Archive for the ‘Skip Fox’ Category
Entry 854 — “sic transit”
Friday, September 7th, 2012
I’m always harping on the importance of a poetry critic’s quoting passages or whole poems by the poets he discusses. This is not revolutionary: it’s taught, I believe, in most college courses on the subject. A critic should also zero in on quoted material at times, too. I sometimes fail to do both myself, so am re-posting to the following excerpt from a poem from Sheer Indefinite, by Skip Fox, in order to say a little about it:
Neither does the world answer but
in mute response. Cold
wind this morning before
dawn, cold
rock in its eye,
frozen
dream in its mind.
.
Entry 853 — Criticism Criticism and Other Stuff
Thursday, September 6th, 2012
Seth Abramson’s latest group of Huffington Post reviews is now up here. It includes a few words about Skip Fox’s Sheer Indefinite. It may be the first time Abramson has reviewed a book I have a copy of. He may have reviewed other poets whose work I liked, though. I learned of the review at New-Poetry, where Skip is a fellow participant. As for Abramson, I not too long ago said some negative things about him here. Here’s what I wrote about Abramson’s column at New-Poetry earlier today:
I don’t think I’ve read a complete review of Abramson’s before today—since so few of the poets he’s interested in interest me. But today I read the one that was half on Skip’s book. Lots of generalities about the two books under review, with no supporting quotations, and blather about the small portion of the poetry scene Abramson is familiar with. Lots of gush, e.g.: “in poetry, as Charles Olson once wrote, every element must be at once a high-energy construct and a high-energy discharge.” This, supposedly, is better than 19th-Century poetry critics’ calls for “beautiful language.” He knows what poetry should and should not be, and spends most of his time telling his readers, with tripe like the Olson quotation. In one of the reviews in his latest entry, he quotes a poet under review, but more for texts that indicate how the poet thinks than how he writes. More typically, he makes statements like, “Nguyen is a master of the poetic line, a distinction considerably rarer in these times than it ought to be,” without telling us just what makes Nguyen that, and why it’s good for a poet to be that.
.One good thing Abramson’s review has is a link at the end to another review of Skip’s book. It’s not much better than Abramson’s but quotes several passages from Sheer Indefinite, including this:.
Neither does the world answer but
in mute response. Cold
wind this morning before
dawn, cold
rock in its eye,
frozen
dream in its mind.
–which is just about exactly the kind of thing I like best in linguexpressive (entirely verbal) poetry..I love the boxes the Huffington has put above Abramson’s tripe for people to click on, by the way. Each has one of the following words in it: “Inspiring,” “Funny”,”Typical,” “Important,” “Outrageous,” “Innovative,” “Beautiful.” Great set of choices.
It is possible, too, that an opposite of mine may share my liking for fresh locutions and be more or less as sensitive to them as I am. Or a truly fine poet may do whatever he does so well that almost anyone must like him.
Other Things: I have to report something of Major Importance that I did a few hours ago. To understand the magnificence of my achievement, you must know that I tend to save things. Not quite everything. I’m able to throw out newspapers as soon as I’ve read them, and some magazines. Clothes I can no longer wear. (Underwear with more than three large rips in them, for example.) Standard food-related garbage. Junk mail. It’s hard to think of anything else, but I’m sure there are other things. My house is cluttered but not ridiculously. And I have gotten rid of a lot of old video equipment I had–an editing something-or-other, stuff like that. I set a few dead bicycles out for pick-up, too, and just a few days ago moved five bicycles I know I could get into running condition again if I only had time from my lanai to my carport. Three of them are now squeezed between the shed at one end of the carport and the defunct car that’s been parked in it for more than twenty years, serving as a storage shed for correspondence (which I have four filling cabinets in the car for). Two are against the house. I sort of hope someone will steal them. But I may learn of someone I can give one or more of them to. Or maybe someone will pay me something for spare parts or salvageable metal. In any case, they are now out of the way, so I have room on the lanai for a few more things.
My Major Achievement was throwing out over a hundred packing envelopes, and the like, that things had been mailed to me in and I thought I could re-use. Not completely unreasonable, for I have re-used a number of such things. But it was obvious that I was adding to my supply regardless of how often I used something from it. I also had a bunch of unused packing envelopes I’d bought in large quantity when I thought my press would have mail order customers. Several times I’d thought it might be wise to throw a few envelopes out, but never did. Today, though, I threw all of them out except a box with perhaps twenty of them in it that there was a good place for on the lanai. (I couldn’t possibly throw all of them out! Some of them had interesting stamps on them–or mail art scribbles.)
About a week ago I vowed for the fifteenth or twentieth time to put mine house in order. I was going to spend two hours a day at it. That quickly became one hour a day. Now it’s five minutes a day. The problem is that I got the real clutter taken care of pretty quickly, but couldn’t figure out what to do next. I think I have now: be cruel to a lot of books. I have over a thousand, I’m sure, and I expect to want to read no more than ten of the many I haven’t yet read. It’s emotionally near impossible for me to throw them out, and I doubt the local library would want any of them–or anybody I know locally would. so the plan is to box them. I’m speaking of non-vocation-related books. I have boxed a lot of poetry books, and will try to box a few more, but I can’t be sure I won’t ever again want to look at them, or need to, to check on something, or have a friend interested in one of them.
I’m some kind of data-addict, I think. It’s not a serious affliction, just a bothersome one, particularly for someone as impoverished as I’ve always been. I have over a dozen, maybe over thirty, books on sub-atomic physics, of which I’ve read maybe one entirely, and three or four slightly. I’ve bought books like that always expecting I’ll finally read one and understand it! Math books, too. Many of my large collection of psychology books I have read but doubt I’ll look at again. I’ve read most of my history books, too, and would love to reread just about all of them, but never will. I have a lot of hard-bound plays, too, but stopped reading them when my hopes of becoming a performed playwright sputtered out 25 years or so ago. Some I would enjoy, but I prefer novels for escape reading. It’s absurd how many different subjects I have books about, most of which I never read–never truly realizing that I needed to focus, always wildly trying to expand my circle of knowledge until it enclosed all known data. I always set myself many more goals than I can ever accomplish, too. Ah, but my reading goals are just Enough. Time to fill this five-foot carton I have with more books. A few hours ago, I dumped four books in it. I can probably fill it up. Then I’ll have space to try to re-arrange my unboxed so I’ll know where each of them is for the rest of my life! Well, so that I won’t call myself horrible names as I totter through the house yet against hunting for a book of the highest importance, possibly even one I wrote myself, and not finding it more that once a year instead of once a week.
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