Famous Americans
Disclosure: Loren Goodman’s time at Columbia coincided with mine. While I generally follow Publishers Weekly‘s lead in preferring not to talk about first books of poems, and given that my eyebrows arch automatically when I see other critics praise their friends, I would feel remiss…
Corpus Socius
Emily Dickinson’s lines A bomb Upon the Ceiling Is an Improving thing It keeps the Nerves progressive Conjecture flourishing articulate my experience of reading Lance Phillips’ Corpus Socius. Phillips’ intense rhetoric of fragmentation and condensation elides narrative and image in the service of spiritual questing….
Krypton Nights
If it is true that no great and enduring volume can be written on the flea, it is equally true that the function the flea cannot be made to occupy will be well served by ever-more great and enduring volumes. Recourse to material (sometimes transubstantiated…
Complete Fiction
A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy. — “A Step Away from Them,” Frank O’Hara One view of criticism is that, whatever its ostensible subject and purpose may be, its real…
Spar
I am ambivalent about Karen Volkman’s poetry. I’m aware, as I read her second book, Spar, of a continuous subliminal excitement, the kind I trust in some writers from Mallarme on to lead me somehow to an undeniable ineffable experience. I also get a sense…
Deposition
The divine: what a dilemma. Substantial credit is due to Katie Ford for her efforts to contend simultaneously with both the more gnostic aspects of her chosen Christian sets of reference, as well as their theologies and the affinities and constraints those theologies suggest. To…
The Captain Lands in Paradise
The Davis Test, as performed by the Department of Viticulture and Enology at University of California, Davis, has apparently proved that people can’t tell the difference between red and white wine without color and temperature clues. These clues form our expectations, which in turn form…
The Violence of the Morning
If this review hops around a bit, well, maybe it’s because I’m hopping mad. Or maybe Bedient has given me the hiccups. I’m just going to get the inconsistent praise out of the way for the benefit of those who have read the book and…
The Soldiers of Year II
About halfway through her new American collection, Irish poet Medbh McGuckian invokes the navel of the dream, the constant Freud used in The Interpretation of Dreams to balance his equation of waking life and the irrational: I have had cloud ravenous upon me as the…
Sleeping with the Dictionary
Fun, in poetry, when it isn’t simply an attention-getting device, has been demoted to the position of Prelude to Sincerity: something to be brushed aside—under the rug, into the closet, quick before the company gets here—to allow warm feelings in. Often poetry’s playfulness serves to…
The Body
The new poem is an essay or a novel; at least it calls itself so. Invested in the kind of plasticity Bakhtin claimed for the novel, some of the most inventive poetry today plays in the nowheresville of multi-generic experimentalism. If poetry is in the…
Memory Cards and Adoption Papers
When I worked at the art gallery ten years ago, Ted Greenwald told me a few times to hurry up and get my first book out of the way so I could get down to business. But what about Wallace Stevens? I said. What about…