Let us all now praise the NY Times for continuing to do its part in publicizing poets who write stuff that avoids doing anything that poets weren’t widely doing fifty or more years ago.  The excerpt from its article below should be enough to tell you all you need to know about it without going to the Times:

The Library of Congress announced that it would award the 2014 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry to Patricia Smith for her book “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah.” The $10,000 prize, given for “the most distinguished book of poetry published in the preceding two years,” is donated by the family of Ms. Bobbitt, who was Lyndon B. Johnson’s sister. Ms. Smith, an associate professor at the College of Staten Island, has written six poetry collections; one, “Blood Dazzler” (2008), was a finalist for a National Book Award. Previous winners of the Bobbitt Prize include Charles Wright, W. S. Merwin, Louise Glück and Mark Strand.

It occurs to me that there must by now be at least a thousand different living poets in America who have received a substantial monetary award for their poetry like this Bobbit Prize but not one who is composing the kind of poetry I and a few hundred friends of mine in the field are.

* * *

Here’s another link: it’s to Aeon. I include it because it presents a watered-down version of a small but major element of my theory of cerebral satisfaction.  It’s now almost fifty years ago that I worked out the rudiments of my theory of the unfamiliar and the too-familiar as painful, and the familiar as pleasurable.  Of course, I’ve spruced it up a lot since then, but even then it was probably five or ten times more intelligent than what the Aeon article is about.

Interestingly enough, I was going to submit an article of my thoughts on aesthetic repetition and the like a couple of months ago to Aeon but a friend’s critique convinced me it needed work–too much, I then thought.  I really should go back to it.  I have so many other things to do, though!

* * *

Urp.

.