Archive for December, 2018|Monthly archive page
The Year in Review, or The Latest Album
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: poems, poetry, year end review
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Unlike some poets, who seem able to compose and publish a new book every year, I learned long ago my creative metabolism is more like that of a pop musician, about twelve new pieces, or a new album, annually.
Here’s what I’ve produced this year, with early versions of poems shared here hyperlinked; italicized titles are sequences, while those in quotation marks are individual poems:
Cyberian Vistas (one of which can be read here)
Replies to Mayer Hillman (an early version of one of which can be read here)
Toronto Suite (two of which can be read here and here)
Pasqua Lake Elegies
“A Portrait of the Artist”
“A book I can’t read closed”
“I’m told you’re disappointed”
There are some miscellaneous “one-offs” here, too: “Two [more!] for Mayer Hillman”, “Ontario Election Results in Real Time 2018”, and a little poem on the eve of the provincial elections in Quebec, here.
Happily, too, I delivered a talk on the poetry of Peter Dale Scott and the Postsecular at what used to be called the Learneds in May, while the end of summer saw my collaborator Antoine Malette and myself translating passages of Louis Riel’s Massinahican, which will hopefully appear in an anthology forthcoming from University of California Press in 2019 or 2020.
A Further Serendipity: Concerning Having Nothing to Write
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Donald Hall, poetry, poetry criticism, William Carlos Williams, writer's block
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I doubt there’s a writer who doesn’t experience times when there seems to be nothing to write. I’d wager, though, that that block or absence of inspiration often isn’t so much a lack of some subject as much as the result of some paralyzing judgement by that tyrannical Inner Editor every writer has that this or that matter isn’t worth writing about or that the writer, for whatever reason, just isn’t up to doing it justice.
Yesterday, the late Donald Hall‘s last poem in his notebook popped up in my newsfeed:
Here, Hall turns the Inner Critic’s answer to the question of what’s worth writing about around, a witty if somewhat bitter solution to the problem.
Then, today, I chanced to read these remarks of Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos 
Williams facing the same void:
He’s almost dying, he’s got one foot in the grave (at that time, actually, he was saying, “I’ve got one foot in the grave”). And he thought he had cancer of the anus, actually, at that point. He was very sick, and he was also morbidly fantasizing, and he thought he didn’t have much to write about. (Around that time, I went to see him and he said he had nothing to write about – what can he write about? the cancer of his behind? – I think I mentioned this before). And I said, “Oh, there’s hundreds of young poets in America who would be interested in your behind! – Yes, of course, write about cancer in your behind, anything you can”.
Here, I’d argue, is a different response to the Inner Critic, one that tosses out its conventional, aesthetic criteria for some that are more radical, more ontological: what’s there to write about? Whatever there is to write about.
Poeticritical Serendipity
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Karoline von Günderrode, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, Lyn Hejinian, poetics, poetry, poetry criticism, The Unfollowing
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Donald Wellman reviews Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing, describing it as follows:
Fourteen lines on each page, that’s sonnet length. Little rhyme [or] syllogism employed. No tidy conclusions. Each line as long as it needs to be. Most discontinuous with one another but not necessarily so. It seems there may not be a logic other than method in the construction of Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing (Omnidawn 2016). Nothing follows, no conclusions, the title says it all.
The well-read might be circumspect about a book composed in this manner, sections riming with a sonnet’s length, parataxis the lines’ principle of arrangement, by a poet long-associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (Hejinian is included in both Silliman’s In the American Tree (1986) and Messerli’s “Language” Poetries (1987)), published in 2016.
Such readers might be prompted to further reflection over the implications of these 
compositional characteristics of Hejinian’s book when they read in Alice A. Kuzniar’s Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin about Karoline von Günderrode’s fifteen-verse “Ein apokalyptisches Fragment” (published in 1804), that “…each verse appears as a disjointed fragment in an unconnected, nonteleological series”.
I leave this juxtaposition to speak for itself, for readers with ears to hear and hearts that care to.
“Rothenberg’s concept of ethnopoetics works as a brilliant counter to the dominant literary regime of tight ass Brits and their Yankee counterparts.”
Filed under: Poetry, The Brouillon | Tags: ethnopoetics, Jerome Rothenberg, poetry anthologies
Leave a comment I’ve said to anyone who will listen that any understanding of poetry—what it has been, 
is, and can be—ignorant of Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics is rootless and perverse.
Here’s an appreciation of his project I happened on by chance. Poets, ignore it at your peril!
Poeta Doctus 