Golem and swan

Thanks to Prufrock News for once again featuring one of my poems, this time linking to "The Poet and the Golem" from Books and Culture. Artists of all sorts need chatty champions, people who are willing to get the word out and say in public what they admire and like.

For every writer who is the lucky recipient of a black swan, there are many more who go swanless. After Typee and Omoo, Melville went so swanless that he was eventually forgotten. Dickinson was swanless, though I expect swanlessness was good for her art--nobody chiseled off the oddly important dashes or beat her over the head with the idea of how very strange and curious her work appeared, and that much of swanlessness was good for her singular art. (Most people aren't so strong and vitally themselves as she was.) Poe was so terribly swanless. And Kafka was swanless. In fact, most artists in most artistic fields go swanless.

And so I very much appreciate that Micah Mattix, busy professor that he is, takes the time to share news about poets and writers he finds worthy on daily basis. It is a good thing that he does, and he does it faithfully. If you want to subscribe, go here.

"A fantastic in poetry that makes sense"

Clive Hicks-Jenkins vignette for Thaliad

Thank you to Micah Mattix for mentioning Thaliad in his "Surrealism Was a Mistake" at The American Conservative. Here's a clip from the piece, which I found interesting, and not just because he mentions a book of mine...

       Despite this, soft surrealism—that is, a little incoherence there, an out of place violent or sexual image there (no one tries to actually use automatism)—is still relatively popular today. It makes a poem look edgy, in-the-know, and it has a nice leftist pedigree. The problem is that this soft surrealism can hide incompetence and often adds nothing to a poem, other than the above stylish marking. (Examples—almost all published this month—can be found here, here, here, here, and here.)
       Stephen Burt has written against this soft surrealism, which he calls “elliptical poetry,” and has suggested that a renewed focus on objects in poetry—on “well-made, attentive, unornamented things”—might (and should) replace the “slippery, digressive, polyvocalic,…overlapping, colorful fragments” of a still fashionable soft surrealism.
       I would propose a different route. Getting rid of incoherence, meaningless images, fragmented syntax, and so forth, could open a much needed opportunity for a fantastic in poetry that makes sense. Too long has the fantastic been wedded to Breton’s watered-down automatism, and breaking definitively free from it might open the field for more poems like Marly Youmans’s Thaliad or Joe Fletcher’s Sleigh Ride. And that would be a very good thing.

There are some interesting responses... And I don't know Joe Fletcher. I'll have to remedy that gap!

Waterborne

Here's a bit of youtube snow and Frost from Eric Whitacre

for friends with unexpected snow and ice...

Thanks to critic and reviewer Micah Mattix for including a link to my sonnet "Waterborne" in his Prufrock newsletter (sign up!) yesterday. Here's the poem in Alexander Pepple's Able Muse. The poem is also forthcoming in an anthology edited by poet Mary Meriam.

Please note that today there are two posts--slip on down to the next post to see links to facebook friends with Etsy shops and new books. (And one more to Melanie at Antiphon, and then on and on!)