My interview is up at HCE.

Still mostly only managing to confuse myself as I work on the intro to my dissertation. I just hope it's a progressive sort of confusion.

Working at the bookstore tonight and flipping through The Antonio Gramsci Reader. Some pithy bits:

Having passed from capitalist power to workers' power, the factory will continue to produce the same material things that it produces today. Butin what way and under what forms will poetry, drama, the novel, music, painting and moral and linguistic works be born? It is not a material factory that produces these works.... Nothing in this field is foreseeable except for this general hypothesis: there will be a proletarian culture (a civilization) totally different from the bourgeois one and in this field too class distinctions will be shattered. Bourgeois careerism will be shattered and there will be a poetry, a novel, a theatre, a moral code, a language, a painting and a music peculiar to proletarian civilization, the flowering and ornament of proletarian social organization. What remains to be done? Nothing other than to destroy the present form of civilization. In this field, "to destroy" does not mean the same as in the economic field. It does not mean to deprive humanity of the material products that it needs to subsist and to develop. It means to destroy spiritual hierarchies, prejudices, idols and ossified traditions.

*

A new social group that enters history with a hegemonic attitude, with a self-confidence which it initially did not have, cannot but stir up from deep within itself personalities who would not previsouly have found sufficient strength to express themselves fully in a particular direction.

*

For the politician, every "fixed" image is a priori reactionary: he considers the entire movement in its development. The artist, however, must have "fixed" images that are cast into their definite form. The politician imagines man as he is and, at the same time, how he should be in order to reach a specific goal. His task is precisely to stir men up, to get them to leave their present life behind in order to become collectively able to reach the proposed goal, that is, to get them to "conform" to the goal. The artist necessarily and realistically depicts "that which is," at a given moment (the personal, the non-conformist, etc.) From the political point of view, therefore, the politician will never be satisfied with the artist and will never be able to be: he will find him alwahys behind the times, always anachronistic and overtaken by the real flow of events.

*

When the politician puts pressure on the art of his time to express a particular cultural world, his activity is one of politics, not of artistic criticism. If the cultural world for which one is fighting is a living and necessary fact, its expansiveness will be irresistible and it will find its artists. Yet if, despite pressure, this irresistibility does not appear and is not effective, it means that the world in question was artificial and fictitious, a cardboard lucubration of mediocre men who complain that those of major stature do not agree with them.

*

There is also a "rational" form of conformism that corresponds to necessity, to the minimum amount of force needed to obtain a useful result. The discipline involved must be exalted and promoted and made "spontaneous" or "sincere." Conformism, then, means nothing other than "sociality," but it is nice to use the word "conformism" precisely because it annoys imbeciles. This does not mean that one cannot form a personality or be original, but it makes matters more difficult. It is too easy to be original by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing; this is just mechanical. It is too easy to speak differently from others, to play with neologisms, whereas it is difficult to distinguish oneself from others without doing acrobatics.

Curious how he affirms Futurism (conservative politically, aesthetically revolutionary) as politically revolutionary in spite of itself, but his revolutionary aesthetics seem actually quite conservative, as with Georg Lukacs. But I think this will be useful to me in understanding a little better the specifically Italian situation that Pound found himself in, in some ways extending the Futurist project with The Cantos.

Oh hey, for what it's worth, good speech by Kerry last night. I think he achieved the goal of humanizing himself that all the pundits were going on about. The question is, who was watching? The "bump" upward has yet to appear in the latest polls.

For those looking for the kind of Bush-bashing the convention was a little short on (probably a good thing), check out this article from a new magazine of politics and culture, n+1. I like the cut of its jib.

Disappointed, to say the least, that Steve Evans, in his new "Field Notes" feature in the latest issue of The Poker (the first issue I've seen—thanks to Dan Bouchard for sending it to me) saw fit to dis Selah; this took place as part of a brief discussion of what he refers to as the dominant Stevens-Ashbery post-avant aesthetic represented by poets as diverse as Marjorie Welish (in her excellent book Word Group), Geoffrey G. O'Brian (The Guns and Flags Project, which I don't find as interesting), and Beth Anderson (Overboard, a book I haven't read). Selah is judged to be "a less successful project" than theirs; the book is at least in reasonably good company insofar as he lumped it in with the work published by Jubilat. Steve has to be the most uncompromising critic of his generation, as well as one of the most knowledgable; I have huge respect for him, which makes a judgment like this sting all the more. On the other hand, it was delivered casually, unargued, exactly as if it were a blog entry, so that I can't help but take it less seriously than I would a bad or mixed review. (And then there's the question as to whether I accept the Stevens-Ashbery affiliation. Stevens, certainly, but I don't see Selah as particularly Ashberian; there's more Ashbery in my unpublished manuscript The Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I wonder what position Fourier Series will be seen as occupying?) Cold print does make a difference to the ego, though, so... ouch.

In spite of my bruised feelings I'll be subscribing to The Poker, which I immediately recognize as one of the crucial magazines of our moment—and Steve Evans' "Field Notes" are a large part of the reason why.

Trying to graft key pieces of my A-exam into the introductory chapter of my dissertation. It's ticklish work. Right now the form of it feels more like the vase (or cardboard box) into which I dump all my thinking about Adorno, Virgil, Benjamin, Agamben, Pound, Oppen, etc. I hope it will feel more organic as I get further into it—more the model of the tree-form than the vase-form.

Tony over at Geneva Convention is having a crisis of PhD faith, which makes me think of other friends and acquaintances who have gone through such crises. One of my dearest friends from college had a terrible time at Rutgers; she finished the PhD but then decided to leave academia for good (she's now writing an epic fantasy novel and happier than she's been in years). So it's clearly not for everybody. I think it would be very hard, probably impossible, to write something on the scale of a dissertation if you were unable to care about it as a piece of writing (or at least as a piece of thinking); the other jumping-through-hoops stuff is fakeable, but not the dissertation. Or maybe it is, but I imagine it would cost a huge chunk of one's soul. At the same time, I find I've so far been able to play the game of academia without permanent damage because I do see it as a game. A challenging game, a serious game, a sometimes frustrating game, but a game for all that, with discernible if sometimes obscure rules. The most crucial decision I made in my career as a grad student was giving up my specialization in Renaissance drama and instead choosing to write about the same subject that imbricates the rest of my life: contemporary poetry (though I have found a little historical distance by grounding my studies in Modernism). That made it possible for me to use more or less the same head (and heart) I use in writing poems for writing academic essays. My writing, really my entire life, is animated by the same core group of concerns and fascinations: the materiality of language, fragments of theology, aesthetic knowledge, political economy, and the utopian imagination. I've been very fortunate, I know. No one has bullied me into taking a more limited or utilitarian view of scholarship; I haven't been as harshly exploited as a teacher as many grad students are; and I haven't yet become bored with academic discourse or convinced that it's impossible to talk about stuff that matters in that language. If that last were to occur, I'd have to seriously question the academic life, because for me its entire promise (so far kept) has been to make it possible to talk about fundamental concerns regarding poetry and the world with increasing richness and depth. That's largely why I moved into the PhD realm from the MFA realm: because I felt the typical MFA language for talking about poetry (and the culture and society that generates it and that it generates) was an impoverished one.

It seems to me that Tony's problem is really everyone's problem, in the sense that we are all nowadays called upon to become more and more narrow specialists in whatever field; we are all forced to discipline ourselves. I think I'm lucky because I think I've found a discipline that doesn't require my to cut off all circulation to my other interests; I have a shot at being more whole than many others because academia suits me so well. But many people aren't so lucky. So you have a choice: to find a discipline that doesn't require the pruning of vital limbs, or the much harder choice of resisting discipline, period, in favor of a permanent amateur status (amateur from amat, to love). Though I have accepted the yoke of professionalization (which is not to say I'm not chafed by it), I dream of a revolution in consciousness that would make it possible for us all to be amateurs. Wishing alone won't make it so... but it's a start. Poetry for me is that sort of wishing; as I've said before, it's the creation, in language, of an imaginary wholeness. (Yes, I've been reading Schiller.) The more clearly we can visualize it in poetry, the more likely we are to find a path to real wholeness (or at least to see concretely the obstacles to that wholeness); not just for ourselves, but for all those with whom we feel solidarity. Which is another thing I get from poetry, and that's not nothing.

Hang in there, Tony. Listen to yourself. You're fighting for your life.

Once in a long, long while the Buffalo Poetics List is actually rewarding to subscribe to. Today it's because of Kevin Killian's extremely charming reports on the Orono conference. Read Part 1 and then Part 2.

Blocked and sluggish today. I did manage a semi-coherent addition to the conversation between myself and Chris Lott (and some anonymous poster—boy, am I sick of anonymous posters!) over here this morning. And I ordered some more poetry books for The Bookery, which at least feels useful. But I can't bring myself to look at Pound lately. I've been nibbling at Bloch and also Susan Buck-Morss' wonderful book on Benjamin. And I've been thinking about what happens to pastoral as refuge from history in the postmodern era, which by one definition is itself the forgetting of history. Who needs to hide from what you can't remember? This may all lead to something, but yesterday it led to napping and playing computer games. The weather hasn't helped. This is the wettest summer I can recall since I left New Orleans in 1996. Gray and more gray. I hope things clear up a bit for my friends Richard and Trevor when they come to visit next week.

Got some shelving to do. Deep thoughts later. Maybe much later.

I've been steering clear of the ressentiment machine that is Foetry, but then I stumbled across this. I happen to doubt very much that David Lehman was showing any favoritism to Christine Scanlon, the most recent Barrow Street Book Contest winner. One can be an editorial advisor to a literary magazine without ever setting foot in the magazine's office (if it has one); it's conceivable he's never even met Scanlon. But what burns me about this is their willingness to tar the entire contest with their sloppy brush—which means some of the sticky stuff gets splashed on me. I am not, as I've said before, a committed defender of the contest system—not because I'm worried about conspiracies and unfairness but rather because of the way it fosters an overly "submissive" relationship between authors and editors. But there's no better solution to publishing poetry right now; even print on demand costs more than most publishers will recoup from selling the books. I dislike having to defend myself from unseen enemies, but for the record, one more time: I had no pre-existing relationship with either of the judges of the contests I have won. If publishing books was only about who you know, I would probably not be published.

Okay. Ahem. In other news, how about that Democratic National Convention? I was generally heartened by the spectacle of Democrats looking and sounding confident. It was strange to think of how the Republican convention will seem to take place in an utterly different world, one in which George Bush is a visionary and successful leader. (I saw a sticker on a pickup truck's back window the other day: GEORGE BUSH IS OUR CHURCHILL; next to it was the more puzzling message VICHY IS HERE AGAIN. Does this refer to the treachery of France or to the fifth column of peaceniks at home? Churchill, incidentally, was in favor of using poison gas against rebellious "natives" in the first half of his career.) No one broke away from the "war on terrorism" paradigm, although Clinton hinted at this toward the end of his speech when he said there was no military solution to the problem of Islamic radicalism. (He didn't use the phrase "Islamic radicalism" but I find it vastly preferable to "terrorism"; as many have remarked, terrorism is a tactic and a symptom, not the problem itself.) And certainly no one was going to fault the larger project of neoliberalism; the general theme seemed to be that Kerry would do what Bush is doing, but more tactfully and more successfully. Still, I'm voting for Kerry, because I believe at least it would be possible to have an intelligent conversation with the man on the subject (on any subject). The most terrifying thing about Bush is his complete inability to engage with any reality beyond his own political plurality.

Okay, I've probably said enough about the greatness of Homestar Runner. But... did you know that They Might Be Giants are fans?

For the love of Mike, watch this.

I concur with Ms. Dark: read this. Jordan has some thoughts on it.

Well, the question as to whether I will actually devote a chapter of my dissertation to the Language poets remains open. I certainly appreciate the feedback I've been getting, though—and more than that, I appreciate how the stakes get raised when one contemplates scholarship on living writers. The stakes are highest of all, of course, for myself as a living writer. If I've become fixated on pastoral as the eccentric lens through which to read modernist and postmodernist poetry, it's largely because of my own attractions to the genre and my insisting on its possibility as a site of mediation between aesthetic and political impulses. We shall see.

And now for something completely different: I'm reading and getting a big kick out of Lytle Shaw's The Lobe here at The Bookery tonight. Shaw happens to be an Ithaca native, and he specializes in masking high literary comedy in low blows; or perhaps it's the other way around. There's a painful edge to some of the humor, because many of the poems imply questions about readers: who are they? Do they want this? How about this? Both reader and writer are occasionally cast into the pose of an Augustan literary man, comically distanced from possibilities for real dignity by our actual 21st century context:

Some Critical Exercises

Consider carefully the men busy reviving a woman collapsed by a fire they've built beneath a rock, then pronounce this one of the best composed scenes of the salon.

Reprimand if you must, but save a choice morsel for the Baron and his slumped, work-suited helpers.

Tap your cane sharply against the polished marble.

Purse your lips while uttering the letter O, leaving your mouth open an awkwardly long time, then recline into the bean-bag chair.

Smirk at his malapropism, but mind your own words with a heightened vigilance.

Pass the hookah and recite a naval yarn.

The Spaniard is on horseback, he occupies most of the canvas.

Poor little one, how intense, how thoughtful is your pain!

This is delightful and squirm-inducing all at once, as is the poem that follows (you'll have to content yourselves with the title: "Some Failed 18th Century Jacket Blurbs"). What saves the book from being mere highfalutin' hijinks (which I don't mean to disparage; I could still enjoy a book like that, ideally in the form of a leatherbound mass-market paperback) is how much of the recognizable (or recognizably strange) world Shaw crams into it. Somehow he makes the pomo collage of one poem, "My Mother Would Be on Falcon Crest" facing pages with another poem called "Fragments and Aphorisms for Holderlin" seem fresh again; it's the matter-of-fact furniture of our lives posed agasint the matter-of-fact shag carpet of cultural studies. (He can do this in a single poem title: "Dude Looks Like the Portrait of a Lady.") Not the least of this poetry's pleasures is its musical sense of wit, captured in this six-liner (the middle poem in a series of six-liners):

From the Couch

Pool man escalates turf slide
out back of bread edge pile.
Lay back and limn it.
A hose in the greens, magazine
gloss to Continental hood:
May I speak to the helper of the house?

This reads like riding a waterslide, jumping between alliterative peaks of t and b and splashing through the een rhyme to its assonantal conclusion. But you don't lose sight of the social content of these poems, almost always a self-implicating critique of bourgeois norms or cultural circles (we have met the literati and it is us). If an avant-garde artist is one who wants to close the gap between art and life, but who thereby runs the risk of losing the perspective that makes him or her an artist, Shaw succeeds by leaping right into the gap and discovering all of us already in there with him. The Lobe is good company.

Woke up this morning, grabbed Emily's laptop, and wrote the first three pages of my dissertation. Hurray for me! Only one hundred forty-seven pages to go. Well, probably a few more than that.

The first genuinely summery day in a long while: hot and sunny, with just enough of a breeze to keep the humidity from being uncomfotable. I've been shifting around a lot lately as I approach the moment when I actually start writing the dissertation. Often before embarking on a long project I spend an inordinate amount of time hesitating at the threshold, waiting for some kind of hint or sign that will impel me into the actual writing. It's not an entirely comfortable place to be, but I'm coming to accept it as part of my creative process.

This evening I'm spending a little time with Ernst Bloch, whose cautiously cheerful utopianism makes for a refreshing change from the pessimism of Adorno. I was led back to him through Walter Benjamin, whose early essay "On Language as Such and the Language of Man" I read yesterday in search of further clarification of the idea of "Language" as that site (cite?) in which things communicate themselves: the capability to communicate, communicativity as such. (It's easy to go round in circles trying to think this stuff.) Benjamin of course returns me to such numinous, not-quite-pindownable concepts as mimesis and the dialectical image. Bloch (or at least Jack Zipes' very helpful introduction to Bloch's book of essays, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature) helps clarify Benjamin a bit and moves me closer to my particular (pastoral) ground with his concept of Vor-Schein, or "anticipatory illumination," which seems to exist in constellation with Benjamin's concepts (as well as Adorno's concept of, er, constellation). Here are some notes I scribbled in my non-online notebook just now:

Ernst Bloch sees literature as diagnostic of a topographically conceived historical situation: the distance of a given social moment from Utopia as well as, ideally, the direction in which that Utopia might lie.

Quotes Franz Marc (in his Principles of Hope): "pictures are our own surfacing in another place."

From the same passage: "Wish-landscapes of beauty, of sublimity as a whole, remain in aesthetic anticipatory illusion and as such are attempts to contemplate the world without its perishing."

Marx initiates a tradition of via negativa within Utopian thinking by refusing to describe the Communist society—so the genuine Utopian thinker must obey the commandment against graven images. Yet images have their function—the dialectical image of Benjamin is meant to shock the reader awake from his dogmatic slumber, and this image is thus cousin to Bloch's insistence on the Novum (the genuinely new, as distinguished from a marketable novelty) as the "qualitative reutilization of the cultural heritage" (Zipe's words). The image (most suggestively crystallized for my purposes as the "wish-landscape" or Wünschenlandschaft) takes the form of an "anticipatory illumination. This is the ability of an aesthetic depiction to return the depicted object to its full immanence (suppressed by habitual ways of seeing as well as, presumably, a merely theoretical or calculating vision)—but not in the service of an auratic nostalgia. The goal is rather to measure the distance between the artwork's historical moment (or more vitally, the historical moment of the reader/receiver) and Utopia (which Bloch insists on seeing as objectively realizable—he focuses on the daydream as the origin of anticipatory illumination because unlike actual dreams, whose content is twisted by repression, daydreams "occur in semiconsciousness and point to real, objective possibilities" [Zipes again]). Not only is the wish-landscape then a portrait of Utopia (though necessarily an incomplete and inaccurate one), but the very process of generating such an image depends on a kind of itself-Utopian openness of encounter between subjects and objects—presented once again in topographical terms as what Bloch calls "dialectically open space, in which any object can be aesthetically depicted" (emphasis in original). But Utopia itself is deferred into the not-yet, an undescribable but infinitely important and yearned-for home (Heimat).

Ah, if only I could simply present the blog as my dissertation. Or at least a Habilitationsschrift.

Just added a link to the online magazine Aught, a homegrown Ithaca journal of innovative poetry edited by Ron Henry that I've been too long ignorant of.

To elliptically insist on the topic of profiling: what are we to make of a middle-aged woman in a sunhat browsing the poetry section who looks only at books by Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, and Mary Oliver? If it were not for the Graham I would snobbishly assume she was looking for pretty verbal baubles, though that's probably unfair to Gluck as well. But somehow looking at a Graham book (Never) still leaves this poor woman accused in my mind of looking for poetry that tells her what she already thinks she knows--she's not looking to be changed or blown away. Who is Jorie Graham's audience these days, anyhow? I mean, I still think of her as an important poet and very influential on my generation--but it's been a long time since I've read her myself or gotten excited about a poem of hers.
 
Earlier today a customer asked for Mark Doty and seemed shocked when I said we didn't have any. (And we should have some too, because he sells.) But he also strikes me as a poet of reassurance and affirmation (though his memoir Heaven's Coast was remarkably sad and brave about grief). Maybe what really bothers me about these poets is their language--it just doesn't carry the word-by-word charge that I demand. I like some of Gluck's work, particularly The Wild Iris, but her vocabulary and diction don't sizzle and pop enough for me. (One might say the same about George Oppen, but a) I think there actually is considerable verbal surprise in his terseness and b) his engagement with the larger political world compels me more than Gluck's sometimes melodramatic self-intimacies.) Mary Oliver is, in my opinion, a second-rate Wordsworth; I'd rather read the original. Graham is often intellectually exciting, but her long, discursive lines often fail to hold my attention as raptly as it wants to be held. I open up Never and I'm primarily struck by an impression of endlessness, an experience of sheer verbosity. Unfair! This is all pure gustibus and hardly based upon the kind of sustained reading these poets deserve. But somehow I feel they're read just as shallowly cover-to-cover as I'm "reading" them here. They're read for what they signify; I fail to read them because I can't get any purchase of pleasure on the surface of their language. If they were situated within a tradition I find intellectually interesting (such as Language poetry) I'd pay closer attention; but I might still, ultimately, feel the books slipping from my hands because, on the surface level, they promise so little. (And I'm often more interested in the promise than its fulfillment: what I'm being set up to expect. A broken promise can be very interesting, poetically.)

And a "moderate automatic preference for Arab Muslims." The funny thing is, I know I have racist impulses like anyone else. Perhaps this test just shows I'm committed to not acting on them.

Anyway, try it yourself: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/measureyourattitudes.html.

Taking the Harvard Bias Tests that Dan posted about. I have "a strong automatic preference for African-Americans." Take that, racism!

I'd never really given much thought to Gary Snyder. When he did cross my mind, it was as one of the Beats—a group I have ambivalent sympathy for. I think of them as poets who did important things, who were themselves important symbols for a little while, but who became in our cultural memory a primary example of commodified dissent: "Jack Kerouac wore khakis," etc. Most of the actual writing bores me to tears. Gary Snyder the man continues to impress me because of his dedication to environmental causes; his Buddhism also seems very sincere. But I've never much liked his poems. This is all just a lengthy preamble to me saying I'm surprised how much I'm enjoying his newest book, Danger on Peaks, an advance reader's copy of which was handed to me as I came to work at The Bookery this morning. The first section comprises a group of haibun on the topic of Mount St. Helens and its varying significations through the poet's long life: from the place where he first heard about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a visit to the Blast Zone as a site of more or less unreconstructed nature in 2000. Snyder's style isn't particularly remarkable; it's the kind of nature writing that I've always found to be a bit of a snooze, mostly description of natural features mixed in with acute observations of the changes made by humans (interstates, the presence of ranger stations, etc.). Reading this kind of thing always brings out my inner Frank O'Hara: "I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally REGRET life." But there were a few moments that cut through this, that made me feel the presence of unregretted life. When I was twenty I did a peak climb in central Oregon as part of an Outward Bound trip, and although the beatspeak of the first sentence makes me wince, I understood what Snyder meant when he talked about the estrangement from earth one experiences at the top of a really high mountain:

West coast snowpeaks are too much! They are too far above the surrounding lands. There is a break between. They are in a different world. If you want to get a view of the world you live in, climb a little rocky mountain with a neat small peak. But, the big snowpeaks pierce the realm of clouds and cranes, rest in the zone of five-colored baners and writhing crackling dragons in veils of ragged mist and frost-crystals, into a pure transparency of blue.

Somehow I forgive Snyder this bit of Orientalism—I feel like he's earned it somehow, that he really does see the Chinese heaven up there. Plus I've seen it myself: I remember near dawn at the top of a glacier looking at peaks rising through fog like a thick green sea, sun beginning to crystalize on the snow through the eastern clouds. Then there's his basic unpretentiousness. He has a series of charming quasi-haiku in the second section which make Imagism seem almost fresh again:

A Dent in a Bucket

Hammering a dent out of a bucket
       a woodpecker answers from the woods

Standup Comics

A parking meter that won't take coins
a giant sprinkler valve wheel chained and locked
a red and white fire hydrant
a young dandelion at the edge of the pavement

How

small birds     flit
from bough
to bough to bough

to bough to bough to bough

That last one is my favorite and taps a deeper reservoir of linguistic possibility than Snyder had previously seemed interested in. So I'll keep reading. What's come as a welcome surprise is his willingness to see what's in front of him, acutely and without becoming strident: it's the fulfillment of Pound's "periplum" (something Pound himself completely failed to do; his excoriation of American from Europe is the complete opposite of his proclaimed "see for yourself" ethic). It does not strike me as the kind of invigorated "late work" that Ron was talking about last week, but maybe I don't know enough about Snyder's other work to judge that. Sometimes the mere perseverance of an older writer is inspiration enough.

Do check out this remarkably sympathetic, thoughtful, downright romantic article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus on the MLA and professing English in The Believer. It includes a remarkable defense of arcane academic discourse. Not only does it partially restore my faith and interest in the magazine, but it makes me actually eager to go to my first MLA convention. Will I need a tie?

Media report: Last night's episode of Six Feet Under was very sadistic and disturbing. After that we caught the first episode of Entourage. In the words of Mussolini, "Ma questo e divertente." Earlier that afternoon we had seen Anchorman, which was funny and forgettable. Wish I could have seen all of Will Ferrell's cameos on assorted news programs promoting the movie. Best scene: the news team rumble with "gangs" led by Ferrell, Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Tim Robbins (the public TV anchor, in 'fro and smoking a pipe), and Ben Stiller (the pseudo-Latino anchor of Spanish language news).

RONBrick, where did you get that hand grenade?

BRICKI don't know.

Ever since I read Marjorie Perloff's essay "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?" I've been on the lookout for critical work that breaks down that dichotomy--for both poets are very important to me and implicated in my prosody. So I particularly appreciate this article by Kent Johnson in the newest Jacket. They're looking for reviewers, incidentally. Think I'll volunteer.

It has rained every day in Ithaca for a week.