POETICKS

I walked four miles today. My physical therapist and my surgeon are agreed that I shouldn’t walk more than half a mile. But I had somewhere to go, and have this weird self-belief in my ability to walk. I don’t have the same self-belief in any other physical ability so haven’t done and won’t do anything else I’m not supposed to. I’m not sure what my point is–maybe something about  aconceptual knowledge versus conceptual expertise.

But also to explain why I’m too tired to say more, today, about William Logan in the latest issue of New Criterion except that he has finally actually written about a poet I consider avant-garde (albeit, barely), Rae Armantrout. I guess he had to since she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner and has been a member of the Academy of American Poets and otherwise credentialed for quite a while. He pans her, of course. Ignorantly, of course. Okay, semi-ignorantly. The main thing is that he discusses her–for over a page. Bringing the New Criterion briefly up to 1980.

He also discusses Wilbur’s latest, but I only read the part about Armantrout. Tired. I’ll read the rest of Logan’s commentary, though–I read every word of every issue of the New Criterion. I figure it gives me a good anchor in 1950 to sail into newer things from. I truly wish there were a magazine around as good about 2000 as it is about 1950 (and cultural figures repeating it in 2011).

Later Note:  The book was Broken English, by Heather McHugh.  It showed up.  I had left it in the car of the friends who’d driven me home from the healthcare center with a lot of other stuff in a large shopping bag.  I guess I’m glad I found it.  I’m very glad of the stuff that turned up with it, which included some magazines and two other books that it would have driven me beserk to have looked for and not found.  I wasn’t totally stupid, by the way: I called Linda, my ride home, and asked her to check her car.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts. 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.