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 one 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.