21. Scottish Poetry Library blog mourns the death of young singer-songwriter, poet Lise Sinclair. We do, too.
22. Boston Book Review interviews Maureen McLane, author of Her Poets, chapters of which first appeared in the BBR.
23-26. Culture.pl issues notices of Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Symborska, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, and Alexsander Wat.
27. British Museum blog reports another digitized translation of Homer’s Iliad. Silliman does care about the past!
28. Small Press Distribution blog reports sales rankings for the last few years. We’ve never read any of these books.
29. Blues.Gr blog interviews Jim McCrary, poet from Lawrence, KS, who partied with Ginsberg and Burroughs. We’re supposed to envy the snobby/workingclass tawdriness of it all.
30. Jean Daive poems (wretched little things).
31. Denver Westword Blog interviews Anne Waldman on her new book, Grossamurmur, The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University at Bolder, etc She’s a good Buddhist. And good.
32. The Economist reports Germany’s state owned railway is discouraging the use of Denglisch: German Anglicisms. Those Germans. Always up to no good.
33. Brooklyn Poets interviews Matthea Harvey, who feels very five minutes ago. She thinks pets are really cool, which is just great.
34. Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the first page (typed) with his edits. The archival humanizing of Ashbery begins.
35. Fiction Writers Review: “Why Fiction Writers Should Read Poetry” by Lucas Hunt. Boring, trite. “Poetry is the mud that grows the seed that becomes the forest.” Or something.
36. The Atlantic “The Hole In Our Collective Memory” Amazon numbers: books still under copyright (mid-20th century) lose out to very recent books and books in the public domain (19th century, early 20th cen). More research that bares out the obvious. But nice to know.
37. Huffpost Blog piece on plagiarism by famous poets and songwriters by David Galenson, Professor of Economics at U. Chicago: Lots of big photos of the Beatles, etc. Not one example of plagiarism. Doh!
38. Paul Hoover cheerfully interviewed on all the reading that went into compiling his Norton Post-Modern Poetry anthology. On UPenn. Good for you, Paul.
39. Huffpost Detroit: Elmore Leonard in hospital. (He’s now dead.)
40. Sesame Street parodies “Sons of Anarchy” with “Sons of Poetry” reports USA Today.
41. NYTimes on government’s victory over Apple on E-book price fixing.
42. BBC: Publishers defend Apple.
43. Web Urbanist tells us that a closed Walmart now houses the largest library in the U.S.
44. Solmaz Sharif, by way of William Carlos Williams, makes several artsy-fartsy remarks in the Kenyon Review blog on the Washington Post seeking op-ed political poems. Apparently some poets are incensed the Post wants new opinion couched in old-fashioned poetry.
45-50. Jorie Graham’s in-laws sell Washington Post. Weighing in briefly are the Economist, HuffPost, and the New Yorker, the latter joking that Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos clicked on “Buy Post” by mistake. Walter Isaacson says Bezos is OK; just a “customer service” guy. According to Huffpost Business, the recent failure of Kaplan Higher Education, the for-profit college conglomerate, a revenue winner until recently, and owned by the Washington Post, was key to the Post’s financial troubles.
51. Economist looks at star journalists breaking away from their newspapers.
52. Philadelphia Business Journal looks at newspapers’ financial fall. In a related item: The New York Times owned The Boston Globe. That sports injustice has been revenged, as John Henry, Red Sox owner, just purchased the Globe for a song.
53. A review of Jane Yeh’s book of poems, The Ninjas. The reviewer is excited. We’re not.
54. continent is a new blog which sounds like undergraduate philosophy students trying to say something clever about Modernism so that it makes a kind of abstract, theoretical sense without making any sense. In this particular link on Samuel Beckett’s “Failure to Fail,” Beckett and Gertrude Stein are quoted as producing language that “goes on” without making sense—which is pure “genius,” apparently.
55. Endgame by Becket on-line.
56. George Stanley’s book of poetry, After Desire, has a trailer on Vimeo.
57. continent on “Political Poetry” in terms of Capitalist-hating, lots of weed-smoking, self-consciously optimistic in a “negative capability,”pro-art, pro-writing kind of way. Touchingly sincere. Predictable.
58. Flavorwire’s “23 People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry in 2013″ This list has been roundly attacked for being too “white.” As for the poetry, Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke,” which has made something of a Facebook splash, reads like a New Yorker short story, except for the repetition of the phrase, “the rape joke,” which means “the rapist.” “Rape Joke” has a darkly comic narrative power, which we applaud. Unfortunately, none of the other poems linked are very good, with perhaps the exception of Ariana Reines—who just happens to write about “fucking” a lot—whose poem has a certain coherency and intelligence. The typical poem here, the chief feature of which is “I’m a bored adolescent who can’t write in complete sentences!” doesn’t fly. Not that neatly written prose—the poem by Thomas Sayers Ellis, for instance—automatically makes a poem better. We see the prosaic and the non-prosaic. But not much poetry. O Program Era, what hath thou wrought?
59. Flavorwire’s “A List of Things to Ask Yourself When You’re Making A List of Poets” falls under the category of Duh.
60. Vincent Toro’s list on the English Kills Review, a counter to Flavorwire’s, is an indignant ethical list of 23, but it is a list, on a quick read, with more interesting poets: Natalie Diaz, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Urayoan Noel, Idra Novey, and Patrick Rosal. 6 out of 23 is a pretty good percentage these days. We especially liked “In the Faraway Suburbs” by Noel and “My Mother Will Take A Lover” by Guerrero.” Congratulations, Vincent. You win the battle of the Lists.
