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Showing posts from July, 2010

More on John Wieners

Just a quick note on John Wieners, via Silliman . Between Visions: I printed a few paragraphs from the essay below in My Year 2004 in a piece devoted to Marjorie Perloff, in whose course I first encountered the work of John Wieners. The essay was one of my first attempts to discuss contemporary poetry, and it reveals the graduate-student environment in which it was written. The essay was written at a time when postmodernism was just beginning to have an impact on literary texts and my own notions of postmodernism, moreover, were highly influenced by the course for which I wrote the essay, which would ultimately result in Marjorie Perloff’s important study, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Consequently, I had decided not to republish the piece until news came last week that Wieners had collapsed on a Boston Street and died a few days later, on March 1, in Massachusetts General Hospital. Without any identification upon him, he lay in the hospital for several days

Ariana Reines

is someone whose poems I admire very much. Part of the attraction seems her complete willingness to try anything to make the work bold and memorable. The poems follow no discernable form, look like average-to-bad free verse on the page--random line breaks, simple language-- it seems to me, and on first read you might find it easier to chuck them than face them straight-on, but that would be a terrible mistake. As Gardner said of Robert Penn Warren, read it again. Her books include The Cow   and Coeur De Lion , and she also translates Baudelaire and Jean-Luc Hennig. Here's one from Everyday Genius . from THE PALACE OF JUSTICE when my boyfriend called the cops on me i waited in my room for them to come i waited a half hour and then another half hour this naked whiteness i could contrive to cleanse me officer i am in love and now my lover hate me always having dreamed of being a monk in a cell if i eat celery for ten days and with an ether commingle i could sit in

Yay! A New Draft

I was supposed to be critting some novel excerpts from other people (mea maxima culpa), but I got this instead. Truth: DON'T COUNT ON ME FOR ANYTHING ON TIME OR AS AGREED UPON. First one in a while. Content-wise, it's another knee-slapper. Will disappear in a few days. Poem on a Line by Ken Clark *poof*