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 Tim Dlugos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tim Dlugos. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)