More Drinking Sunday, June 20, 2010

Preparatory to extracting the tenuous stakes of my life in New York to go and live in the Pioneer Valley as a student and instructor, I've done significantly less of what I like to do for this blog and more of the sort of things one does when one is about to exit a metropolitan living situation one might never truly have appreciated in the first place. Namely, I've been drinking, celebrating, counting money, saying goodbye.

Nonetheless, there are things I've read and experienced over the last month I do intend to address: Dottie Lasky's excellent manifesto, Poetry Is Not A Project, Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock, Splice, and Red Dead Redemption, to name a few.

But first, more drinking. I'm reading in Chicago at Myopic Books with Joel Craig this Thursday, June 24th. Please stop by if you're local and free.

A few notes on unusual poetry Thursday, June 10, 2010

Last week I finally read Vanessa Place's Notes on Conceptualisms. I thought I liked Conceptualisms before, but now that it's been positioned like a powerpoint slide over the corpse of Flarf I'm not so sure. It's possible I'll be able to go back to Kenneth Goldsmith's 1010 WINS trilogy and renew my good opinion, but for now, my notes are these:

1) Did you know that Tom Wolfe, Max Eastman, Norman Mailer, Budd Schulman, Bruce Andrews, Dayle, Doyle, Bernbach, Laura Riding, Edward Murrow, John Hersey, Matt Latimer, Ford Maddox Ford, Joesph O'Neill, and virtually every single writer working in the English language since the first world war have thought or do think of themselves as writing in an "uncreative" mode? Did you know that I've never had a boss who'd disagree with you?

1b) We have been genuflecting before our publicly-sulking elders (who theorize the good of our anonymity but not their own) for a very long time. But does the position so suit us that we're now simply a creative anachronism society? We're just going to perform the year 1967 endlessly?

1c) Journalists do Realism and Analogy for money. Plus, their elders call them "experts," which is more than your elders will do for you.

2) Why can't poems just be unusual in certain hands? Why does everything have to be a careerist toilet? At least "unusual" begs the question. "Postmodern" and "Experimental" and "Conceptual" mean what they mean, which is to point at precisely nothing.

3) We have a word we didn't have before for what happens when the less-than-effectual bully one another anonymously using language. It's called trolling. This the singular legacy of the last thirty years of poetic/critical mash-up. We should get credit for that.

3b) If the point is to run for School Board President, or fuck up a bank, or explore hermeneutics, instead of writing poetry, then why write the poetry?

Money

Agriculture Reader Monday, June 7, 2010

The new Agriculture Reader is out now:



I've got a couple of pieces in it. So do a lot of really good writers.

True story: I ran into New York editor Jeremy near the Rocky statue in Philadelphia the other day. Totally random occurrence.