Silliman's Blog

Ron,

Thanks very much for including the link to Paul L. Martin’s review of my books. As I stated in my own blog — and a thorough perusal of Martin’s writings will bear me out — his “insights and observations from the high school classroom on literature, culture, and the life of the mind” clearly show why his students are so lucky to work with him and pass through his influence. His is a strong, poignant voice from the front lines of secondary education.

# posted by

William Michaelian : August 04, 2008

For anyone thinking of taking Bernadette Mayer's workshop in upstate New York, as reported by Harret's, do it!

I visited that beautiful part of the country in July and saw Mayer read new work that was as sharp and tied into our unique culture as ever.

Also, Happy Birthday Obama.

# posted by

Gary Parrish : August 04, 2008

My condolences -- attenuated as I may be here -- to the couple who had their barn of books go up in flames. And Ron, please know you are not the only one who fears that kind of nightmare. Were such a thing to happen, my only solution would be to take comfort in knowing I read what I could, and that I was alive to remember the wonder that was such a collection.

And Ron, did I miss your link to, or did you miss -- or are you choosing not to link to -- the LA Times article last week profiling August August Kleinzahler. It stuck in my craw, that article. It seemed to confuse (equate) a shall we say prickly personality and an (admirable) aggressively dismissive rejection of MFA programs and the aesthetics of Garrison Keillor with poetic experimentalism.

# posted by

Steven Fama : August 04, 2008

Solzhenitsyn was an astonishing Christian witness to the debilitation of both East and West.

There's no one else who can take his place, I think.

# posted by

Kirby Olson : August 04, 2008

Bill Knott's sardonic art of rejection is a practical lesson in the sociology of the poetry biz. That being aesthete judges and critics are often, though thankfully not always, prone to reject the unlovely poetry of unlovely poets, no matter how perfectly executed. We've published the poetry and philosophy of actual monstrous people simply because of their talent, so why can't we praise the sad poetic genius of Bill Knott?

# posted by

Mary Jo Malo : August 04, 2008

Steve,

You missed it. See “what’s so interesting about being a lout?” in the July 29 links.

You can read the article here.

The quotation above, by the way, is a line from the article.

# posted by

Ron : August 04, 2008

Thanks for the links, Ron.

I do hope to get to a more in-depth examination of Total Syntax sometime soon.

I don't see the need for a new O'Hara Selected myself; I feel like the only problem with the Collected is that 99% of the poems are more or less perfect. I don't know what people are looking for.

Burke's defense--though I'm pleased to see it--repeats the frequent mistake of boiling all of F O'H's work down to the "personist" addresses to friends and lovers. There are a lot of those, but even "Biotherm," a magnificent work, can't really be reduced to "casual speech"--and then there are those fantastic late poems ("Here in New York We are Having Some Trouble With the World's Fair") and the early, very French ones--and the diction, anyway, is as full of various kinds of artifice as it is "casual."

If often seems like people just want the most "fun" version of O'Hara. There's a lot to miss if that's your bag, and its absence is glaring in the most flippant and comfortable (e.g. bad) late NY School writing.

# posted by

Andy Gricevich : August 04, 2008

From the introduction to Ashbery's Italian Selected: "E nella natura dell'avanguaria l'essere un fenomeno transitorio; non e concepibile rimanere all'avanguardia per tutta una carriera che copre, a oggi, oltre mezzo secolo." I wouldn't agree that he has. Barbara Guest did. But I don't think Ashbery did...nor did he appear to care to do so. But who refuses cake? Only the willowy.

# posted by

William Keckler : August 04, 2008

Nikita Khrushchev's daughter was on tv to night talking of
Solzhenitsyn...

beyond all "religion" and
dogma

I have relatives who disappeared in the Gulag

I am here because family got out of the the Russia
Solzhenitsyn has spoken to..

just imagine what is garbage regarding China!

# posted by

Ed Baker : August 04, 2008

I second Andy, though I don't know fully what he means about what's missing in O'Hara's reception. One of my favorite remarks on O'Hara is that of Charles Altieri who wrote in his book Enlarging the Temple (Bucknell UP) that -- it's the proximity to PAIN that makes O'Hara's work so interesting.

That may be a key ingredient that's missing in much of late NY school writing. Almost entirely missing in Koch (except for the last book) and in many others that I shan't name.

You can't fake proximity to pain. It means a total openness to experience that has to be lived.

Ask Jesus.

# posted by

Kirby Olson : August 04, 2008

Joy is just as authentic as pain is. And they're both there in Koch. How much of one and how much of the other, I don't care. It's not a contest.

# posted by

Matt : August 05, 2008

Thanks for the links, Ron.

I should say that I don't think all of O'Hara's work falls under the "personist" monicker; there are quite a few poems in the book where he leaves his famed breakneck pace and finessed his lyrics to get across a set of conditions an excited style won't do for, as in the terrific "Second Avenue". Above all, though, I can't think of an O'Hara poem that didn't sound as if this were some talking to you, confiding to you in some rich intimacy. Style and tone change with the nature of the things the poet wanted to go over, and it is a shock for some who discover he could actually write elegantly, in a high style . Mastery is the word, I think; he wrote so well that you couldn't see the mechanics.

# posted by

TED BURKE : August 05, 2008

Watten's essay "The Expanded Object" makes the following assertion:

"Spring & All, for Williams, was
the moment of its frustrated but split comprehension (recall the original
edition with its ovum and sperm paralleling the split between poetry
and prose). If we are on the way to another relation of the poet/critic
dyad, it may be in the reproductive potential of the dyad itself—and what
is meant by reproduction as social rather than individually embodied.
New possibilities of gender and their resulting psychic investments,
which refuse the Oedipal containment of autonomous form and its
constraints on meaning, will motivate, in all senses, the exploration of
this little divide. More needs to be said to develop a transition—which I
hope at least to have suggested—from an Oedipal ‘default mode’ of the
concrete universal as a mode of social reproduction, to an exploded,
hybrid object in terms of new psychic formations of gender."

First of all Watten is confusing the cover of Kora In Hell (with its ovum surrounded by swimming spermatazoa) with the undecorated wrapper of Spring & All. He uses what he takes to be the symbolic meaning of this illustration--"paralleling the split between poetry and prose" (though how he deduces this meaning is unclear)--to suggest an aristotelian version of the creative artist as 'Oedipal default mode[l],' and advocates a transition towards an "exploded, hybrid object in terms of new psychic formations of gender." What this new hybrid object would look like is anyone's guess. Perhaps an hermaphroditic Teletubby?

The illustration to the book Kora In Hell would seem to have been a pointer to the content and implications of THAT book, not Spring & All. It would be interesting to see someone apply notions of gender to that text, a task I'm not aware anyone has yet attempted.

# posted by

Curtis Faville : August 06, 2008

Dear Ron,

Thanks for all the links again...

One interesting thing about the internet is that not only does it speed things up, but slows them down;news stays news: we haven't had James Thin in Edinburgh for 6 years. That article was from 2002.

Col.

# posted by

Colin : August 07, 2008

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