Once you tell your students that any poem can be about poetry itself, then they go through a period of reading this way excessively, making any poem "metapoetic" even when it's really NOT. Yet this stage of reading is necessary. In other words, you have to have gone through this stage at some point. When you come out the other side... you recognize the difference between forcing the metapoetic reading and listening to what the poem might have to say about itself.

***

The sun down, the ease, the speed of the night
chill make it seem in the nature of things to be cold...

Reading these lines by Bronk it is impossible not to think of the great Steven Wallace.

***

We accept deritativeness in others because we are derivative ourselves. Still, I wonder whether we're not too tolerant, sometimes. There's that polite fiction of not mentioning the obvious source of the derivation, pretending that the poet has any originality at all.

I share my August 24 birthday with Jorge Luis Borges, whose work I am teaching today in class.

Turning 46 tomorrow. Another birthday to be spent alone.

The best thing about Billy Collins' BAP might very well be that there are no poems by Billy Collins in it! I'm hoping at least that there are no poems by him in it.

I can't seem to get angry enough to blog properly. One thing you should check out, though, is the shoddy science behind Sax's popular book on gender differences, as exposed by Mark Liberman on Language Log. To prove that men and women see the world differently, the guy looks at differences in RAT EYES, and gets it completely wrong on top of that. He makes absurd claims about the greater aural sensitivity of girls, in the service of a rancid gender ideology. Mark is doing a valuable service in exposing this charlatan.

Anyone can cite a scientific study in a popular book, with the assurance that few people will check out the study to see if it really says what it is purported to say. Most people wouldn't even have the expertise to do it anyway.

I have a new blog,Books I Read Today, more for keeping track of what I'm reading than for anyone else's infotainment.

Half Truths

I was raised in a tomato field.
There I could never be a boy.

My livelihood is in school supplies.
I dreamt the ink in my pens was blue.

"tan norteamericano como desorientado"

is as offensive as any other linking of a negative characteristic with a national or ethnic identity.

"tan judío como despistado"

"tan árabe como mal informado"

"tan suramericano como confundido"

"tan español como grosero"

"tan granadino como rancio"

It's a clever rhetorical trick, much beloved of racists the world over. García Montero also accuses me of being "políticamente correcto" and a lover of Indian Reservations. I suppose that's an insult from where he comes from. It ultimately just shows the rottenness of his ideology--the very point I was making in my original critique of him.

It strikes me that I am a specialist in contemporary Spanish poetry, but that my own intellectual formation and set of influences is not in the least Spanish--apart from the specific work I did in order to become a specialist in this area. Thus the perspective I bring to the field is completely different from that of a Spanish intellectual--aside from what we might share by virtue of belonging to the same sub-specialty.

This is not a wholly bad thing. Now there are people I know of who are academic specialists in Spain who don't have a firm grasp of Spanish intellectual life at all. I'm not saying that's a good thing. On the other hand I think it's fine to be influence more by Kenneth Burke, Marjorie Perloff, and Roland Barthes than by Carlos Bousoño and Dámaso Alonso. To have grown up reading the New York Review of Books more than Insula.

I believe in historical specificity, in the where and when of it all. However, the true historicists are the formalists, because only the formalists have an eye for the specific forms of a period. Historicists who resort to the "content mining" mode of literary criticism largely miss the point.

What do the nativist and the cosmopolitan share? A belief that what matters is where an idea comes from, home or abroad. Like fans of two teams who share a common interest in the outcome of a game.

If you memorize a poem in a particular place, and then remember the poem the next day, you will also remember the place you where you memorized it. The test for a class should take place in the same classroom where the class is taught. If I am listening to the radio, All Things Considered, for several hours in the car, until a particular story is repeated, I will know the exact place I was when I heard this segment the first time. If you make a drawing of something, you will never forget what it looks like, even if the drawing itself bears no resemblance to the thing drawn.

I've been described by one prominent Spanish poet as "tan norteamericano como desorientado..." [both North-American and clueless, or as clueless as I am American] Not by name of course. He wouldn't stoop to acknowledge me by name. A useful footnote in the article where I found this quote helpfully identifies me as the culprit. Of course, I don't mind. It's nothing personal on either side. He's just the Spanish equivalent of Official Verse Culture and I criticized him for it.

Whew. 101 degrees for the third straight day. We're in our apartment, between two houses. I'm working on a Guggenheim application, while Julia draws Wile E Coyote and Daffy Duck.

The Duplications: Nate Pritts, "4 months from Monday, Monday"