Adventures in Scholarship: Garrick Davis on the Textbook Understanding Poetry
Reviewed: Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. 1st edition, 1938. 2nd edition, 1950. 3rd edition, 1960. 4th edition, 1976. What was the most important literature textbook of the 20th century? A work by two associate professors at Louisiana State University, it turns out, which went through four editions, and which made millions for [...]
An American Way to Go: John Foy on Peter Balakian
Reviewed: Ziggurat by Peter Balakian. University of Chicago Press, 2010.Peter Balakian’s poetry is a “strange brew of wind and light” distilled to one degree or another from primal trauma. He’s as American as Walt Whitman and Joe Namath, a product of high school football teams in the affluent New Jersey suburbs, but he is not [...]
Rick Joines on the Gravity and Levity of Kay Ryan
Reviewed: The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan. Grove Press, 2011. 288 pages. $14.95.Kay Ryan’s pulling-herself-up-by-her-own-muddied-Blundstone-bootstraps-story is already the stuff of legend. After writing and publishing poems for 20 years or so in relative obscurity, in this last decade she became the darling of Poetry Magazine, won a Guggenheim and the [...]
A Strange and Beautiful Noise: Late Ashbery Syndrome, or, Listening without Hearing
Invariably described by critics as “difficult,” Ashbery (perhaps disingenuously) considers himself a simple and direct author of poems that deliberately switch tone, speaker, mood, tense, voice, and idiom seemingly at random. He cobbles together an aural surface that imitates the ADD noise of our channel-hopping daily lives, our bombardment by contradictory opinions, unconnected images, and raw data on a scale impossible to assimilate. He acknowledges in an interview with Daniel Kane for What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde that he “frequently incorporate[s] overheard speech,” and, as for the role randomness and chance might play in his poems, he concedes “I am a believer in fortuitous accidents.” These are trappings commonly associated with the urbane postmodern aesthetic. Put another way, postmodernism of the kind that Ashbery offers is frequently a nihilistic type of modernism. At times, he seems to enjoy confusion and instability, even as poetic process: “It’s a question of a sudden feeling of unsureness at what I am doing, wondering why I am writing the way I am, and also not feeling the urge to write in another way.” This does not arise from a provocative or incendiary instinct, as he explains in the Paris Review, but rather the belief that one must keep moving or be in danger of ossification.
The Lighter Side: The Unspoken Rules of Book Reviewing II
28 June 2011
In considering “the unspoken rules of book reviewing,” the editors came across David Wheatley’s superb essay on poet-critics (originally published in CPR a number of years ago) and decided to reprint a section of it (modified only by numbered bullets for emphasis). Here is the view “from across the pond” as it were.* * *Since I’ve got to talking about my working methods, let me end with some practical poet-critical (poetic-critical?) suggestions of my own.1) Don’t return to the scene of the crime without good reason if you’ve already trashed someone once. It makes you look petty. Larkin’s two jobs on Auden in Required Writing and Further Requirements bury the poet only to dig up him up again for further abuse, though some latitude must be [...]
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Crick-Crossed: Quincy Lehr on Ben Mazer
21 June 2011
Reviewed: A City of Angels: A Verse Play in Three Acts by Ben Mazer. Cy Gist Press, 2011A verse drama—particularly when encountered, not on stage, but in a limited edition chapbook—has a tall order in front of it. It must, solely through dialogue, convey scene, emotion, and plot, even while working as verse. Ben Mazer’s City of Angels never succeeds more than intermittently at any of these. One can sense, as if through the fog of the streets in which the play is set, a far better work, but too often, one feels that an early draft has been published that is still in need of a good gust of air to clear away the mist and make the story clearer.It’s not as if Mazer’s [...]
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The Lighter Side: The CPR Dream Vacation House
14 June 2011
The CPR editors recently received the following note from the Italian scholar Massimo Bacigalupo:Dear Scholars of Ezra Pound and Modernism:I thought you’d like to know that the house where Olga Rudge and Ezra Poundlived in Sant’Ambrogio di Zoagli, above Rapallo, is for sale. Only half of it,to be precise.If any of you is interested I can put you in touch with the current owner, whohosted us very courteously during our Rapallo Conferences.You should be warned, however, that real estate on the Riviera is expensive.Rest assured, we are phoning the ghost of New Directions founder James Laughlin right now for a mortgage loan.Seriously, it’ s not too late for someone to preserve ”the Ezuversity.” This should be one of American literature’s great shrines.Please contact us if you would like more [...]
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Masterful Variations: Luke Hankins on Ashley Anna McHugh
08 June 2011
Reviewed: Into These Knots by Ashley Anna McHugh. Ivan R. Dee, 2010. 68 pp. Hardcover. $22.50. Winner of the 2010 New Criterion Poetry Prize. In Ashley Anna McHugh’s “All Other Ground Is Sinking Sand” (“On Christ the solid rock I stand” goes the previous line of the hymn this title is taken from), a villanelle addressed to the speaker’s father, we find ourselves at the ailing father’s bedside and learn that he has a bedsore that has turned gangrenous:Doctors say that he could die: They have to hurry,might amputate. He nods, then the click of the door,and my father cries, he prays—but this is a hard story:Staph spreads, and surgeons treat his body like a quarry.Close to his spine, they mine the green-black ore—and still, [...]
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Don Paterson’s Improbable Distances
06 June 2011
Reviewed: Rain by Don Paterson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009. 61 pages. What we most love we must lose. That implacable fact of human existence is the ground bass of Don Paterson’s excellent book Rain.It would be wrong to treat the book as a syllogism deriving the importance of love from its improbability and our impermanence; yet the perception of the vastness of the universe, the odd intrusion of human beings into its mysteries, and the consequent unlikeliness and instability of human connections pervades the poems and gives them a kind of cumulative eerie power.Start with “Parallax,” which is based on what might be called inverse solipsism. The title is a bit of a red herring. A lunar parallax is the angular difference between the apparent [...]
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Short Cuts: Roy Nicosia on a Post-Dementia Poet
27 May 2011
Reviewed: Sunday Houses the Sunday House by Elizabeth Hughey. University of Iowa Press, 2006. (Winner of the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize.)Forty years ago, Randall Jarrell sadly proclaimed that the gods who had taken away the poet’s readers had replaced them with students. These days, the students have disappeared as well, and been replaced by prizes. There are now over 50 first-book poetry contests in the United States. (The wag might say: a number equaling the average readership of the first book of verse). Why are there so many poetry contests if no one is reading the stuff? The answer is simple. Our poetry publishers need all of these contests and prizes so that they can extract reading fees from the only readers they have left: aspiring poets. It’s a captive audience, and they [...]
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The Lighter Side: The Unspoken Rules of Book Reviewing
19 May 2011
The Unspoken Rules of Book Reviewing: A Guide for Beginners Rule 1: Only review a book if you can be impartial about it—that is, only review a book toward which you feel nothing. Be descriptive; avoid value judgments.Rule 2: If you do have an opinion, don’t express it unless it’s positive. Make sure to balance any negative observations (or even less-than-positive ones) with an equal number of positive observations.Rule 3: If you do have a negative opinion of a book, make sure you express it only if the author is in no position to harm you in any way (that is, someone with no power in the poetry world).Rule 4: Do not review anyone you know.Now let’s talk about those rules. Rule 1: This is [...]
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The CPR Editors: We Comment on the Comments
17 May 2011
Recently, Andrew Feld posted the following comment on Joan Houlihan’s review of Christian Wiman’s latest book of poems:Without addressing the substance of this review, it does seem problematic to me that it is written by a poet whose most recent book was given a hugely unfavorable review in the journal edited by Christian Wiman. Whatever you might want to say about her claims and criticisms, Jean Houlihan can hardly be regarded as impartial on this subject. The supposed objectivity of her critique is completely negated by her personal investment in rejecting Wiman’s poetry and poetic standards. Would she have written the same review if her book had been praised in Wiman’s journal? Probably not. The mystery is not why this review was written, but why [...]
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The Lighter Side: Norman Stock Knows Our Pain
27 April 2011
In a review copy of Norman Stock’s new collection, Pickled Dreams Naked (NYQ Books), we came across the first honest poem we’ve ever read about poetry readings. Poetasters, prepare yourselves.At a Boring Poetry ReadingThey read the audience to death.These poets use live ammunition, their words, to weaken us.Are they trying to put us to sleep or are they trying to keep themselves upby droning on and on? Instead of listening, all I’m doing is waiting for them to stop.The applause will be like glass breaking, the glass they are enclosing us in.It is as if they tied their shoes in front of us just to show us they could tie their shoes in front of us!O save me from this scatterbrain orderliness, this posture of beheading.Will this [...]
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The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English
25 April 2011
1. Precursors / chronological by countryA) EnglandGascoigne, George. “Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English…” In The Posies of George Gascoigne. London: Richard Smith, 1575.[1]Puttenham, George. The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition. 1589. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.Lancelot, Claude. Quatre Traitez de Pöesies Latine, Françoise, Italienne, et Espagnole. 1663.Poole, Joshua. The English Parnassus: Or, a Helpe to English Poesie. London: 1657; 2nd ed. 1677.Bysshe, Edward. The Art of English Poetry. Containing I. Rules for making VERSES. II. A Collection of the most Natural, Agreeable, and Sublime THOUGHTS, viz. Allusions, Similes, Descriptions and Characters, of Persons and Things, that are to be found in the best ENGLISH POETS. III. A Dictionary of RHYMES. London, 1702, 1705, 1708, [...]
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- The Well-Wrought Void: Joan Houlihan on Christian Wiman
- The Lighter Side: Five Lessons from AWP (Or, Why We Hate Poetry Readings)
- The Lighter Side: Why We Still Hate Poetry Readings
- Short Cuts: Joan Houlihan on Ange Mlinko
- The CPR Editors: We Comment on the Comments
- The Rest Is Criticism
- CPR Classic Readings: Philip Larkin's "Here"
- Poetry and the Problem of Standards
- The Lighter Side: Norman Stock Knows Our Pain
- Short Cuts: Roy Nicosia on a Post-Dementia Poet
- Adventures in Scholarship: Garrick Davis on the Textbook Understanding Poetry
- An American Way to Go: John Foy on Peter Balakian
- Rick Joines on the Gravity and Levity of Kay Ryan
- The Lighter Side: The Unspoken Rules of Book Reviewing II
- Crick-Crossed: Quincy Lehr on Ben Mazer
- The Lighter Side: The CPR Dream Vacation House
- Masterful Variations: Luke Hankins on Ashley Anna McHugh
- Don Paterson’s Improbable Distances
- Short Cuts: Roy Nicosia on a Post-Dementia Poet
- The Lighter Side: The Unspoken Rules of Book Reviewing
- A New Possum: Dear Editors and commentors: I agree with ...
- r: To John Toy on Peter BalakianLs book of poems Zigg...
- mwaheed: The poem “To The Virgins, to make Much of Time” by...
- John Poch: There are always going to be readers who don't lik...
- Reagan Upshaw: As a reviewer who has written his share of negativ...
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