Tuesday, August 17, 2004

A fistfull of Spuyten Duyvil books have arrived to enliven the shelves here at the Bookery. I was reading in Stroffolino's Spin Cycle this morning. His very smart essay on Jennifer Moxley's Imagination Verses includes this useful fragmentary definition of lyric vs. what I take to be more totalizing impulses (i.e., discursive or narrative poetry): "as a lyric poet, [Moxley] is more interested in weaving together fictions that suffice in a particular situation than she is in promulgating any overarching theoretical 'consistency'". A fine clarification of a Stevensian imperative. The book is badly edited, though; the good folks at SD could stand to hire a proofreader, if they could afford one. Still, I'm excited by this particular pile, which includes Nada Gordon's deliciously decadent Are Not Our Lowing Hiefers Sleeker Than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, Michael Heller's Knowledge, David Rosenberg's See What You Think: Critical Essays for the Next Avant Garde, Edward Foster's The Angelus Bell, Norman Finkelstein's Track, Louis Cabri's The Mood Embosser, Tod Thilleman's The Corybantes, Peter O'Leary's Watchfulness, Paul Oppenheimer's The Flame Charts, Michael Heller's Conviction's Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry, Leonard Schwartz's A Flicker at the Edge of Things, Michael Magee's MS, and Garrett Kalleberg's Psychological Corporations. A veritable feast.

Also finally received my copy of Carroll F. Terrell's A Companion toThe Cantosof Ezra Pound. So I'll be heading back down that particular mineshaft before the summer is out.

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