Don’t take my word for it on this one (and I know I’m teasing here for the eventual post about why I think L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is a game worth playing and how it changed the broader poetry game in fun and interesting ways). Just go here.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Gamechangers, Dritten Stück
Don’t take my word for it on this one (and I know I’m teasing here for the eventual post about why I think L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is a game worth playing and how it changed the broader poetry game in fun and interesting ways). Just go here.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Review: Duhamel's Bankruptcy
There are, I suppose, reviewers who like going all Francis Jeffrey on poets and their poems, but I’m not one of them. This scrupulous blog, however, is dedicated to the impartial – or explicitly and admittedly partial but, one hopes, not unfair – reviewing of whatever volumes make it, by whatever means, over the digital transom. So it is not with pleasure that I am saying here that Denise Duhamel’s Ka-ching! (Pitt Poetry Series, 2009; exclamation point in title) is terrible, but that is indeed what I am saying.
I’d like to say that I dislike this book because, like so many others I dislike, its poems are simply autobiography rendered in chopped prose without the tension of formal conventions, without attention to language in its languageyness (self-reference and simultaneous multiple meanings and sound over sense and materiality, for example). I can’t, though, because Duhamel does a lot of things here that, at least when they’re done well, I like. She writes prose poems, for example, and she writes some sestinas, and she sometimes plays precisely with these characteristics of language. This makes things a little tougher. Only a little, though, because the way Duhamel handles the prose poem, the sestina, and the self-referential and material aspects of language is so simple and cheap that the poems are drained of the energy that comes from any sort of challenge to the reader.
The book’s themes are money and chance (two things I think poets might profitably [ahem] explore more often), and the volume opens with “Play Money,” a sequence of prose poems titled in which each successive poem is titled with a higher dollar amount. I say “prose poems” because the book is labeled “Poetry” on the back cover and is published by the Pitt Poetry Series, but there’s nothing about these pieces that foregrounds language-as-language or that warps or estranges the narrated reality as good prose poems do. I might call them very short stories (the kind of thing you can find here), but even that seems to grant them a little more literary status than their structures (straightforwardly anecdotal, with maybe a clunky O. Henry twist) or characters (caricatures) merit. They’re really memoirettes about pretty typical money-related experiences (a heroic penny-pinching CEO pinches a penny, a deadbeat roommate steals and cheats, our hapless heroine doesn’t get a job). That last one is representative in its reliance upon cliché at every level:
I had resisted going to the MLA conference, a meat market for fresh English PhDs who were stiff in their new or borrowed suits, vying like dreary Miss Americas for tenure track lines. The judges were the gray-haired full professors, crinkled, withered – five o’clock shadows on the men, orthopedic shoes on the women. They yawned through candidate presentations and had long lunches paid for by their institutions. But I really wanted the job and going to MLA showed I was serious.
One wishes some of the desire to be taken seriously had led to the invention of fresher images and phrases. “Meat market”? Really? Job interview as beauty pageant? Nobody’s thought of that one before. Boy, she nails the gray eminences of the literary professoriate, though, right down to their metonymic shadows and shoes. Am I motivated to complain about this one because, well, some of my best friends are gray-haired full professors (some, indeed, both “crinkled” and “withered”!)? Probably. But only because my experience of that world does not resemble the clichés with which Duhamel attempts to capture it. (Now, if she'd written about black skirts, black leather jackets, and black-and-white kaffiyeh . . .)
What I find more annoying even than such an “I resemble that remark” moment is the way the poem (“$700,000”), like several others in the book, commits the cardinal sin of complaining in poems about how hard it is to be a poet. Now, I know that poems often include moments of such self-reference (Keats’s fears that he might cease to be, for example, are largely vocational), but there’s a world of difference between the worry that one’s early death is going to prevent him from filling books with all that’s in his head and resentment over how one couldn’t land the tenured sinecure that would have underwritten a poetic career. An analogy, if I might be permitted such a trope: the former is like this, while the latter is like this here.
And even when the poems about poetry and being a poet aren’t complaints, and even when they take the refreshingly estranging form of something like a sestina, they fall flat by taking a simple joke too far and, like your uncle at the wedding after too much champagne, explaining the punch line. Here, exhibits A and B:
from “Delta Flight 659”
I’m writing this on a plane, Sean Penn,
with my black Pilot Razor ballpoint pen.
Ever since 9/11, I’m a nervous flyer. I leave my Pentium
Processor in Florida so TSA can’t x-ray my stanzas, penetrate
my persona. Maybe this should be in iambic pentameter,
rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in a Penn
variant.
And from “I Dreamed I Wrote This Sestina Wearing My Maidenform Bra” (Gentle Reader, nostalgic as you might be for the ads on which it riffs, you and I only wish I were bullshitting you about that title)
In the thirties, A-cup breasts were called nubbins,
B cups snubbins,
C cups droopers, and D cups super droopers.
In the fifties, a bullet bra could make a bombshell
Of most women. Pointy torpedo cups
had every Hollywood starlet hooked.
OK. Credit where it’s due. All the “pen”s took some coming up with, and there’s a pun embedded in the brand name of the speaker’s pen in the first excerpt, and the play of figurative and literal language in the fourth line of the second excerpt refreshes the dead metaphor of “bombshell.” But the “pen”s seem suited more to a parlor game (or a drinking game) than to a poem about the relationship of poetry to politics, and the last line gives away the gimmick with five stanzas still to get through. And one can only wish the poet dreamed of writing in ways that might more effectively delight and instruct.
I mean lift and separate.
But the book is not without some more successful poems, and it’s not surprising that these are the poems in which the poet writes about things other than the poems she’s writing, turns her attention to persons other than her poem-writing self. “Basically,” for instance, separates children into two kinds (the ones who torture and the ones who rescue) and lifts each up in turn to understand how “all children are exhausted by the cruelties / of the world and fight sleep because there is still / so much to do.” Which reminds me just how tired I am right now, tired of the “torture” one feels compelled to undertake (so many infelicities to point out) in order to “rescue” readers from the unconscionable puffery that soils the back cover of this paperback I’m going to put down, now that I’m done putting it down.
I’d like to say that I dislike this book because, like so many others I dislike, its poems are simply autobiography rendered in chopped prose without the tension of formal conventions, without attention to language in its languageyness (self-reference and simultaneous multiple meanings and sound over sense and materiality, for example). I can’t, though, because Duhamel does a lot of things here that, at least when they’re done well, I like. She writes prose poems, for example, and she writes some sestinas, and she sometimes plays precisely with these characteristics of language. This makes things a little tougher. Only a little, though, because the way Duhamel handles the prose poem, the sestina, and the self-referential and material aspects of language is so simple and cheap that the poems are drained of the energy that comes from any sort of challenge to the reader.
The book’s themes are money and chance (two things I think poets might profitably [ahem] explore more often), and the volume opens with “Play Money,” a sequence of prose poems titled in which each successive poem is titled with a higher dollar amount. I say “prose poems” because the book is labeled “Poetry” on the back cover and is published by the Pitt Poetry Series, but there’s nothing about these pieces that foregrounds language-as-language or that warps or estranges the narrated reality as good prose poems do. I might call them very short stories (the kind of thing you can find here), but even that seems to grant them a little more literary status than their structures (straightforwardly anecdotal, with maybe a clunky O. Henry twist) or characters (caricatures) merit. They’re really memoirettes about pretty typical money-related experiences (a heroic penny-pinching CEO pinches a penny, a deadbeat roommate steals and cheats, our hapless heroine doesn’t get a job). That last one is representative in its reliance upon cliché at every level:
I had resisted going to the MLA conference, a meat market for fresh English PhDs who were stiff in their new or borrowed suits, vying like dreary Miss Americas for tenure track lines. The judges were the gray-haired full professors, crinkled, withered – five o’clock shadows on the men, orthopedic shoes on the women. They yawned through candidate presentations and had long lunches paid for by their institutions. But I really wanted the job and going to MLA showed I was serious.
One wishes some of the desire to be taken seriously had led to the invention of fresher images and phrases. “Meat market”? Really? Job interview as beauty pageant? Nobody’s thought of that one before. Boy, she nails the gray eminences of the literary professoriate, though, right down to their metonymic shadows and shoes. Am I motivated to complain about this one because, well, some of my best friends are gray-haired full professors (some, indeed, both “crinkled” and “withered”!)? Probably. But only because my experience of that world does not resemble the clichés with which Duhamel attempts to capture it. (Now, if she'd written about black skirts, black leather jackets, and black-and-white kaffiyeh . . .)
What I find more annoying even than such an “I resemble that remark” moment is the way the poem (“$700,000”), like several others in the book, commits the cardinal sin of complaining in poems about how hard it is to be a poet. Now, I know that poems often include moments of such self-reference (Keats’s fears that he might cease to be, for example, are largely vocational), but there’s a world of difference between the worry that one’s early death is going to prevent him from filling books with all that’s in his head and resentment over how one couldn’t land the tenured sinecure that would have underwritten a poetic career. An analogy, if I might be permitted such a trope: the former is like this, while the latter is like this here.
And even when the poems about poetry and being a poet aren’t complaints, and even when they take the refreshingly estranging form of something like a sestina, they fall flat by taking a simple joke too far and, like your uncle at the wedding after too much champagne, explaining the punch line. Here, exhibits A and B:
from “Delta Flight 659”
I’m writing this on a plane, Sean Penn,
with my black Pilot Razor ballpoint pen.
Ever since 9/11, I’m a nervous flyer. I leave my Pentium
Processor in Florida so TSA can’t x-ray my stanzas, penetrate
my persona. Maybe this should be in iambic pentameter,
rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in a Penn
variant.
And from “I Dreamed I Wrote This Sestina Wearing My Maidenform Bra” (Gentle Reader, nostalgic as you might be for the ads on which it riffs, you and I only wish I were bullshitting you about that title)
In the thirties, A-cup breasts were called nubbins,
B cups snubbins,
C cups droopers, and D cups super droopers.
In the fifties, a bullet bra could make a bombshell
Of most women. Pointy torpedo cups
had every Hollywood starlet hooked.
OK. Credit where it’s due. All the “pen”s took some coming up with, and there’s a pun embedded in the brand name of the speaker’s pen in the first excerpt, and the play of figurative and literal language in the fourth line of the second excerpt refreshes the dead metaphor of “bombshell.” But the “pen”s seem suited more to a parlor game (or a drinking game) than to a poem about the relationship of poetry to politics, and the last line gives away the gimmick with five stanzas still to get through. And one can only wish the poet dreamed of writing in ways that might more effectively delight and instruct.
I mean lift and separate.
But the book is not without some more successful poems, and it’s not surprising that these are the poems in which the poet writes about things other than the poems she’s writing, turns her attention to persons other than her poem-writing self. “Basically,” for instance, separates children into two kinds (the ones who torture and the ones who rescue) and lifts each up in turn to understand how “all children are exhausted by the cruelties / of the world and fight sleep because there is still / so much to do.” Which reminds me just how tired I am right now, tired of the “torture” one feels compelled to undertake (so many infelicities to point out) in order to “rescue” readers from the unconscionable puffery that soils the back cover of this paperback I’m going to put down, now that I’m done putting it down.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Gamechangers, Part Deux
A few posts ago, I promised you a Top Five list (with Honorable Mentions!), and though that post included only two main entries, a Top Five list, Gentle Reader, is what you have every right to expect and a Top Five list is what you shall receive. Herewith, then, further entries in the list of Gamechanger Volumes in Twentieth-Century Poetry. A recap: we’re sticking to 1925-1975 for this list (between the release of the Ezra Pound Cantos concept album -- you know, the one with the cool cover and a couple of great hits but also some drum solos and noodling keyboard bits you could, in retrospect, do without – and the release of Dolomite, starring Rudy Ray Moore); and we’re looking for volumes that a chock-full of great poems which, individually but especially when taken together, articulate a new direction for poetry, especially a direction subsequent poets have followed. And so, without further throat-clearing:
Number Three: John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Close readers of this here melopoeic blog might recall that the original terminus of the period to be covered by this list was 1974, but I have since realized that while the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon formed my political consciousness in profound ways, to link this Top Five list to an event in American political history would be like, well, it would be like an English department linking its distribution requirement to something like the passage of the First Reform Bill in 1832. But I also realized that sticking to that earlier date would require me to nominate Ashbery’s 1956 volume, Some Trees. Now, I was sorely tempted by that possibility. The earlier book’s not only got some fantastic poems in it (“The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” “A Long Novel,” “Le livre est sur la table”), and it not only has cool prose poems like “The Young Son,” but it also has the benefit of what must have been the freshness of a lilac-soaked May afternoon amidst the monuments of Late Modernism and the well-wrought urns of post-Modernist formalism that littered the literary landscape at the time of its appearance.
But I’m plumping for Self-Portrait. Look, it boasts a bunch of poems that show up on numerous critics’ best-of lists: “Forties Flick,” “Scheherezade,” “Hop o’ My Thumb,” “Märchenbilder,” and the title poem. More than that, though, it adds to the Surrealist play and generally Frenchy feel (you know, like when you see the human arm torch-holders along the wall of the Beast’s palace in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete) of the earlier poems a range of cultural reference that stretches from Parmigianino (whose painting inspires the title poem) to Van Camp’s Pork and Bea
ns (or a sign for same, which shows up in “Grand Galop” along with the only high-littrachah puke sound I’ve ever run across: “Puaagh. Vomit. Puaaaaagh. More vomit”).But wait, there’s more. There is, in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a seriously playful meditation on the duties of representation and the responsibilities of evading them, an ars poetica at least partially encapsulated by these lines:
We see only postures of the dream,
Riders of the motion that swings the face
Into view under evening skies, with no
False disarray as proof of authenticity.
But it is life englobed.
Am I wrong to read a not-so-subtle kick at Confessionalism in the penultimate line-and-a-half there? And am I not right that the last line quoted is the shit?
This somber blog will, in the near future, offer its own meditation on play in poetry and why those alliteratively conjoined terms are GOOD THINGS, but Ashbery was there first, was present, we might even say, at something like the creation of a poetics dedicated to the proposition that a Magrittean atmosphere, a Cornellesque knack for juxtaposition (Ashbery is also, it turns out, a hell of a collagist), and a healthy appetite for the strange within the familiar are perhaps more interesting than our individual psyches’ struggles laid out in self-portraits in institutional glassless mirrors.
But you know what? I’d put this book on my list for this stanza, which concludes “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”:
The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.
Kind of like this book.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Review: Gizzi's Deep Deadpan
Michael Gizzi, New Depths of Deadpan (Burning Deck, 2009)
As promised in the last installment of this adventurous blog, a review of a slim volume by a real live living poet currently, perhaps right this very minute, writing poems. The back cover copy consists entirely of questions, the first of which glosses the collection’s title and provides as good a key to t
hese poems as any: “Should the two archetypal masks that represent Comedy and Tragedy pass through each other (imagine a total eclipse), might not their overlapping intersection be an expression of deadpan?” The poems, which tend not to pose questions but, instead, to juxtapose declarations, wear just such an expression, playing with the multiple meanings and opposed affects that cohabit words and phrases in ways that at once grin and grimace.
Take “About Face.” Please. The title combines military command and modifying phrase, the imperative to reverse direction and the invitation to consider the visage. This sets two stages on which the poem acts out. First, we get reversals: “No sooner am I out the door than I want to be home reading.” And second, though the seriality I’m suggesting betrays the simultaneity the poem actually performs, we get reflection on, via reflections in, pre-fabricated chunks of language, as when the speaker compares his face to a “full-grown narcissus” (flower and flower’s namesake), says he cut off his nose (not to spite his face but to identify himself) and professes his love for “being busted in the mirror.” There’s a resulting insight from all that the poem narrates: “Then someone opens an eye in my head. Murmur of subtitles.”
The pun linking vision and subjectivity (eye/I, captain) is a Romantic truism, but the adverb that opens this last line links it to (self-)reflection in the complex mirror of cliché, and the closing sentence reels the life of one’s own mind in a language suddenly foreign, one for which we require the helpful trot of translation.
But see, I’ve done this thing that writing about poems like Gizzi’s often does. I’ve made it sound patently un-fun. These poems, though, are fun, and funny. Like this here cautionary example a friend and collaborator sent, making clear the importance of knowing where strings of words come from. Sometimes punnily funny, though by this I don’t mean to demean as we often do when pointing out a pun. Every line in “Cloistered in an Oyster,” for example, riffs on the reality of mollusk life as it’s embedded in phrases like “mother of pearl” and “oyster bed,” in words like “shuck” and “clammy,” but leaves the leer of Tragedy just visible behind its Comic lightness. And still more fun are the poems, like “Raging Balls” or “Attention Deficit Flypaper,” where things get a little blue (another word whose connotations combine the limning of loss and the gladdening of glands), that come admirably clean about the masturbatory character of this linguistic play (though with the strong sense that both masturbation and play get bad reps by not being taken nearly seriously enough). Check out the latter of those two poems in its entirety:
The Italian matriculates with the usher under the chapel.
Masturbation covers a small portion of the audacity of lust.
Like an aphrodisiac in daycare, he cut his eyes on onions.
Some days he wants to cry, but antidepressants won’t let him.
Gizzi does a lot just with sound here (suggesting a connection between matriculation and masturbation, for example), but the real fun, it seems to me, is in the various ways we can read a phrase like “Like an aphrodisiac in daycare.” Similar to such a substance in its infancy? As if such a substance were distributed to a gathering of infants? And the choice we make here determines the simile’s modification of the main clause. The first way might suggest that he, in a kind of erotically related infancy, instead of cutting teeth cuts (that is, develops) his eyes on the tear-inducing fumes of onions, while the second suggests that “he” is hamstrung by an incapacity to act on urges chemically induced (or, as the last line tells us, inhibited).
I’m having fun playing with these lines, but there’s no reason why I should have all of it. There are plenty of copies of New Depths of Deadpan to go around. Go get your own, and see what you can make of “Clouds Nine” (mild insult to Rumi-quoting New Agers?) or “Hours Dismembered” (Herrick and Marvell mashed up with Damien Hirst?), or “Night-Blooming Gramophone” (in just what way do “Rats know what good sex is”?). And then tell me in the comments section.
As promised in the last installment of this adventurous blog, a review of a slim volume by a real live living poet currently, perhaps right this very minute, writing poems. The back cover copy consists entirely of questions, the first of which glosses the collection’s title and provides as good a key to t
hese poems as any: “Should the two archetypal masks that represent Comedy and Tragedy pass through each other (imagine a total eclipse), might not their overlapping intersection be an expression of deadpan?” The poems, which tend not to pose questions but, instead, to juxtapose declarations, wear just such an expression, playing with the multiple meanings and opposed affects that cohabit words and phrases in ways that at once grin and grimace.Take “About Face.” Please. The title combines military command and modifying phrase, the imperative to reverse direction and the invitation to consider the visage. This sets two stages on which the poem acts out. First, we get reversals: “No sooner am I out the door than I want to be home reading.” And second, though the seriality I’m suggesting betrays the simultaneity the poem actually performs, we get reflection on, via reflections in, pre-fabricated chunks of language, as when the speaker compares his face to a “full-grown narcissus” (flower and flower’s namesake), says he cut off his nose (not to spite his face but to identify himself) and professes his love for “being busted in the mirror.” There’s a resulting insight from all that the poem narrates: “Then someone opens an eye in my head. Murmur of subtitles.”
The pun linking vision and subjectivity (eye/I, captain) is a Romantic truism, but the adverb that opens this last line links it to (self-)reflection in the complex mirror of cliché, and the closing sentence reels the life of one’s own mind in a language suddenly foreign, one for which we require the helpful trot of translation.But see, I’ve done this thing that writing about poems like Gizzi’s often does. I’ve made it sound patently un-fun. These poems, though, are fun, and funny. Like this here cautionary example a friend and collaborator sent, making clear the importance of knowing where strings of words come from. Sometimes punnily funny, though by this I don’t mean to demean as we often do when pointing out a pun. Every line in “Cloistered in an Oyster,” for example, riffs on the reality of mollusk life as it’s embedded in phrases like “mother of pearl” and “oyster bed,” in words like “shuck” and “clammy,” but leaves the leer of Tragedy just visible behind its Comic lightness. And still more fun are the poems, like “Raging Balls” or “Attention Deficit Flypaper,” where things get a little blue (another word whose connotations combine the limning of loss and the gladdening of glands), that come admirably clean about the masturbatory character of this linguistic play (though with the strong sense that both masturbation and play get bad reps by not being taken nearly seriously enough). Check out the latter of those two poems in its entirety:
The Italian matriculates with the usher under the chapel.
Masturbation covers a small portion of the audacity of lust.
Like an aphrodisiac in daycare, he cut his eyes on onions.
Some days he wants to cry, but antidepressants won’t let him.
Gizzi does a lot just with sound here (suggesting a connection between matriculation and masturbation, for example), but the real fun, it seems to me, is in the various ways we can read a phrase like “Like an aphrodisiac in daycare.” Similar to such a substance in its infancy? As if such a substance were distributed to a gathering of infants? And the choice we make here determines the simile’s modification of the main clause. The first way might suggest that he, in a kind of erotically related infancy, instead of cutting teeth cuts (that is, develops) his eyes on the tear-inducing fumes of onions, while the second suggests that “he” is hamstrung by an incapacity to act on urges chemically induced (or, as the last line tells us, inhibited).
I’m having fun playing with these lines, but there’s no reason why I should have all of it. There are plenty of copies of New Depths of Deadpan to go around. Go get your own, and see what you can make of “Clouds Nine” (mild insult to Rumi-quoting New Agers?) or “Hours Dismembered” (Herrick and Marvell mashed up with Damien Hirst?), or “Night-Blooming Gramophone” (in just what way do “Rats know what good sex is”?). And then tell me in the comments section.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A Funny Thing Not Happening in the Forum
Check out, if you’re interested in that kind of thing, the latest issue of Bookforum (FEB/MAR 2010), but don’t expect to find reviews of new English-language poetry therein cuz there aren’t any. Oh, there are brief items on forthcoming volumes (two, to be exact) in the “Pub Dates” department (page 4). By brief, I mean 116 words (I counted; it didn’t take long, and this includes title, publisher, author and translator names) on Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Rising of the Ashes (due out in February) and 97 words (including the ampersand in Farrar, Straus, & Giroux and another in a quote from “The Ballad of the Girly Man”) on Charles Bernstein’s All the Whiskey in Heaven, due out in March.
Really, Bookforum? This is it? A couple hundred words devoted to new poetry out of 45 pages. An entry on the selected poems volume by one of the most interesting and important experimental poets in the country that’s about the same length as one on the new volume of Catherine Millet’s who-gives-a-f*ck memoir (Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M)?!
OK. I’m exaggerating. There’s one full-page review devoted to the work of a poet: Eric Ormsby on three books by Mahmoud Darwish. This is good stuff, both the poetry (Darwish is amazing) and the review (Ormbsy is able, sometimes eloquent), but could no volume, perhaps a slim one consisting of newly produced poems, by a living poet be found that might merit a thousand words or so? You might start by looking here (scroll down past the stuff about Salinger, RIP).
The problem ain't confined to this here latest issue either. The last one (DEC/JAN) included o
ne review (a short one tucked into the round-up corral at the end of the issue) of a poetry book (an interesting but unrepresentative one: Brandon Downing's Lake Antiquity: Poems 1996-2008) a book of collages with found-text poems). That issue, though, at least boasts a very smart piece on September 11 novels by my pal and idol, Laura Frost.And the problem ain’t just Bookforum, Gentle Reader. I’ll be updating you soon on the first month of the new year’s coverage of new poetry (hell, of poetry at all) in the NYT Book Review, the New Yorker, and a couple other among the last remaining outlets that pay any attention to books in our benighted republic, but you can guess what I’ll be saying. What space does go to poetry tends to go to big collecteds or selecteds, often by dead poets. Important as these books are, reviews of them do precious little to cultivate a readership for the ink-stained (or maybe carpel-tunnelled) wretches currently producing the stuff. Guess you’ll have to watch this space for such reviews (coming soon).
P.S. This humble blogger’s heart leapt up – OK, fidgeted in anticipation of irritation – at the sight of Adam Kirsch’s name on the issue’s cover (be on the lookout for this ambitious blog’s take on all that’s wrong with Kirsch as poetry critic – it might be a long, even a multi-part, post), but, alas, his review was devoted to Thomas Mallon’s new book of and on letters. I tell you, it’s a sad issue of a magazine on books that disappoints me by not even including a poetry review by Adam Kirsch. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
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