New book acquisitions

Here are the most recent arrivals on my desk:

Mount Clutter by Sarah Lindsay arrived this week. I've read her other collections with great delight, and so far this one is every bit as good as the others. She's a fantastic poet, smart and readable. She cuts no corners when it comes to craft and always delivers something that's entertaining for the reader. What more could one ask for?










Okay, so it's not poetry, but I've really been enjoying Roberto Bolaño's poetry, and as promised, I will now be reading his fiction, starting with The Savage Detectives. I can't wait.












Hooked by Carolyn Smart takes as its subject matter the lives of seven famous or infamous women -- Myra Hindley, Unity Mitford, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Carrington, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, and Elizabeth Smart -- each of whom was at some point possessed by addiction or obsession, so it should make for heady, and intriguing, reading.

"Alien vs. Predator" -- a poem by Michael Robbins

Okay everybody, let's all love poet Michael Robbins....

Seriously.

A couple of weeks ago, Michael Robbin's poem "Alien vs. Predator" appeared in The New Yorker, and all kinds of wonderful hell broke loose. I'm arriving a little late to the dance, and lots of interesting things have already been said about it, but for those who haven't encountered this story yet, I've collected the essentials.



First of all, go to The New Yorker and read the poem. But here's a taste:

Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.

We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s

berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys

for a living, you’d pray to me, too.

I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.

That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree

making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.

I set the controls, I pioneer

the seeding of the ionosphere.

I translate the Bible into velociraptor.

.... The rest is here.


Zach Baron weighs in.

Zach Baron interviews Michael Robbins.

Carl Wilson weighs in.

I can't wait for a full collection of poems by Michael Robbins; I think it's safe to assume he's not the same Michael Robbins who wrote the collection of spiritual/healing poems Love Like This. His biographical note at Columbia College says he's writing his "dissertation on the perseverance of the lyric subject after confessionalism & Language poetry" which means he's a good egg in my book.

Poet and novelist John Updike: 1932 - 2009

The New York Times

The Globe and Mail

The National Post

The Boston Globe

The Telegraph

The Guardian

The BBC

Writing advice from the professionals

Tony Hoagland on delivering the accident:




Martin Amis on avoiding the cliché:




Garrison Keillor on getting out of the house:

More Sarah Lindsay

Clearly, I have been on a Sarah Lindsay (pictured) kick lately. It's official: I'm a fan. In case my enthusiasm is at all contagious, perhaps you would like to read this wonderful review by Daisy Fried in Poetry Magazine of Lindsay's latest book, Twigs & Knucklebones.

Twigs & Knucklebones is a rare thing in poetry—a very good read. Fans of Sarah Lindsay's previous books, National Book Award finalist Primate Behavior (1997) and Mount Clutter (2002), will find here what they found there, only more so: freaks of nature and freakish nature, far-flung and underexplored places, things scientific and sci-fi, real things that seem invented, imaginary things that seem real. Orchids that grow underground. The introduction of starlings to America. Cities of the dead. Life on Jupiter's moon.

Lindsay's poems are as narrative as poems can get—they tell elaborate stories—but aren't at all confessional. Lindsay uses the word "I" to refer to herself or a poet-speaker in very few poems. Her voice in Twigs & Knucklebones is omniscient yet intimate, super-literate and flawlessly graceful, like a really good lecturer who knows how to entertain an audience while speaking on complex subject matters. In a sense these are "Research & Development" poems. One suspects Lindsay reads an article, for example, about a species of extinct zebra, then writes "Elegy for the Quagga." But the R&D never overwhelms insight or music. "Krakatau split with a blinding noise," writes Lindsay, of the volcanic island's 1883 explosion. "Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam, / the last known member of Equus quagga, / the southernmost subspecies of zebra, died." A little later, "Who needs to hear a quagga's voice?"

The poet does, and by the end of the poem, so does the reader—and can't. It feels like a kind of wound:

Even if, when it sank to its irreplaceable knees,
when its unique throat closed behind a sigh,
no dust rose to redden a whole year's sunsets,
no one unwittingly busy
two thousand miles away jumped at the sound,
no ashes rained on ships in the merciless sea

Read the rest of the review here.

New Book Purchases

This year, I have decided to try to record all my new book purchases on my blog, at least new poetry and poetry-related books. We will see how long this lasts, but since I bought two new books yesterday, now seems like a good time to start.

First, we have Primate Behavior by Sarah Lindsay. I loved Lindsay's most recent book (Twigs & Knucklebones, Copper Canyon, 2008) so much, I decided to order her previous books. Primate Behavior is her first collection, and it was published by Grove Press in 1997. Her second collection, Mount Clutter (Grove, 2002), is still on order.

So far, her first collection is anything but a disappointment. The more of her poems I read, the more I like her as a poet. I read her work with excitement and a small amount of envy. She is quickly becoming one of my favourite contemporary poets.





Next, we have The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño is a hot commodity these days, as translations of his novels are increasingly popular with English-speaking readers. Bolaño admitted he thought of himself as a poet first and foremost, saying, "The poetry makes me blush less." With this in mind, I have decided to make his poetry my personal introduction to his works.

This book contains 44 poems in the original Spanish and in English translation on facing pages. So far, so good.





I ordered this last year, but it arrived in 2009. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer is a must have, in my opinion. He is my favourite poet of the Berkeley Renaissance. It's been a pleasure since it arrived, and it will remain so for a long, long time.

My Top Ten Poetry Books of 2008... and then some.

Okay, I'm probably forgetting something here, and I haven't got around to reading all the books I've meant to this year, and I do have a stack of books I've bought but haven't read yet, so try not to take this too seriously. If your book isn't here, I apologize. You know I think you're brilliant. These are not ranked (stopping at ten is arbitrary enough), rather, they are listed in alphabetical order by author:

1) Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse by Darcie Dennigan (Fordham University Press)

2) All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman (APR/Honickman 1st Book Award)

3) Crabwise to the Hounds by Jeramy Dodds (Coach House Books)

4) Gloria by Selima Hill (Bloodaxe Books)

5) Twigs & Knucklebones by Sarah Lindsay (Copper Canyon Press)

6) Seven Notebooks by Campbell McGrath (HarperCollins)

7) The New Layman's Almanac by Jacob McArthur Mooney (McClelland & Stewart)

8) The Sentinel by A.F. Moritz (House of Anansi Press)

9) Dead Cars in Managua by Stuart Ross (Punchy Writers/DC Books)

10) Blert by Jordan Scott (Coach House Books)

It's interesting to note that four books that made my list are first books (Dennigan, Dickman, Dodds, and Mooney).


BOOKS THAT I EDITED

To avoid the appearance of favouritism, I haven't included books that I edited for my own imprint with Insomniac Press on my top ten list, but I am still very proud of these books and would like to recommend them, as well. Here they are in alphabetical order by author:

1) The Debaucher by Jason Camlot

2) The Red Element by Catherine Graham

3) Into the Drowned World by Ryan Kamstra



HONOURABLE MENTIONS
(other books I loved this year, because stopping at ten is arbitrary enough)

1) Palilalia by Jefferey Donaldson (MQUP)

2) Repose by Adam Getty (Nightwood Editions)

3) Be Calm, Honey by David W. McFadden (The Mansfield Press)

4) Noble Gas, Penny Black by David O'Meara (Brick Books)

5) Breaker by Sue Sinclair (Brick Books)

6) Jeremiah, Ohio by Adam Sol (Anansi)

7) Ghost Soldier by James Tate (Ecco/HarperCollins)


Happy reading!

Resurgence of painting's popularity bodes well for lyrical poetry, I think.

Peter Darbyshire's CanCult.ca points to this article by Deborah Campbell in Canadian Art magazine, and while it is about the resurgence in the popularity of painting as an artform, I think the general ideas behind this resurgence in painting's popularity bode well for lyrical poetry, too.

The whole article is very interesting, but, for me, it boils down to this:

For artists who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, painting had not only been knocked from its centuries old pedestal but had become a very nearly leprous form, replaced by conceptual and -- particularly in Vancouver -- photo-based art. To be a young painter in a university program at the time was to be bludgeoned with critical texts such as Douglas Crimp’s famous 1981 essay “The End of Painting,” a defi nitive attack on the medium that today might be considered as infl uential -- and as wrong-headed -- as Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?”

...

“The conceptual practice was very good for Vancouver in that it established an example of success -- that local artists can be respected internationally and have signifi cant careers,” he says. The unfortunate side effect was that other possibilities were all but foreclosed.

“Painting was incorrect and the correct thinkers scorned it,” he continues. “Under conceptualism, human empathy was replaced with correct thought and intellection and self-pride in intellection. Spirit was taken off the agenda. Rhythm was taken off the agenda. Soul was taken off the agenda. The only thing left was the narrow spectrum of the intellectual.” -- (Neil Campbell, a sessional instructor at Emily Carr whose abstract geometric paintings opened the fall 2008 season at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York.)

...

Which makes one think. Could it be that a lopsided emphasis on intellect -- methodical, analytic, scholarly, bloodless -- is losing traction? It may be that the failure of intellect, of technology, to contend with the troubles confronting the planet -- troubles too often brought about by technological innovation and its Edward Burtynsky-esque consequences -- has engendered a backlash. Or that, at a time when it’s often said that anyone can make a movie on a laptop, we want to see something anyone can’t do -- like make really interesting stuff with their hands. Or maybe people have just gotten bored.

I am completely in favour of this boom for the tactile arts. As Peter Darbyshire said on his blog, we should support "anything that’s about craft rather than just being a gimmick." The reason I think this bodes well for lyrical poetry is pretty simple. Movements in literary circles tend to trail movements in the art world, and this might mean that people are also getting bored with poetry that is methodical, analytic, scholarly, and bloodless. I, for one, grow every day more and more tired of poetry that seems to exist for no other purpose than to illustrate some tautological tidbit of critical theory, which is a creative impulse I really can't reconcile with a love of poetry. It isn't difficult to plug some words into a formula and watch the intellectualized gibberish spill forth. But where is the craft? Where is the love? Wanting to become a poet because you love critical theory is like wanting to become a chef because you love cutlery. The result is something no one should have to stomach.