What I'm Reading #4

I have a short list for some reason this week. I think that means I've been busy.

Winters, Anne. The Displaced of Capital. The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Winters is a thoroughly urban poet (she visited class last night and said that to her, nature was a tree growing out of a grate in the sidewalk!) which is something quite foreign to me, but is absolutley captivating. There is something in the way she describes New York city that makes it feel organic rather than man-made.

While some of the criticism I read praised the series "A Sonnet Map of Manhattan" above the long narrative poem "The Immigrant Woman," I felt quite the opposite. The sonnets were interesting, but "The Immigrant Woman" was captivating. Snapshots of New York's architecture, of grad student life, of a woman and her daughter living in a tenement, of a friendship that grows and withers--all these things are presented with the right amounts of drama, of detatchment, of detail. I could read this poem 1000 times and not grow tired of it, I think.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Bantam Classics, orignally published 1776.

I'm just starting to dig into this one, so forgive me if I'm short sighted. The back of the book says Smith "provided the first--and still the most eloquent--integrated description of the workings of a market economy." I'm only to the chapter where he describes the invention of money, so... (seriously--he spends 10 pages explaining how much a schilling weighs!)

What's strange here (for me) is the complete lack of political correctness. There are civilized folks and there are savages. People who don't have a specialized skill are likely to be "slothful and lazy"--and it goes on. What he's describing is the division of labor, and the advances that this has made possible. Of course, he seems to be pretty accurate (if you take away the bias) but I'm absolutely at a loss as to what we (a group of first year PhD students in English studies) are going to have to talk about. A classmate of mine who "gets" this theory stuff has directed me to davidharvey.org and Marx to contextualize. We'll see what happens.

What I'm Reading #2/3 - The Lightning Round

I'm a bit busier than I'd expected this semester (isn't that always the case?) and this little project keeps getting bumped to the bottom of the list. I still think keeping an annotated bibliography is a good idea, I'm just not sure how good. So today, I'm setting a timer for 10 minutes. Whatever I can do in that amount of time, great. Here goes:

For Class:

Fried, Michael. The Next Bend in the Road. University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Fried is a poet and an art historian, and (as expected) many of his poems are ekphrastic. While I think these poems do what they set out to do, it's not a project I'm terribly interested in pursuing. I do wonder, though, how Fried defines "prose poem," as many of his read more like museum plaques than poems.

Kleinzahler, August. The Strange Hours Travelers Keep. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

If you followed my link the other day, you would have found Kleinzahler's interview at bookslut. I linked it because I think it's amusing, but also because his irreverence is one of my favorite qualities of his poetry. I imagine Kleinzahler to be the middle-aged guy at the party who drinks too much scotch, hits on 25 year old women, and tells stories about French hookers while smoking a giant, nasty-smelling cigar. And usually, I love that guy (although yes, sometimes he can be creepy). At any rate, I liked the book.

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Uh-oh. Ten minutes are up. I don't get many points for that performance.

Here's what I didn't have time to mention:
David Shipler, The Working Poor (the primary text for my freshman comp classes)
Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
Miscellaneous texts on rhetoric/rhetorical theory

What I'm Reading - #1

As promised, here's a brief look at what I'm reading this week.

Just Because:

Pink, Daniel H., A Whole New Mind, Riverhead Books, 2005.

Pink claims that “Right-brainers” will be the most sought-after and successful employees in what he calls the Conceptual Age (which follows the information age). MFAs will be the new MBAs, he says, and empathy, creativity, and “joyfulness” are some of the key skills we all need to brush up on to stay competitive. I'm only about 60 pages in--I'll let you know if he comes up with anything useful.

For Class:

Moxley, Jennifer, The Sense Record, Edge, 2002.

My first impression of The Sense Record was that despite some really powerful, beautiful poems, the collection as a whole wasn’t for me. Many poems seemed to be overly expository, others too theoretical for my taste. After class discussion last night though, I realized that I missed a lot of what Moxley was setting out to do because my background in poetry just isn’t strong enough. Some of the criticism was helpful (see below), but I will be coming back to this collection after I’ve brushed up on my American poetry pre-1980.* Moxley makes allusions to Wordsworth and Whitman that flew right over my head, and now that I know they’re there, I may be able to take a little more away from what I’ve read. Also in this collection: ars poetica, feminism, critique of the academy, etc., Language poetry meets lyric poetry (?)... I'm feeling terribly inarticulate here, and know I'm not giving this book a fair shake. I'll be reading it again and revising my notes, hopefully before the end of the semester.

Bartlett, Lee, "What is 'Language Poetry'?" Critical Inquiry 12, 1986.

Language poetry is a reaction to/critique of "the workshop poem" and the "organizing I" in confessional poetry, yadda, yadda, yadda. Here's what I don't get: why can't we all just write the kind of poetry we want to write?

To be fair, what I did find interesting/instructive is the emphasis on deconstruction, text "as a play of subtexts," and the importance of signification and sound.

Also interesting: what I thought was Language Poetry is not Language Poetry, although I'm still not sure what is.

Burt, Stephen, “The Elliptical Poets,” American Letters and Commentary, 1999 (?).

In this short essay, Burt identifies a school of poetry that follows Language poetry and is characterized by “Fragmentation, jumpiness, audacity, performance, grammatical oddity, rebellion, voice, [and] some measure of closure.” Some poets he names to this school are Ann Carson, C.D. Wright, Liam Rector, Mark Levine, Lucie Brock-Broido, among others. Rather than paraphrasing, I’ll just quote his conclusion, which ties things up nicely:

[Elliptical poets] want to convey both metaphysical challenge and recognizable, seen and tasted, detail. Ellipticists reject: poems written in order to demonstrate theories; scene-painting, and prettiness as its own end; slogans; authenticity and wholeheartedness; mysticism; straight-up narrative; and extended abstraction […]. Elliptical poets are uneasy about (less often, hostile to) inherited elites and privileges, but they are not populists, and won’t write down to, or connect the dots for, their readers; their difficulty conveys respect.

I also read, but won't bore you with summaries of:

• Oren Izenberg's "Language Poetry and Collective Life"
• Marjorie Perloff's "After Language Poetry: Innovation and its Theoretical Discontents"
• OEI's special "After Language Poetry" issue, with short essays by poets including Moxley, Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, and others

*Yes, I know. It's shameful that I am only well versed in contemporary poetry. I focused heavily on fiction as an undergrad and am trying to make up for it little-by-little. That's why I'm getting a PhD.

Spring Semester Eve

John is on a plane back to Cleveland, I've finished some proofing on Barn Owl Review #2 and there's nothing more I can put between myself and day one of Spring 09.

I don't have butterflies in my stomach...they're buzzards.

I'm not ready to teach tomorrow. I don't have a solid class plan, I don't have copies, and (more importantly) I don't know what I'm going to wear. I can't wear power heels because there's a foot of snow on the ground, and I don't think my ugly-ass hiking boots (the only water proof shoes I own) are going to inspire anyone. But seriously. The copies are my biggest worry. Do I go to staples and pay, or do I try to wake up early enough to get to school an hour or so before class starts so that I can get my copy code and do them for free? And why, oh why, do I have to do my own copies? At UA, you just fill out a little form and the student assistants do it for you. I like it a lot better that way. (Item #817 on the list of things I like better about UA.)

Okay, so I procrastinated. But does that really surprise you? I always wait until the last minute, and with John visiting for the last week, I wasn't about to spend all my time in University Hall putting the finishing touches on my syllabus and handouts. So I'm down to the wire. It'll get done and this time tomorrow I'll be one down, 44 to go.

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Since the beginning of my grad student career, I've been meaning to start an annotated bibliography. A prof suggested it once, and it seemed like something only the most anal retentive people would actually do, but now it seems almost essential to keeping everything straight. I haven't even started putting together my exam committee yet, but I'm fairly sure of the topics I'll choose (contemporary poetry, working class lit, etc., etc.), so it couldn't hurt. Anyway, the point is I am going to try to start my annotated bib this semester, and I'm going to use this blog to keep myself honest. So, starting Tuesday, I'll be posting a list of what I'm reading, with short summaries/reviews each week. You have my permission to poke, prod, and torment me if I miss any of the next 15 weeks.

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Well, I've officially procrastinated longer than I planned. Sigh. Back to the plans...