A google search for "Adorno atonal aesthetics," "commentary on visions of gerard, Kerouac," or "solving polyrhythms" will bring you to this blog. I have a bit more time today to blog because my daughter is back in school, and I haven't started classes yet myself.

***

On "Lime tree" (Kasey Mohammed's blog) last Friday, some commentary on Olson that leads me to reflect. There is a technical obsessiveness in American poetry that has always rubbed me the wrong way. I approve of an obsession with poetic technique, but not when it is couched in pseudo-technical terms. That is, when the technical discussion is all metaphorical, never about the actual syllables. That's why I like Coolidge's essays. His grounding in music. When drummers talk about rhythm they talk are talking in very specific, precise terms. Zukovsky? He also knew what he was talking about, obviously. Creeley? His theoretical pronouncements are couched in a weirdly inarticulate ("semi-articulate flakes") dialect. I love Creeley's poetry, but dislike that Black Mountain rhetoric he felt he needed to explain what he was doing. O'Hara has a comment somewhere: it's amazing Creeley puts in as many syllables as Levertov. I know this is heresy to many who will be reading this! That very aspect of Creeley about which I feel ambivalent leads directly to Grenier, of whom I need to read much more.

***

An essay by M. Perloff about Adrienne Rich. Pointing out that her style is basically derivative of Robert Lowell. I kept waiting for it to appear in one of Perloff's collections of essays, and it never did. Too brutal, perhaps? The point that the idea of a specifically gendered language (Rich's claim for herself) was based on the most prominent mainstream male poet of mid-century America. I remember in Graduate school (early 80s for me) there were people who read Rich and only Rich. People not otherwise readers of poetry. They would not have recognized this stylistic kinship because they had not read Lowell.