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Aspects of Poetics (Part One)
Originally presented as a talk to the Chicago Poetics Seminar, we will be posting this article in two parts, the second of which will appear in the following update. (By “poetics,” I’m thinking of one of the basic ways we take this word when applied to poetry, a proposal, a manifesto, a theory….) Proust sets […]
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When Addressing Field for British Isles…
I don’t know if you care for me to speak; your attention, your collective expectancy tells me that you do, but your silence, instead of inviting me to break it, asks and expects more of the same. You wait for my complete compliance, but I could never be as still. And also, you don’t have […]
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On Philip Jenks’ On the Cave You Live In
On the Cave You Live In, poems by Philip Jenks. Flood Editions (ISBN# 0-9710059-2-3);50 pages. $10.00. Seizures, the body’s aberrant inflection of physiological distress, might be construed as a type of extenuating reflex, parroting the mechanism of response in a negative realization. They are a serious, frequently debilitating depth-charge—autonomous in that they incur involuntary performance, […]
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Hurrah for Euphony
Dedicated to Young Poets“Hurrah for Euphony” was written during the semester Ronald Johnson taught creative writing at UC-Berkeley in 1994, a position that allowed him very temporarily to move back to his beloved Bay Area from Topeka, where he felt he had been exiled, much like Ovid before him (though RJ’s was a financial rather than political exile). […]
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An Annotated Antidote to Nü Metal
When my wife & I moved from Chicago to St. Louis in August, 2000, we decided to get cable. Reception in St. Louis is awful & we knew we’d want to be watching TV. Last time I had cable was in 1996, so that my brother & I could watch all the Bulls games. I […]
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On A Recent Recording Entitled Act Five, Scene One
Act Five, Scene One is an hour-long piece that has as its wellsprings two relatively short sections. The first occurs at the beginning of the piece and the second appears at the thirty-minute mark. The rest of the piece largely consists of versionings of this material, with the significant exception of Tony Conrad’s composition-within-a-composition, which […]
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Where Are All the Literary Agitators?
In a recent New York Times Book Review interview, novelist Rick Moody — not chiefly known as a pusher of polemical fiction or social views — had this to say: “Messing around with form is great, but I still want stories to save lives.” His remark is startling & apt, coming as it does in […]
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On Peter O’Leary’s Watchfulness
Watchfulness, poems by Peter O’Leary Spuyten Duyvil (ISBN# 1-881471-73-X); 144 pages. $12.00 Despite its deep-searching mysticism and splendid inventions of gnostic histories, Peter O’Leary’s first collection, Watchfulness, shares little with the tradition of Western devotional verse. Although the tonal and iconic elements might resemble in passing Herbert, Blake, Hopkins, even R.S. Thomas, these poems derive […]