Bachelardette: "A friend at MacDowell writes me that only a couple of writers knew Robert Creeley's name. (Don't overestimate the literacy of other artists.)"

That's the reference that I was looking for yesterday.

Speaking of Ronald Johnson, I just picked up The Shrubberies. Last thing I need: more books! I notice it was edited by Peter O'Leary, who live in St. Louis. (I don't know him.)

Johnson isn't in any anthologies that I know of. He's certainly one of the best KANSAS poets of all time. If you like poetry of condensed, radiant power:


modal reflections

sutra round pool
on a summer's day

loft waterlily


--dragonfly skim

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

A great rant from Jordan this morning.

Yes, the Kantian imperative: you must not only have the experience yourself, but feel that this experience is valid for others as well. That's why "taste" is not a "personal" matter. No, you don't have a right to your own taste, I've always said. This gets me into trouble, but I mean no harm: If taste were personal, you wouldn't have millions of screaming fans. Taste is always collective, even if the collective is only two people, a "folie à deux."

I am a very resistant reader. Where Ron Silliman might seem to admire 500 contemporary poets with an equal measure of enthusiasm, I like about 12 or 15. I usually don't go out of my way to criticize "avant-garde" poets I dislike or think are overrated, because that kind of writing gets enough flak from other people already.

There are thousands of ways to create poetry. Teaching someone "how to write a poem" is an impossibility. It's not analogous to teaching someone how to change a tire, or scramble an egg. Of course, in any given context (time, place, language, tradtion) only about a dozen ways of making poetry will seem at all possible. Usually, only one will be the focus of any pedagogical technique, as institutionalized in any given location. Let's say that writing fiction is reduced to the idea of writing the "New Yorker Short Story." That's just one form, one tradition narrowly circumscribed in time and place. There really is a way of teaching someone to write the Cheever/Updike story, as updated by more recent writers. It is like teaching someone to scramble an egg. If you don't want to scramble the egg, what are you to do?

Did you see Franz's letters to the editor in Poetry, May issue? They make him look pretty bad. It's true that the magazine is no good, but you don't come to that conclusion after they have just rejected you. That just looks like sour grapes.

The game of "not-having-heard-of-x" could be potentially infinite. There's something nasty about it--like making fun of the undergraduate who had never heard of Apollo. Writing a poem about an undergraduate who has never heard of Apollo is even worse. There should a certain humility brought into play. I had never heard of Ronald Johnson until I read an essay by Guy Davenport about him, maybe 12 years ago or so.

Who?

    Not knowing who someone is is the ultimate litmus test, but one that we will all fail at one time or another. For example, I haven't heard of many prominent contemporary "classical" composers, many middle-brow novelists and rock guitarists, not to mention television actors. I suspect that there are many writers--both poets and novelists--who have never heard of Bernadette Mayer. Someone, I forget who, was saying on a blog recently: "I was with some writers who didn't know who Creeley was."

Nada Gordon Introduction on Bernadette Mayer. Yes, my vote is that Nada should publish the work, with some minimal revision.

Lorca is not a strong influence on contemporary Spanish poetry. Sure, he's in the "canon" and there's a fair amount of Lorca-kitsch that will never go away, but he's not a widespread influence. I'm not saying recent Spanish poetry would be better or worse if it were more connected to Lorca, but simply stating a general consensus. Nor do Spanish views of Lorca emphasize the features of his work that make him influential in US poetics, the duende for example. There a level at which he has not entered into the nation's literature. I love Lorca, of course, but there's no point in my wishing for his influence to have been greater (greater, by the way, is a word to be types with the left hand alone). I'm not in the business of contrafactual literary history. More Lorca influence might have meant more kitsch; I'm not sure.

Lorca criticism tends to be very bad. There are good, very specialized critics who do nothing but Lorca, but without interesting the rest of our field in what they do. There are many others who are just plain bad.

I stumbled by accident on the new Dagzine.. I didn't even know it had moved.

When the music swells in a movie in a way that feels emotionally coercive: this is the point where you're supposed to feel this way. It's overdetermined, the effect calculated. There is no trust in the capacity of the audience to respond without such cues. That's cringe-worthy.

It would be like complaining that Paul Auster's novels are too deep and intellectual, when the problem is that he makes his "profundity" much too explicit and practically EXPLAINS to the reader how to interpret his "themes."

Much as I love The New York Trilogy many of his other books are tainted with that "Great American Novel" idea, you know, when the novelist is trying to say something profound about "America." The guy who blows up replicas of the Statue of Liberty in Leviathan, for example. Mr. Vertigo about a boy who can fly is not Auster's finest hour. Nor is Timbuktu, narrated from the point of view of a dog. The Book of Illusions has a nice conceit--a film director of the silent era who disappears into the desert and makes movies that will never be shown to anyone. Oracle Night is nicely plotted and avoids some of the horrible clichés of the other books. There is no Auster novel that doesn't make me cringe in parts, when it becomes simply too OBVIOUS. Yet that is also what makes him somewhat popular.