The combination of blogger.com being down for a few days last week and a very busy weekend hosting family has led to me not posting for nearly a week, so today's entry is wide-ranging.
I was listening a bit to the Rolling Stones the other day and was struck by the oddness of "Mother's Little Helper." What possessed Mick Jagger to write this song? Why did he, the epitome of (packaged, mainstream) nonconformity and a heavy drug user, feel the need to sing about the dangers of housewives abusing drugs and the rise of pre-packaged food products? It's bizarre.
Manchester United's clinching of their 19th league championship (12 in the Premiership and seven in the old First Division) on Saturday was incredibly satisfying. I fancy their chances of winning the Champions League final against Barcelona more than most (and not just because I am a United fan). All of the pressure will be on Barcelona, and the final is at Wembley! Don't underestimate the "home" advantage for United, as well as all of the ghosts from their 1968 European Cup win, also at Wembley. Plus the revenge factor from losing to Barcelona in the 2009 final. United have all of the intangibles on their side, and they have shown throughout Sir Alex Ferguson's tenure that they know how to use intangibles to their utmost advantage.
I just finished reading Nnedi Okorafor's novel Who Fears Death, a science fiction/fantasy narrative that is a pastiche of themes from Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Dave Eggers's What is the What. It does not explicitly acknowledge that it is an allegory of the genocide in Sudan until the very end, though this correlation is obvious from the very beginning. It was a fun read, not especially accomplished technically, but interesting as a fictionalized response to real-world catastrophe, which is an area of scholarly interest for me.
Books Acquired Recently
Dlugos, Tim. A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos. Ed. David Trinidad. Callicoon: Nightboat, 2011.
I wrote last month about how I enjoy Dlugos because of his similarity to Frank O'Hara, and sure enough, the first blurb on the back of the book is Ted Berrigan calling Dlugos "the Frank O'Hara of his generation." The back cover also claims that Dlugos is "a major American poet," which at this point is just wishful thinking, but it is a statement that deserves to be true. It also calls him the "seminal poet of the AIDS epidemic," ha ha.
Toews, Miriam. The Flying Troutmans. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.
I've been meaning to read this for a while. I really enjoyed Toews's previous novel, A Complicated Kindness, and am interested to see what she does with characters that (as far as I can tell from reading about the book) are not Mennonite. Toews is also excellent as Esther in the film Silent Light, which is probably the best movie about Mennonites/Amish, beating both Witness and Hazel's People.
Showing posts with label Frank O'Hara. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frank O'Hara. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Friday, May 6, 2011
Books Acquired Recently
Books Acquired Recently:
I've gone a little crazy buying books in the past few weeks. Not all of them have even arrived yet! These are the ones I've received so far.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks. Ed. Elizabeth Alexander. New York: Library of America, 2005.
I would love to teach Brooks extensively sometime rather than just a few poems from an anthology, but her Selected Poems does not include any of her work from the Black Arts Movement, which is what I am most interested in, so I ordered this collection to see if it would be suitable to use instead because it covers her entire career.
Germano, William. From Dissertation to Book. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.
My big writing project this summer is to revise my dissertation into book form so that I can begin submitting book proposals to publishers. I read Germano's book last night and it was quite helpful in giving me a map for going about my revisions.
Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.
Amazon recommended this to me, and it looks interesting. African American literature and LGBT studies are my two scholarly foci these days, so this should be a helpful resource.
Koch, Kenneth. Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems. Ed. Ron Padgett. New York: Library of America, 2007.
I've been meaning to read Koch for years because of his close friendship with my favorite poet, Frank O'Hara. There have been numerous times in the past few years when I've almost bought this collection, but then didn't. Labyrinth Books had it on sale for $6.00 new, so I decided now was the time.
McEvoy, Seth. Samuel R. Delany. New York: Ungar, 1984.
My next book project is on Delany, so last week I ordered copies of all of the books on him that I didn't already own. Delany says in About Writing that McEvoy's book is the worst one about his work, so I won't use it much (if at all), but I like to be throrough. There is little enough criticism on Delany that one can't be choosy.
Moore, Honor, ed. Poems From the Women's Movement. New York: Library of America, 2009.
This looked really interesting when I saw it in the Labyrinth Books catalogue, and it was only $6.00. It might be fun to teach in a Rhetoric course. I am a total sucker for Library of America books because they are so aesthetically pleasing.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.
Amazon recommended this to me after I ordered Johnson and Henderson's anthology. I am very much interested in the literature of terrorism and more broadly the continuing after-effects of 9/11, so Puar's book sounds very interesting to me, though I probably won't have time to read it for a while.
Stine, Jean Marie. Season of the Witch. 1968. San Francisco: Eros, 2011.
I read about Stine's book in Thomas Disch's The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of, and it sounded interesting. I am constantly looking for examples of transgender fiction, and they are few and far between, so Stine helps fill the gap.
I've gone a little crazy buying books in the past few weeks. Not all of them have even arrived yet! These are the ones I've received so far.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks. Ed. Elizabeth Alexander. New York: Library of America, 2005.
I would love to teach Brooks extensively sometime rather than just a few poems from an anthology, but her Selected Poems does not include any of her work from the Black Arts Movement, which is what I am most interested in, so I ordered this collection to see if it would be suitable to use instead because it covers her entire career.
Germano, William. From Dissertation to Book. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.
My big writing project this summer is to revise my dissertation into book form so that I can begin submitting book proposals to publishers. I read Germano's book last night and it was quite helpful in giving me a map for going about my revisions.
Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.
Amazon recommended this to me, and it looks interesting. African American literature and LGBT studies are my two scholarly foci these days, so this should be a helpful resource.
Koch, Kenneth. Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems. Ed. Ron Padgett. New York: Library of America, 2007.
I've been meaning to read Koch for years because of his close friendship with my favorite poet, Frank O'Hara. There have been numerous times in the past few years when I've almost bought this collection, but then didn't. Labyrinth Books had it on sale for $6.00 new, so I decided now was the time.
McEvoy, Seth. Samuel R. Delany. New York: Ungar, 1984.
My next book project is on Delany, so last week I ordered copies of all of the books on him that I didn't already own. Delany says in About Writing that McEvoy's book is the worst one about his work, so I won't use it much (if at all), but I like to be throrough. There is little enough criticism on Delany that one can't be choosy.
Moore, Honor, ed. Poems From the Women's Movement. New York: Library of America, 2009.
This looked really interesting when I saw it in the Labyrinth Books catalogue, and it was only $6.00. It might be fun to teach in a Rhetoric course. I am a total sucker for Library of America books because they are so aesthetically pleasing.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.
Amazon recommended this to me after I ordered Johnson and Henderson's anthology. I am very much interested in the literature of terrorism and more broadly the continuing after-effects of 9/11, so Puar's book sounds very interesting to me, though I probably won't have time to read it for a while.
Stine, Jean Marie. Season of the Witch. 1968. San Francisco: Eros, 2011.
I read about Stine's book in Thomas Disch's The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of, and it sounded interesting. I am constantly looking for examples of transgender fiction, and they are few and far between, so Stine helps fill the gap.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Thoughts on Cavafy
This evening I've been reading in The Complete Poems of [Constantine] Cavafy (the 1976 Rae Dalven translation) in between innings of the Mets-Nationals game. I first encountered his poetry in J.D. McClatchy's anthology Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems and enjoyed it enough to desire more.
Cavafy's poems are almost all either love poems (the majority of them clearly homoerotic) or retellings of ancient Greek myths or history. The latter are not very good (compared, for instance, with the skillful way in which H.D. writes about the same subject matter), but the love poems are excellent. They tend to be short vignettes, beautifully crafted, about brief liaisons and the former lovers of the speaker's youth.
"On Painting" especially stands out to me:
I attend to my work and I love it.
But today the languor of composition disheartens me.
The day has affected me. Its face
is deepening dark. It continues to blow and rain.
I would sooner see than speak.
In this painting now, I am looking at
a beautiful lad who is stretched out
near the fountain, probably worn out from running.
What a beautiful child; what a divine noon
has now overtaken him to lull him to sleep.--
I sit and look so for a long time.
And again it is in art that I rest from its toil.
That last line is spectacular: the idea that the turmoil caused by the struggle to create beauty ("the languor of composition disheartens me") can only be assuaged by beauty's calming influence.
I love the depiction of visual art in poetry. Cavafy describes the path to the sublime that the best paintings reveal to viewers in a way that is reminiscent of Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter," which also speaks of the mysterious beauty of painting from a sideways angle, using a painting as an illustration of this beauty rather than attempting a straightforward description of its essence.
Cavafy's poems are almost all either love poems (the majority of them clearly homoerotic) or retellings of ancient Greek myths or history. The latter are not very good (compared, for instance, with the skillful way in which H.D. writes about the same subject matter), but the love poems are excellent. They tend to be short vignettes, beautifully crafted, about brief liaisons and the former lovers of the speaker's youth.
"On Painting" especially stands out to me:
I attend to my work and I love it.
But today the languor of composition disheartens me.
The day has affected me. Its face
is deepening dark. It continues to blow and rain.
I would sooner see than speak.
In this painting now, I am looking at
a beautiful lad who is stretched out
near the fountain, probably worn out from running.
What a beautiful child; what a divine noon
has now overtaken him to lull him to sleep.--
I sit and look so for a long time.
And again it is in art that I rest from its toil.
That last line is spectacular: the idea that the turmoil caused by the struggle to create beauty ("the languor of composition disheartens me") can only be assuaged by beauty's calming influence.
I love the depiction of visual art in poetry. Cavafy describes the path to the sublime that the best paintings reveal to viewers in a way that is reminiscent of Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter," which also speaks of the mysterious beauty of painting from a sideways angle, using a painting as an illustration of this beauty rather than attempting a straightforward description of its essence.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Tim Dlugos Lives!
I just found out today that Tim Dlugos's Collected Poems is coming out next month, edited by David Trinidad. Dlugos died of AIDS in 1990 just as he was becoming established as a significant poetic voice not only in the gay literary community, but in the wider poetry community as well. Since then he's been virtually ignored by anthologists and critics with the exception of a few short articles by Trinidad.
I was introduced to Dlugos's work when a professor of mine suggested I do a paper on him about five years ago (I have been remiss in failing to either revise it for publication or at least present it at a conference, but will have to revisit it once the new book is released). I love his poems because they have a vitality to them that is Frank O'Hara-esque. O'Hara is my favorite poet; thus that is one of the highest compliments I can pay another writer.
For instance, here is "Not Stravinsky" in full:
Dark-eyed boy in tight designer jeans and sneakers on your way from basketball practice at Bishop Somebody High, I
don't know what you're playing on your Walkman but it probably is not Stravinsky. (Powerless 46)
I love the Whitman-esque long lines (the poem is only two lines long even though each line is long enough to take up two lines of print) and subject matter. The same-sex desire expressed in the poem is beautiful, a fleeting moment of both enjoyment and sadness (the desire going completely unrequited) for the speaker (presumably Dlugos), the knowledge that all the two will ever share is a fleeting moment in passing that isn't even recognized by the boy, but is striking enough for Dlugos to commemorate in a poem. We see here the immediacy of O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems, that urgency to get an experience down on paper before one moves on with the day, with the rest of life. Dlugos's "On This Train Are People Who Resemble" is also in this vein, an everyday list poem colored by the New York City vibe and references to pop culture. In fact, one could pass it off as a lost O'Hara poem to readers unfamiliar with Dlugos's work.
Hopefully this new collection will put Dlugos back on readers' radar because his work is too good to disappear outside the boundaries of the canon, which, for all its problematic characteristics, is useful for keeping essential literature in print. The best-case scenario would be for Dlugos's Collected Poems to do for his critical reputation what O'Hara's did for his when it was first published in 1971 (O'Hara was more well-known then than Dlugos is now among poetry lovers, but not yet among critics from the academy). Dlugos's Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990 (New York: High Risk Books, 1996, also edited by Trinidad), which is an excellent, concise collection, unfortunately did little to stir interest in his work.
I was introduced to Dlugos's work when a professor of mine suggested I do a paper on him about five years ago (I have been remiss in failing to either revise it for publication or at least present it at a conference, but will have to revisit it once the new book is released). I love his poems because they have a vitality to them that is Frank O'Hara-esque. O'Hara is my favorite poet; thus that is one of the highest compliments I can pay another writer.
For instance, here is "Not Stravinsky" in full:
Dark-eyed boy in tight designer jeans and sneakers on your way from basketball practice at Bishop Somebody High, I
don't know what you're playing on your Walkman but it probably is not Stravinsky. (Powerless 46)
I love the Whitman-esque long lines (the poem is only two lines long even though each line is long enough to take up two lines of print) and subject matter. The same-sex desire expressed in the poem is beautiful, a fleeting moment of both enjoyment and sadness (the desire going completely unrequited) for the speaker (presumably Dlugos), the knowledge that all the two will ever share is a fleeting moment in passing that isn't even recognized by the boy, but is striking enough for Dlugos to commemorate in a poem. We see here the immediacy of O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems, that urgency to get an experience down on paper before one moves on with the day, with the rest of life. Dlugos's "On This Train Are People Who Resemble" is also in this vein, an everyday list poem colored by the New York City vibe and references to pop culture. In fact, one could pass it off as a lost O'Hara poem to readers unfamiliar with Dlugos's work.
Hopefully this new collection will put Dlugos back on readers' radar because his work is too good to disappear outside the boundaries of the canon, which, for all its problematic characteristics, is useful for keeping essential literature in print. The best-case scenario would be for Dlugos's Collected Poems to do for his critical reputation what O'Hara's did for his when it was first published in 1971 (O'Hara was more well-known then than Dlugos is now among poetry lovers, but not yet among critics from the academy). Dlugos's Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990 (New York: High Risk Books, 1996, also edited by Trinidad), which is an excellent, concise collection, unfortunately did little to stir interest in his work.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Update/Books Acquired Recently
Well, it's been half a month since I last wrote. Part of this delay has been because I've been spending oodles of time on facebook, but mostly my lack of blogging activity is due to an increase in end-of-semester schoolwork. I will begin writing more frequently again once the school year ends after the first week of May.
In the interim, the most exciting thing that has happened is that I got an OED! I'm using it to write a paper on the high number (189) of first usages in Robert Herrick's poetry.
Books Acquired Recently
Frank O'Hara. Selected Poems. amazon.com
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. amazon.com
In the interim, the most exciting thing that has happened is that I got an OED! I'm using it to write a paper on the high number (189) of first usages in Robert Herrick's poetry.
Books Acquired Recently
Frank O'Hara. Selected Poems. amazon.com
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. amazon.com
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