Archive for the ‘Poetry Magazine’ Category
Entry 874 — Have I Sold Out?
Thursday, September 27th, 2012
The other day I learned that the Harriet Blog run by Poetry had somehow come across my Scientific American guest blog and given it a nice positive write-up here. The good of this is that it means a little more exposure for the otherstream, and more credibility for it with . . . well, those who ignore everything that is not properly certified by higher-ups. The bad of it, of course, is its scaring me with the possibility that what I’m involved with is now at Poetry’s level. That’s not a genuine worry. If Harriet says something good about this blog, though, I will worry. It’s got no seal of approval on it like “Scientific American.“
To be honest, I’m pleased that the Harriet staff seems to have sincerely liked my blog entry. People like those on it and the more advanced readers of Poetry are the audience I’m trying most to capture with my mathpo blog. So, no more about it.
Entry 595 — Another Review of Poetry Magazine
Friday, December 16th, 2011
The following is another apparently unpublished review of Poetry I did for Small Press Review, this one earlier than the one I posted yesterday.
Poetry
Volume CXCVII, Number 5, February 2011. 90 pp.
Edited by Christian Wiman
published monthly except bimonthly July/August
444 n. Michigan Avenue, Ste 1850
Chicago IL 60611. $3.75, $35/year.
Critic David Orr has a review in this issue of Poetry that typifies what makes it, in my view, the largest obstacle facing superior American poets. It is the belief that poetry “has been all but entirely absorbed by institutions of higher education,” as he quotes Mark McGurl as having put it. Only someone oblivious to all the poetry happening outside academia, most notably, visual poetry, language poetry, sound poetry, cyber poetry and mathematical poetry, can believe this.
True, Poetry once let a few so-so specimens of visual poems into an issue and some language poems into another. But these were token gestures. The proof of the pudding is that it has never devoted space to articles about either. Of course, it will fairly soon give language poetry more pages now that many of the chief language poets have become established–chiefly by virtue of being professors.
What’s depressing about this is that Poetry is wealthy, influential, often-appearing and claims to want to represent the full continuum of contemporary poetry, so could do so much to help the impoverished R&D department of the poetry enterprise.
As for what poetry is in this issue, suffice it to say that Carolyn Forche is one of the two poets named on the front cover as a contributor.
Diary Entry
Thursday, 15 December 2011, 7 P.M. A bad day. It started with my tennis team losing two of three matches including the one I played in–horribly. I got just about nothing done until a little while ago, after taking a couple of APCs. My accomplishment for the day, another blog entry, and a press release for the exhibition. I have now gotten just about all the work for the exhibition done that I need to. I just have a couple of pieces I want to get re-framed by a professional.
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Entry 594 — A Discouraging Force in Poetry
Thursday, December 15th, 2011
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.
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