A good but brief interview with Kyle Schlesinger in
A couple of good posts on Thomas Meyer by Jeff Davis, including a test of translation, resurrecting a model of close reading that Clayton Eshleman pioneered in the great journal Caterpillar.
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This blog got noticed by Slate, not for anything written about poetry, but about fashion…. What impact did this have on visits here? So far as I can tell, absolutely none.
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Twenty-three days after her death, the Los Angeles Times weighs in with an obit of Barbara Guest. Again we get the trifecta: Guest is associated in this short piece with modernism, Abstract Expressionism and language poetry, as if these terms were commensurate and flowed easily one into the other. At least the examples of Abstract Expressionism are Pollock & de Kooning, the example of langpo Charles Bernstein.
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Last night, right before the toasters – rebel robots called Cylons, bent on the destruction of the human race – arrived to capture the human colony on the planet of New Caprica in the season-ending episode of Battlestar Gallactica, a union rep, Galen Tyrol, played by Aaron Douglas, gave a rousing speech that was, word for word, Mario Savio’s call to action from the steps of Sproul Hall just prior to the Free Speech Movement sit-in on December 3, 1964:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.
To someone who was fortunate enough to hear those lines the first time they were given, that was a very weird moment of déjà vu indeed.
