In memory of the great American poet Adrienne Rich, who passed away late last month, may I suggest this 2011 interview she gave to the Paris Review?
She is often lumped together with Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (mainly because she was their contemporary, she was a woman, and she is associated with feminist poetics) but perhaps not given the same level of reverence. Sad to say, but maybe now that she’s dead, she will start to receive it.
Pound is still thinking about the early years of America as an independent country. The primary figure here is John Adams, which is an interesting choice because, let’s face it, before McCullough produced that door stopper of a biography, no one gave a s–t about Adams (caveat: I have read that door stopper, a signed copy no less, and it’s a good book, but I’m not going to tell you that Adams was as important as all that, except for the basic fact of having been only our second president).
An interesting little tidbit – five pages into this Canto, Pound uses ‘@’ in place of ‘at’ in a sentence:
Mazzei: little hope of success @ so low an interest
While there is little else of interest, I always perk up at mentions of early coffeehouses:
Affaires (Xmas day, Amsterdam) still suspended
but stockjobbing goes on uninterruptedly
at coffee houses on Sundays and holidays
when it cannot be held upon ‘change
As a simply historical fact, the first modern marker for stock trading (or stockjobbing, as it was, indeed, called) did truly begin in a coffeehouse.
April is National Poetry Month! You may recognize this fact on account of Barnes & Noble moving some books of poetry (mostly anthologies and Billy Collins) closer to the front of the store.
But this is a time to try and proselytize on the value and joy of poetry, so I will be posting something everyday about poetry.
Stay tuned and, you know… consider reading some poetry
In the meantime, DC residents will find a number of poetry events through the Library of Congress and other folks may find something on the website of the Poetry Foundation.
I was living in a suburb of Minneapolis with my good friend Ryan.
Part of our relationship is based on shared appreciation for literature, science fiction, and philosophy, but also on our appreciation coming from different directions.
In short, I am am humanities geek and he’s a hard sciences geek.
During this time, I read a book in his collection called Neurophilosophy by Patricia Churchland.
Neurophilosophy indulges in a contemporary brand of scientific reductivism that I cannot accept on a very visceral level. On a more rational level, while I accept that we may one day understand all the problems of consciousness and free will within a scientific framework, I believe that the terms under which they are resolved and the extent to which science will have advance will have the effect of rendering all the claims of neurophilosophical reductivism as meaningless as Churchland finds most efforts by traditional philosophy to address these issues to be.
These memories were brought up when I read this essay debunking the claims and efforts of Churchland and her colleagues. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m pleased to have the author on ‘my’ side, mainly because he’s tendetiously strident, without showing much in the way of rigor and spends most of the piece tearing straw men without bothering to address the very real issues brought up by applying modern neuroscience to the old questions of philosophy and religion.
I fully understand and participate in the subjective desire to believe in something transcendent – something inside us as conscious beings connected to art, beauty, creation, the divine. But, dude… not the way to make the argument! Thanks for setting us back.
I should also add the my friend’s views have softened and he is, dare I say, closer to ‘my’ side of the argument (‘our’ side?) than where his opinions used to fall. Getting soft in his old age?
I just wanted to encourage folks to read this post by Ron Silliman.
I don’t know Corina Copp, but Silliman is right in saying that the design Ugly Duckling Presse produced for her chapbook is amazing.
The Florida novelist Harry Crews died on Wednesday, March 28, 2012. I haven’t read his books since the nineties, but for a while, I was big fan, once upon a time.
He was the author of uniquely Florida form of Southern Gothic. Even though many of works took place outside of Florida, if you were a Floridian and knew something of the state besides the coasts and beaches, you recognized the landscape as part of your home. An impoverished southern landscape unleavened by false dreams of Gone with the Wind style genteelness. No Rhett Butler ever wooed a woman in the Sunshine State.
I actually first read him in a stolen Playboy when I was kid. It was an excerpt from Body, which I realized years later when I read that novel.
His finest work, in my opinion, was the despairing A Feast of Snakes.
Florida is not known literary novelists or poets. It’s shame to lose one.
She passed away at home on March 27. She was 82.
Her books, Dark Fields of the Republic and An Atlas of the Difficult World, influenced and affected me greatly during a hard time in my life. It’s hard to imagine she’s not still out there, even though I never met her.
the coffee philosopher 