Today I’m posting a short review I did for Small Press Review that as far as I know did not get published:

Poetry
Volume CXCVIII, Number 4, July/August 2011. 110 pp.
Edited by Christian Wiman
published monthly except bimonthly July/August
444 N. Michigan Avenue, Ste 1850,
Chicago IL 60611. $3.75, $35/year.

Poetry, during its first few years, was a literary miracle: a publication devoted to poetry that was strongly under the influence of a world-class poet.  Now, eighty years or so later it features poems by knownstreamers like David Ferry, to whom the organization funding it recently gave $100,000.  One begins:

The five or six of them, sitting on the rocks,
Out at Lanesville, near Gloucester; it is like
Listening to music.  Several of them are teachers,
One is a psychologist, one is reading a book,
The page glares white in the summer sunlight;

Standard free verse, standard trivially “authentic” geographical details, a certain standard conversational randomness, a standard imagistic detail.  I thought it was going to be a very standard Iowa State meditation on an old family photograph.  Not so, not that that made any difference.  I can’t say there was anything wrong with it.  The problem is that Poetry rarely publishes anything much different from it, except when briefly pretending to cover the entire contemporary American poetry continuum by publishing some token language or visual poems.  It certainly never encourages superior poetry.

Diary Entry

Wednesday, 14 December 2011, 7 P.M.  A busy day.  I saw my cardiologist who said I was doing fine.  In fact, he took me off one of my two blood pressure pills.  I did some marketing after leaving the doctor’s.  Later, I spent an hour or so at the Arts and Humanities Council offices for a get-together.  I chatted with a few people.  I knew no one but Judy so didn’t circulate.  I’m still no good with people I don’t know, unless sitting with them, as I did with John and Howard, two guys I actually had good conversations with.  Howard went to where my Christmas poem was on display for a look.  He said he liked it.  Previous to that, one of the women I’d talked a bit with, describing my long division poems, had gone to look at it, and returned to tell me, and two friends of hers, that she liked it.  That, and the food I had, made the event a success for me!

Once home, I babbled a bit about how nice it’d be to live to the age of 500 to take care of my blog entry for the day.  My public relations visit to the A&H fesitivities qualifies as another piece of work done for my exhibition.  I did actually take care of a major chore today: this year’s Christmas cards.  I included a two-paragraph year-end letter with most of them.  I spent over two hours taking care of that.  I estimate I have three or four more cards to send.

.

Today I’m posting a short review I did for Small Press Review that as far as I know did not get published:

Poetry
Volume CXCVIII, Number 4, July/August 2011. 110 pp.
Edited by Christian Wiman
published monthly except bimonthly July/August
444 N. Michigan Avenue, Ste 1850,
Chicago IL 60611. $3.75, $35/year.

Poetry, during its first few years, was a literary miracle: a publication devoted to poetry that was strongly under the influence of a world-class poet.  Now, eighty years or so later it features poems by knownstreamers like David Ferry, to whom the organization funding it recently gave $100,000.  One begins:

The five or six of them, sitting on the rocks,
Out at Lanesville, near Gloucester; it is like
Listening to music.  Several of them are teachers,
One is a psychologist, one is reading a book,
The page glares white in the summer sunlight;

Standard free verse, standard trivially “authentic” geographical details, a certain standard conversational randomness, a standard imagistic detail.  I thought it was going to be a very standard Iowa State meditation on an old family photograph.  Not so, not that that made any difference.  I can’t say there was anything wrong with it.  The problem is that Poetry rarely publishes anything much different from it, except when briefly pretending to cover the entire contemporary American poetry continuum by publishing some token language or visual poems.  It certainly never encourages superior poetry.

Diary Entry

Wednesday, 14 December 2011, 7 P.M.  A busy day.  I saw my cardiologist who said I was doing fine.  In fact, he took me off one of my two blood pressure pills.  I did some marketing after leaving the doctor’s.  Later, I spent an hour or so at the Arts and Humanities Council offices for a get-together.  I chatted with a few people.  I knew no one but Judy so didn’t circulate.  I’m still no good with people I don’t know, unless sitting with them, as I did with John and Howard, two guys I actually had good conversations with.  Howard went to where my Christmas poem was on display for a look.  He said he liked it.  Previous to that, one of the women I’d talked a bit with, describing my long division poems, had gone to look at it, and returned to tell me, and two friends of hers, that she liked it.  That, and the food I had, made the event a success for me!

Once home, I babbled a bit about how nice it’d be to live to the age of 500 to take care of my blog entry for the day.  My public relations visit to the A&H fesitivities qualifies as another piece of work done for my exhibition.  I did actually take care of a major chore today: this year’s Christmas cards.  I included a two-paragraph year-end letter with most of them.  I spent over two hours taking care of that.  I estimate I have three or four more cards to send.

.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under David Ferry, Enemies of Poetry, Poetry Magazine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.