. I think of Mr. Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” our nation’s first inaugural poem which commemorated Kennedy’s election by declaring imperialism our native triumph. Or, come some thirty years later, Ms. Angelou’s inaugural correction, “On the Pulse of Morning,” which gave our land a god’s voice and spoke the chilling lines: “Come, you may stand upon my / Back and face your distant destiny, / But seek no haven in my shadow. I will give you no hiding place down here.” Of course there are those other poems that would not be paid for but censored by such commissioners (Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America” or Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos), but I also think of Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville or Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, poetry that speaks into the forgetting air what should not be forgotten. In his letter to me, Wendell didn’t mean he was being paid to write high, public verse. I think, in fact, he meant something like its opposite. To be occasional means to be willing to be of your time and place, to be of the mortal moment.
    Almost twenty years gone from those late Kentucky nights of literary friendship, and I find myself in community with relative strangers, other transient emerging voices tweeting memorials to what is likely America’s greatest generation of poets. Carolyn Kizer. Ai. Amiri Baraka. Adrienne Rich. Lucille Clifton. Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin. Phillip Levine. Maya Angelou. Ruth Stone. Gil Scott-Heron. Grace Paley. Claudia Emerson. Lou Reed. Giants of sanity’s work, all gone in a small pile of years. If we can still believe in a human democracy, it is in no small way thanks to these cantankerous, righteous souls. I wish I could hold each in their passing, put my forehead to their foreheads, kiss them goodbye. I cannot. Though I’ve spent my adult life reading, memorizing their poems, charting their words like compass guides, they lived across time from me, and, now, make their neighborhood on history’s other shore. All I know to do is read. And write. And by that I mean, I want to learn their courage of the here and now.

    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...ion-of-poetry/
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    ESSAY
    “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
    The famous poem was nearly not published.

    “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
    This month marks the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published when Eliot was just 26 years old. Had it not been for the intervention of Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, the seminal poem that helped usher in American Modernism might not have been published at all.

    Eliot originally wrote parts of the monologue of a troubled, middle-aged man in 1910 and soon combined these pieces to form the long, complicated poem readers know now. Then he put it in a drawer for four years and focused on his graduate study in philosophy.

    In the spring of 1914, Conrad Aiken, Eliot’s college friend, passed “Prufrock” along to Harold Monro, editor of Poetry and Drama. He reportedly remarked that the poem is “absolutely insane” and turned it down.

    In September 1914, Eliot first met Pound in London, who was then the acting foreign correspondent of Poetry. Eliot showed him “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Pound was elated. “Prufrock,” wrote Pound to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, is “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American,” adding exuberantly in all caps, “PRAY GOD IT BE NOT BE A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS.”

    The following slideshow features three of Pound’s letters to Monroe, proclaiming Eliot’s talent and urging her to publish “Prufrock.” (“I hope you’ll get it in soon,” he wrote.) She found room in the June 1915 issue. Though Monroe’s responses to Pound are not available, his letters hint at her apprehension. “In being the first American magazine to print Eliot you have scored again, though you may not yet think so,” Pound wrote shortly after “Prufrock” appeared in print, still compelled to convince her of its value.


    View slideshow of letters from Pound to Monroe

    For more background, watch Eliot scholar and editor Christopher Ricks the Prufrock centenary at Harvard University.

    Letters by Ezra Pound, from New Directions Publishing Company acting as agent, copyright 2015 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Company. Photos courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.


    Originally Published: June 8, 2015


    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    POETRY NEWS
    ‘Every Era is Replete with Bad Poetry': Donald Hall at New Hampshire Union Leader
    BY HARRIET STAFF

    Although he quit writing poetry two years ago, citing a connection between poetry’s sensuality and his octogenarian age, Donald Hall did manage to speak rather candidly with the New Hampshire Union Leader about his observations after decades writing poetry. (Although we know little about aging, we agree that poetry is a truly sexy craft.) From New Hampshire Union Leader:
    WILMOT – This century appears to be a promising one so far for poetry.
    Cities from Manchester to Pasadena host poetry slams. Hip-hop has entrenched its rhythmical brand of poetry into popular culture. And even small-town bookstores feature readings from poets.
    Despite the groundswell, New Hampshire’s most famous living poet announced two years ago that he was done with the craft.
    “I’m too old,” said Donald Hall, 86, this country’s 14th poet laureate. “I think that poetry’s very sexual, and I think it’s a lack of testosterone or low testosterone. In the early 50s, I said that poetry was ‘rich with sensuality.'”
    Hall spoke recently in the book-lined living room of the Wilmot farmhouse that has been in his family for four generations. His right knee is shot, making the front couple of porch steps as daunting a challenge as a granite cliff on his beloved Mount Kearsarge.
    He sits in an upholstered chair that is on a 6-inch riser; easier for him to get up and down. He looks out antique glass windows, the kind that warp outside objects like a funhouse mirror. Closest to his view are the peonies and other perennials that his deceased wife – acclaimed poet Jane Kenyon – planted decades ago.
    Hall’s best poetry, he said, was written in his 40s and 50s. Over time, his poetic abilities waned. So he just put an end to it (although he does revise previously written poems).
    Hall still writes. Like a baseball player who trades his mitt for a golf club, he’s turned to less vibrant endeavors. He answers nearly all letters that come his way. And in 2014, he published “Essays after Eighty,” a wry look at being old. The book landed on the New York Times Bestseller list (for a week, he notes).
    “Certainly, he has been a big name of his generation, partly because he so dedicated his life to writing,” said Acworth resident Alice Fogel, the current New Hampshire poet laureate.
    In the mid-70s, many writers found his career move inspirational, Fogel said. Encouraged by Kenyon, Hall gave up a tenured job at University of Michigan and moved to the Wilmot farm to make a living writing.
    From there, Hall earned his place among New Hampshire’s literary greats. Robert Frost, Maxine Kumin, Charles Simic. All are national poets laureate; each lived in the Granite State. Frost, Hall and Kumin wrote vividly about New England.[…]
    Continue at New Hampshire Union Leader.
    Tags: Donald Hall, New Hampshire Leader
    Posted in Poetry News on Monday, June 22nd, 2015 by Harriet Staff

    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...-union-leader/
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    ‘a lance to pierce the possible': Reading N. H. Pritchard
    BY LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM

    I would like to shift away from discussing the deployment of whiteness in conceptual, avant-garde, or experimental writing. In my previous post, “Canvases Pale,” I included a definition of conceptual poetics that links it specifically to the 21st century. Similarly, the definition in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics emphasizes the mechanistic mode of reproduction in these poetics, aided largely by the Internet and various means of digital production. But such technologies of writing in the formulation of poetics and aesthetics are not 21st century developments. I’d like to not be so hasty or short-sighted on the matter, and look at some work by N.H. Pritchard. As Kenneth Goldsmith has so keenly shown, various ways of manipulating text objects (words, sentences, sentence placement) do affect the reading and meaning-making of a particular text. I would like to glance at sections of the poem “Metagnomy” from Pritchard’s 1971 collection The Matrix: Poems, 1960-1970.
    One striking feature of the poem is the deployment of kerning, the typographic process of “adjusting the space between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result” (Wikipedia). In his era, however, texts would have required physical typesetting in order to print and so I feel that an acknowledgement of the physical process and labor of his designs is required. This likely required more than a keystroke commitment.

    In “Metagnomy,” Pritchard draws on themes of nature in the images of birds and wind (“s ee m in g ly/as if a bird in f light” and “in t he w in d s w o n t”). However the poem is preoccupied not as much with the place or location of these images (the place of the poem isn’t exactly a physical one, rather it is “A mid the non com mit t e d/com pound s of t he m in d”) as it is with how, in emphasizing the constructedness of language, our attention is drawn to the ways that these constructions themselves build the image of pastoral beauty. That is, nature has no beauty-qua-beauty independent of how language describes it. The deliberately higher-pitched poetic register of the line “unto the sylvan down of wombs” (“un to t sylvan d own of w om b s”) concretizes the way language, already at least one remove from experience, combines with the expressive desire to abstract the self away from the more-than-human world in the process of trying to approach it more concretely. Language systems, Pritchard seems to suggest, much less traditional modes of writing and presenting text, are just not adequate to the task of developing a subjectivity that can understand the more-than-human elements of the world.
    Instead, the poem proposes that by peering through the holes in language we can see the subconscious at work. It is through the activities of the mind that metagnomy, in the power of divination, can approach the mysterious. In this way the prospects of mental divination and access to aspects of the more-than-human world through extrasensory mental perception are assessed through the peeling apart of the words, revealing that the changed course of “a bird in f light” (line 9) is indeed “s ee m in g l y” (line 8). That is, what we perceive as a change in the course of a bird in flight might simply be the course the bird was always on. Similarly, the “w or d/f or got ten/in t he w in d ’ s w on t,” recalls the idea of a voice or words lost in the wind and suggests that words are not lost or forgotten as they are being carried on a different stream.
    The poem does not negotiate between the more-than-human world and the world of the human, but is a negotiation with the mental self. The human subject must negotiate the openness and discomfort with the very openness supplied by the linguistic ambiguity the unclosed words suggest. As in many aspects of divination practices, one must first be open to the messages of the more-than-human world in order to access the fact that the mysteries of the mind and the natural world are the same and that there is no opposition. This is different from healing a rift or recapturing innocence, a la the poetics of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and to a lesser extent, Blake and Clare, but a statement as to the artificiality of the rift in the first place. For Pritchard, neither the mind or the text are screens against which the scenes of memory are played and replayed, allowing for a return to a pre-lapsarian childlike pastoral innocence; but the mind is a hem, a mist (both “hem” and “mist” come ghosting through the line “thru a c he mist r y of ought”—and how easy it is to read that as “chemistry of thought”!), an “age-less” (or “age less”?) gleaming. Or is it an “image less gleaming” or “imageless gleaming”:
    LB2
    Operating rhizomatically with its multiple entry points and replete with traces, there is no way to “tell” a definitive reading and the form-as-content actively resists such closure. The potential meanings are increased by the typographical maneuverings. In Pritchard’s poetics, the signifier is always at play in an unstable hovering. The mind is reasserted as a sensory organ that, with the attention required by “man if est s t a s i s” (a very difficult image to picture) to “r ide on ly up on t h at move ment t he ear t h pro vide s” (or is it “t he ear th” provides?) can lead to the profoundly natural and intrinsic sixth sense of seeing through the word tracings to the workings of the world that inspire them. Pritchard’s formal choices reflect the avant-garde aesthetic in the ways we might know the avant-garde as avant-garde (in its more traditional sense), as radical breaks with conventional forms and the conscious disruption of the status quo of what it means to “read” a text. He is perhaps doubly othered (and written out of literary history) not just by his avant-garde techniques, but also the way these techniques are deployed in an investigation of place and the natural world. What to make of such a poet who, at the time, was “out there” formally and stylistically in the service of exploring the more-than-human world? For those tempted to read Pritchard’s supposedly racially unmarked poetics as post-racial (or prefiguring the pleasant fiction of the post-racial) or as transcending race, such claims are hard to justify. While his choice of poetics acknowledge the way earlier African-American writers opened spaces for a greater variety of poetic forms and choices for content, poems like “Self” (“What does the cracker/when in a barrel/bare/with dark/and alone/and/beside it/self/with fear/of being/uneaten”) use the tropes of darkness and the slang meanings of “cracker” to direct attention, if obliquely, to constructions of race and particularly those constructions of whiteness.
    I would be remiss if I did not point out the extent to which, in a first draft, my transcription of the lines (without the spaces) were an unnecessary violence occasioned by my efforts to “make legible” or “naturalize” the lines for the benefit (and detriment) of those who might not have the text on hand. Perhaps because they reveal one of the more readily accessible images in Pritchard’s work, the lines
    LB3
    not only suggest potential motives behind Pritchard’s psychovisual form, but the “pier” in “pierce,” a pier as a lance (the long line itself a piercing lance) piercing the landscape of a lake or an ocean, becomes extremely hard to ignore. What’s more, we are asked to consider the way the constructedness of the pier, a piece of built environment, seeks to pierce and enter (with deliberate phallic undertones) the more-than-human world. The textual kerning unlocks an image and its associated web of connotations that were previously hidden in the closed graphemes. A pier is an incursion, yes, but it can also be read as a radical (if misguided) attempt at clos...................

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Trust me, poets pick and choose how much we care to embrace from this topics/discussions.
    Would be foolhardy to take each as gospel IMHO. Yet is much one can learn. --Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...ddy-lucy-ives/

    Speculative Thinking With Srikanth Reddy & Lucy Ives
    BY HARRIET STAFF


    In “The Technocrat’s Guide to the Galaxy,” poet Srikanth Reddy talks with Lucy Ives “about the possible plurality of worlds, poets as ‘feeling machines,’ and how to make an aesthetic object out of bureaucratic relics of the space race,” referencing a talk Reddy gave at Triple Canopy’s 2013 show at MoMA/PS1, Speculations (“The future is ______”), which comprised 50 days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future with leading leaders and thinking thinkers of now. “You seemed so comfortable in this speculative mode of thinking!” says Ives. “I’m curious what role speculative thinking might play in your work.” “…If you don’t think about the distant future of our contemporary historical moment—the longue durée, as it were—then it’s very easy for one’s political or aesthetic practice to be too circumscribed in the ‘now.’ Or even in one’s domestic practice, for that matter,” replies Reddy. More from this excellent conversation:
    Ives In your second collection of poetry, Voyager (2011), there is certainly some interest in speculative thinking, since the book speaks to the possibility of a plurality of worlds. Interestingly, this happens through the erasure, appropriation, and rewriting of a memoir by Kurt Waldheim, former secretary-general of the United Nations and, as was revealed during his (successful) run for the Austrian presidency in 1985, intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
    Reddy In a way, as I worked on Voyager I was interested in some cosmological questions—“How many worlds are there?” or “How many objects are there in the world?” or “Is the world a single object?”—that real philosophers might find somewhat boring. But in the book I’m trying to deal with these problems not so much speculatively as concretely, through a reading of Waldheim’s hopelessly partial and duplicitous account of the world, trying to retrieve other imaginative cosmologies from inside of that falsely totalizing technocratic text. So the cosmological project of Voyager is more about investigative reading than about speculation to a certain extent.
    […]
    Ives …I’d like to know…how you think about the role of the poet or the “creative writer” within the academy. Is poetry ever a kind of knowledge, in an academic sense?
    Reddy I hear a lot of colleagues in the humanities self-describe as knowledge workers. I don’t think that’s a helpful way of describing what a poet is doing, even within an institutional context. This is an old-fashioned, probably romantic distinction, but I think of the poet more as a “feeling worker,” or an “affective worker.” Not that I’m hoping for a return to sentimentalism in the art. It’s just that I’m skeptical of any knowledge claim people make for poetry. I’ve never seen the art form as one that is epistemological in that sense. I find that it’s more of a technology of feeling than anything else, or at least, I feel that poetry helps me to orient myself affectively in the world—that this is the work it does for me in my experience, though naturally others will invariably find that it does other forms of work for them. It’s a hopelessly rough-hewn way of overstating the case, the way I’m making these distinctions, of course!
    Ives And yet there are what one might call philosophic tendencies within your work—an interest in contemplation, for example.
    Reddy In the first book of Voyager there is a series of propositions about the world that very loosely echoes Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I wasn’t really trying to do philosophy here; I was trying to feel my way toward a kind of philosophical music that was more “flattened out” than the lyric, tonally speaking. The philosophical premise of Book One of Voyager was just that: a kind of a premise for the construction of poetic language. I’m very drawn to conceptual work, since it has a kind of philosophical inflection. (I’m thinking of writers like Tan Lin or Lisa Robertson here, though they may not self-identify as “conceptualists” in a strict sense). But I think it would be a dangerous mistake to make the claim that my own poem—or, in a sense, any poem—is actually doing philosophy! Rather, one could say that the poem—my own poem, that is—is adopting the rhetorical and tonal, and even narratological, strategies of philosophy in order to achieve aesthetic effects. That’s what I like about conceptual work: how it makes me feel. Not that it gives me a new set of political or epistemological tools to make my way in the world. Rather, it allows me to feel my way to a proper stance toward these tools.
    Read more at Triple Canopy. A recording of Reddy’s Speculations talk is here. And if you want to check out a few poems from Voyager, we have a sampling here.
    Tags: Lucy Ives, Srikanth Reddy, Triple Canopy
    Posted in Poetry News on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015 by Harriet Staff.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    BY WIN BASSETT

    How are you? Pity soaks the moment like wet bread. Do I spit it out, or must I gum this unguent down?


    I learned in my first week as a hospital chaplain never to ask, “How are you?” or any variation of the question. Before my chaplaincy program, I went to law school and served as a criminal prosecutor in North Carolina; I never felt compelled to utter this small-talk inquiry to any party during that time. But instead of the harsh overhead lighting inside a dilapidated courthouse, I now find myself underneath the sterile bulbs of a university hospital in Virginia for the next three months. Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), a standardized chaplaincy program housed in most large hospitals in the United States, is a popular summer option for students in seminaries. I gave up the moral distress of putting kids in jail for nonviolent crimes to study literature in a divinity school, a move I hope will serve as an adequate bridge from law to secondary education and advocacy for the poetry world that lent me the courage to head down this road. “To make injustice the only / measure of our attention is to praise the Devil,” Jack Gilbert writes in the providentially named poem “A Brief for the Defense.”

    Back in the hospital, my fellow interns and I watched the film Wit, along with most other summer chaplaincy programs in the country, to understand why we shouldn’t ask how someone is doing. The movie depicts an angry John Donne scholar (played by Emma Thompson) during her various stages of cancer:

    I've been asked, "How are you feeling?" while throwing up into a plastic basin.

    I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour operation with a tube in every orifice: "How are you feeling today?"

    I'm waiting for the moment when I'm asked this question and I'm dead.

    I'm a little sorry I'll miss that.

    I asked the question all summer. What else was I supposed to say when I cold-knocked and walked into a room of a vulnerable person I’d never spoken to nor seen in my life?

    Wiman goes on to write, “prevarications, extenuations, tomorrow’s tease of being: / we are what we are only in our last bastions.” This notion of “our last bastions” troubles me. The most common definition of his last word: “an institution, a place, or a person strongly defending or upholding particular principles, attitudes, or activities.” When a grown man who is half-naked in a hospital bed cries because he can’t move his bowels, is this all that he is if he dies tomorrow?

    I visited this man almost every day for two months last summer. In the mornings, we had didactics (such as “Caring for the Buddhist Patient”) or verbatims (in which we workshopped, word for word, how a patient visit had unfolded), so I visited this guy after lunch each day. He was about my father’s age—mid-50s—and he was cleaning brush behind some of his property near the West Virginia–Virginia line when he was shot with an AK-47. It was an accident—some kid was dry-firing it a few houses down, messed up, and shot my patient in the back of his right shoulder. The shell bounced around and traveled down his bowels. I prayed for shit with him all summer.

    I’ll call him Joe. On our second visit, Joe had me weeping. After telling me more details about how someone shot him with an assault rifle, how his hospitalization hurt the business at his auto shop, and how the traveling back and forth from home exhausts his wife, I said to him, “You don’t seem like you’re angry at all.” Joe told me he’s not. “The first thing I did was to forgive that boy.” Behind wet eyes, I told Joe that it’s rare to encounter someone who actually does what Jesus told us to do. And I rethought Wiman’s line about last bastions.



    My first overnight stint, one that spans morning to morning, came four weeks into my summer program at the hospital. During the normal workday hours, no fewer than four chaplain interns, five chaplain residents, two staff chaplains, and two chaplain supervisors roam the main building’s eight floors, which hold 601 beds. I cover only the pediatric and orthopedic units in my afternoons. But once the on-call shift hits, from five in the evening until eight the next morning, I cover the entire hospital. I love this, I told my supervisor, because I like holding down the fort. He told me this feeling might be telling of something else. This standardized chaplaincy program, after all, was designed for participants to learn more about themselves than anything else all summer.

    An in-between feeling, like the time on Cadillac Mountain I saw the sun blaring its new brightness, hit me each time I emerged from the on-call suite (a basement room with a twin bed) at the end of my overnight shifts. I write in-between in a similar sense to Seamus Heaney’s notion: between the present and something greater to which I’m not privy. After living for 24 hours inside the building, I open the door from the basement to the three-story wall of windows in the lobby that try to serve as a gate to a beaming sun—the motions and resultant visuals make me feel as though a day never passed. It seems this way because the civilization inside never stops, never rests. The citizens might change shifts, but it’s noticeable only if I try—there are so many of them, and they are so busy. Days separate, it seems, not because of a new sun’s rising but because a rest period has begun and ended.

    When does a new day come into being after one of my overnight shifts? Not until I step outside. “As the doors glide shut behind me, / the world flares back into being— / I exist again, recover myself,” writes Anya Silver in “Leaving the Hospital.” As her poem’s speaker emerges from the building, she comments on a fellow patient who doesn’t fare well at night: “the nighttime cries of a man withered / child-size by cancer, and the bells / of emptied IVs tolling through hallways.”

    The nurses inevitably page the on-call chaplain when they hear “the nighttime cries of a man withered” because they usually have more pressing medical concerns that need their attention. I find early on in my summer that hymns work better than other forms of language or media to console these souls. Forget small talk, television, and off-the-cuff prayers—these folks know their hymns. After a few weeks of confidence-boosting patient encounters, I realize poetry might also be helpful in these instances of distress. The patients don’t know the poems I carry in my pocket the way they know their hymns, but they quiet nonetheless. I chalk up these powers to poetry’s economy of words. When you know you don’t have much longer in this life, why not make every word you speak and hear pack as much meaning as possible? “Poetry is an orphan of silence,” Charles Simic said.



    “Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly, / Dozens of pale hands are waving / Back, from inside their flames,” James Dickey writes in “The Hospital Window.” Like the speaker, I take images of hospital residents with me after sleepless nights. They remain vivid, and the images still live and move after I leave the hospital on my bike as people drive and walk to work in the morning.
    I helped a man—if helping means being the last person to pray with him—die during the weeks in July when the Virginia heat blurred my vision outside. He told me he was ready. I didn’t take him seriously, and I tried to convince him that it wasn’t time. “That the dying may float without fear / In the bold blue gaze of my father,” Dickey writes. Drained and on my ride home, I think about when I asked him when last he saw his children. “Before I went blind over a decade ago,” he laughed.



    Those mornings I traveled north on I91,
    passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock
    where the elms discussed their genealogies.
    I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital,
    took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret,
    learned I was an I drawn to Es.
    In small group I said, “I do not like it—
    the way so many young black men die here-- ............................................
    .........................
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    All Mod Cons – or a Reflective Analysis on Whitman and American Institutional Technophilia
    BY PHILP JENKS


    Walt-Whitman

    I’ve been too cruel to Walt Whitman’s works. Perhaps because I relate too much to the criticisms I have that it strikes fear in me. His work seems to uncover another honesty. The speaker appears often as a loving and encompassing man. He includes “everything” from classes, races, sexualities and into ecosystems in a vast democratic celebration of being. No small feat. Yet, this is much like many of the progressive oppressors I know. I’ve been groomed by Whitman too many times. Can I forgive the works? Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days, and Democratic Vistas all deploy a masculinist voyeurism. Moreover, the “I,” the speaking subject is the “neutral” and abstract. Put differently, this gets down to the institutionalized sexisms, racisms, classisms and all other isms that are inculcated within me. And I don’t always work to get them out and destroy them. Whitman’s voyeuristic vision watches over each and every, delighting in it. This includes even the most horrifying scenes, darkest spaces I’ve encountered. Too often I will denounce. Despite gestures to the contrary, including a book on an overly judgmental society (My First Painting Will Be the Accuser on Zephyr Press), I’m judgmental of his inclusivity. Or efforts therein. Yet, without his work I’d be no writer, understand much less, and yes there have been times when it saved my life. Whitman incorporates a hinge into the world, suturing a rift in reason, providing some repair that is desperately needed in these times.
    Sometimes I’m so scared of the Civil War patent-office hospital he depicts in Specimen Days. Rarely even can I think about it. They stored dead soldiers in these patent cases.
    A few weeks ago the vast area of the second story of that noblest of Washington buildings was crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers. They were placed in three very large apartments. I went there many times. It was a strange, solemn, and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating sight. I go sometimes to sooth and relieve particular cases. Two of the immense apartments are fill’d high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models of every kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever enter’d into the mind of man to conceive….Between these cases are lateral openings, perhaps eight feet wide and quite deep, and in these were placed the sick….It was, indeed, a curious scene, especially at night when lit up. (Whitman: Poetry and Prose, Library of America Edition 741)
    While too much has been made of American innovation and technology, still the immense transformation of such a place and space (for place has a home within it) into its very opposite illuminates an eeriness, an ability to convey that beyond most capabilities. Or…was it the opposite? Here, the site of invention, “shades of makers of the world” (Wolf) haunts the groaning, dying boys and men. Machines, utensils, inventions, and “a poor fellow dying, with emaciated face and glassy eye, the nurse by his side, the doctor also there, but no friend, no relative” (Whitman 742). A piercing loneliness and alienation could not be more aptly scripted for one’s life. The Civil War was the first “technological” war in so many senses. The other side of making, but not thinking—the other side of thinking that new creation inevitably is “progress” in a sort of fascistic Hegelian spirit is that eventually a nation’s embodiment of technological advance will inherit the scores of dead bodies that thoughtless technophilia produces. For Whitman, institutionalism itself kills off the source of any liberated verse.
    And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or
    dead
    But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest
    any person for miles around approach unawares,
    Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the
    sea or some quiet island,
    (“Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” 271)
    This hinge of the world may appear bucolic or naïve even. However, consider the alternative. It would seem within the sheer volume of Whitman’s work, much of the twenty-first century in the Global North is far closer to a Patent-Office Hospital, a making without thinking (Arendt, Essays in Understanding).


    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250426

    INTERVIEW
    Talk to the Dead
    Ruth Lilly Prize winner Alice Notley on the voice and spirits of her poetry.

    BY ADAM PLUNKETT

    Any honest introduction of Alice Notley should acknowledge that you can’t quite introduce her. She has written too much, for too long, in too many different ways, and if any principle explains her work, it’s what she calls “disobedience,” a refusal to comply with any movement or style or idea or identity. In her nearly 30 books from the last 45 years, she has been a New York School poet (second generation) and a feminist poet, an epic and a lyric and a novelistic poet, a playwright and a memoirist, an essayist and an accomplished visual artist: funny, poignant, erudite, and fearless. “Over the years,” she wrote in 2005, “I’ve been variously … formal, experimental, elliptical, polysyllabic, exceedingly plain, personal, and narrative; also speedy and slowed-down; all, it seems to me, in the same general voice.”

    True to noncompliant form, she told me recently that she hears less a voice in her poetry now than a number of voices. It was late April, and she was on a trip to New York City, where she learned that she had been awarded the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. We discussed the voices in a series of e-mails, which touched on her ambition to give voice to the dead and the silenced, her two forthcoming books, and why she thinks academia is dulling poetry. Our interview has been edited and condensed.

    ******

    What brings you back to New York City? And how does it feel to be back after having lived abroad, in Paris, for—correct me if I’m wrong—22 years now?

    I come back to New York a couple times a year to visit my sons and their families. But this visit I also read at The Poetry Project, something I have done every few years since 1971. It’s familiar to come back—it’s family and friends, it’s the sound of a significant part of my poetry—that New York speed and humor in the street, it’s an important part of my background. I’ve lived in Paris now for 23 years and it’s become home, but I need New York, too


    Are you aware at all when you’re here of discontinuity, too?


    Sometimes I think and say aloud that it’s changed—but I’m not really sure it’s that different. The energy’s the same. There are still people who live their lives primarily out on the sidewalk, for example. There are large numbers of immigrants, though of different backgrounds from before; the subway’s still interesting to ride in; there’s a lot of overt artistic activity.


    You wrote in your 1995 essay “The ‘Feminine’ Epic” that part of what drew you to write The Descent of Alette, an epic in which the protagonist finds herself on “a subway, endlessly,” was your noticing more and more homeless people in New York in the late 1980s. How, if at all, do you see oppression manifesting itself differently now that the city has so many rich inhabitants? How is it different in Paris?


    I’m told that there are homeless people everywhere in New York; I think I would have to stay here longer to know exactly where they are. I’m not aware of people clustered together, as they were in the ’80s, in places like Tompkins Square Park and beneath Grand Central Station. I suppose that means that overt displays of homelessness are discouraged. Paris had a rather large homeless population when I first moved there, and there seem to be a lot of people sleeping over heating grates at the moment. But there’s more dialogue in Europe in general about housing. There are a lot more people in the world than there used to be, and taking care of everyone’s needs seems formidable. I actually don’t think about the rich very much. I’m not interested in them. I suppose I think everyone should exclude them.

    Could you speak to your decision not to spend your career in academia, and to why, as you’ve said elsewhere, “Poetry should feel hugely uncomfortable in the academy”?


    I’ve never seen any connection between poetry and the academy or poetry and the university—or between fiction writing and the university. When I first went to Iowa as a fiction writer, I was appalled to discover I was supposed to learn how to teach. I somehow hadn’t noticed the MFA was a teaching degree. I gradually began writing poetry and got my degree eventually in fiction and poetry both, but I refused to do the student teaching and was given the job of being the dittograph person. I ran off everybody’s handouts for classes. Poetry is itself an ancient art older than any academy or institution. Why should a poet teach poetry or anything else?


    Could you talk about specific problems in the poetry world that stem at least in part from the fact that so many practicing poets spend their lives in academia? One issue that occurred to me was the shift in emphasis from musicality to form that you discuss in your essay “American Poetic Music at the Moment.” Perhaps part of the reason poets are more comfortable talking about form than sound is that it’s easier to study.


    Oh, everyone’s so boring! They have students! We had these really difficult lives in the midst of which we talked to each other and fought with each other about all of our thoughts about poetry. Everyone thinks they’re a poet because they get degrees. They are taught by boring teachers who validate the fact that they have a certain interest in poetry and then—presto—they get to validate more like themselves. I am using the pronoun “they” in the normal American vernacular way that is born of necessity. So. There are still old-fashioned, silly ways to discuss musicality in the mainstream academy (you say vague things about consonants and vowels), and my work has been subjected to them as well as to the lack of discussion in the avant-garde part of the academy. With musicality no one knows what to say, because it’s practically metaphysical, the essence of the poetry talent—don’t ever mention the poetry talent, either. I am totally musical, and I hear all the words I say in daily life. I have allergies at the moment that are blocking up my normal sounds and making other ones. My speaking voice is echoing about in my brain-bones, and I can’t catch my breath properly.

    ------------------------------------------------ ****
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...iel-borzutzky/

    Rhetorics as Raw Material: On the Complex Work of Daniel Borzutzky
    BY HARRIET STAFF



    At Jacket2, Kristin Dykstra writes about both the translation and creative work of Daniel Borzutzky, and how the two
    modes interrelate as she reads across his oeuvre, focusing on Borzutzky’s 2015 collection Memories of My Overdevelopment,
    categorized by its publisher, Kenning Editions, as “nonfiction.”
    This way depends on their shared grounds of a hemispheric expanse defined around rhetorics of neoliberalism and resistance,
    which Borzutzky has been conceptualizing in increasingly focused texts. His gradual construction of a specific
    hemispheric span for his writing – a span where Latin American expression intersects with that of the US, in
    translation/poetry worlds – uses those rhetorics as raw material.
    As a result, it’s increasingly possible to read Borzutzky’s oeuvre as an extended investigation of life under rampant
    corporatization and the bureaucracies it attempts to consume. His intonations serve up the new inter-American epic — or
    anti-epic? — in the age of neoliberalism.
    Later, Dykstra expands this influence:
    As critic Michael Dowdy outlines in a book-length study of US Latino/a literature, different notions of how to define
    “freedom” accompany the rise of neoliberalism. For its promotors,
    neoliberal theory aims to maximize freedom by reducing citizenship to a rational choice model of atomized, possessive
    individualism. This conception ties all valences of freedom to the market, dismantles collective forms of organization
    and ownership, converts states into servants to capital, guts social safety nets and the public sphere, and relentlessly commodifies culture, including modes of resistance. (9)
    Neoliberalism translates.
    And so does resistance to its modalities, though its complications merit time and attention (resources increasingly scarce).
    Poetic resistance has included writers who “model freedom as a relational concept rooted in diachronic place-based
    cultural practices and constituted interpersonally rather than held individually” (Dowdy 9).
    Borzutzky’s explorations, in which the translator exists as fulcrum, a single small-scale point for relations from which
    larger motions and visions emerge, offer vivid examples of how such cultural work continues to unfurl.
    Chile, one of the famous testing sites for neoliberalism after its 1973 coup d’etat, permeates and restructures Borzutzky’s
    contemporary northern city. Remember and historicize neoliberalism’s storied Chicagoan origins and its initial export to
    Chile. But Borzutzky’s latest writings emphasize a more recent vector of influence. The Chilean boomerang has returned.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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