Some critical items newly up on the web that are worth reading & thinking about:

 

The first is Hank Lazer’s “The People’s Poetry,” in the current issue of The Boston Review. The second is “Avant, Post-Avant, and Beyond,” a roundtable on Joan Houlihan’s Boston Comment website, featuring Oren Izenberg, Norman Finkelstein, Stephen Burt, Alan Golding, H.L. Hix, Kent Johnson & Joe Amato. Amato’s trope of the yellow submarine is priceless – I kept waiting for him to name The Blue Meanies & break out in a chorus of We all live….

 

The roundtable grew out of reactions to Houlihan’s own negative take on contemporary writing, but she has interestingly stepped back from the fray itself, presumably functioning here primarily to frame questions. The questions, it is worth noting, are fair & reasonable. Lazer’s focus is so close to the concerns of the roundtable that the two really function as contributions to the same larger debate, which might be characterized as how best to characterize the post-language literary landscape. A question that haunts this blog much of the time as well.

 

Also in The Boston Review & definitely worth reading is Marjorie Perloff’s review of Richard Sieburth’s new editions of the poetry of Ezra Pound. 

 

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Great moments in irony: The 2004 René Wellek Prize, awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association, has gone to Barrett Watten’s The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Politics. Wellek at least attended the Prague School for Linguistics while Roman Jakobson was on its faculty, from whom he seems to have borrowed (and denatured) much of the work of the Russian Formalists in his particular contribution to New Criticism as it emerged in the 1930s.

 

This blog gave Watten’s book – which I’m still reading – its very first critical mention back in June 2003. When I read it, the first verse of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” runs incessantly through my backbrain. Not only are Watten’s own concerns similar, but the density that characterizes Dylan’s best writing – almost a verticality – is something that Watten shares & has brought forward both in his poetry & his critical work. Watten’s book deserves every award it gets.

 

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Weird personal note: Friday afternoon, while I was having a perfectly ordinary phone conversation with a friend, the hearing on the right side of my head literally shut off. A trip to the doctor yesterday revealed no ear wax buildup, so I’ve been given some steroids & an anti-viral medication in the hopes that this is what is causing pressure on the nerves. After about eight hours on the steroids (but before I’d gotten the anti-viral meds) my hearing started to return. I’ll see a specialist tomorrow, but it’s been very disorienting. I was at a restaurant on Friday night & was served the wrong entrée & it took me the longest time to realize it, simply because I couldn’t think straight. So any craziness here this coming week will probably just be an accurate reflection of your correspondent.