Criticism

Part of this meme’s power stems from a long American engagement with images that put outspoken black men back in their place…

I was having a drink on the balcony of a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn last April when I fainted, flipped over the railing and fell two stories onto a parked vehicle and thence into an asphalt parking lot some fifteen feet below…

Forgive the phrasing, but this is one of the inevitable questions that arises when reading Dodie Bellamy’s exhilarating Cunt Norton, which splices classic poems from the Norton Anthology of Poetry with unattributed pornographic texts…

Extending 20th century collage’s greatest techniques and mannerisms, Jess is the unlikely collision of print culture and poetry, Victorian and mid-century American esoterica, mainstream advertising and underground smut.

…Spike Jonze seems content to have made a movie about our relationship with technology, when what he’s made is about our relationship with language…

We are used to hearing these terms derogatorily regarding poetry of less than exemplary literary value; perhaps suggesting either clumsy or downright ugly rhythms: inept, sentimental, misordered, trivial, cliché. But what if a poem’s great literary value is rather because it embraces these taboo registers, willingly, wildly, playfully?

Into the dusk-charged air of such words lies the vegetable kingdom of Keats and Schuyler, the textural-as-sculptural in Nutter’s arsenal. Like a calmer Dean Young, what lies beneath Nutter’s titles reveals an intersection of quietude and zaniness. Sensualists rejoice! Lovers of language’s eerie physicality. Oglers of its draping of shapely phrases with imaginary weight…

That is, the neighborhood working stiffs of northern New Jersey, its chummy losers and benign perverts, the children of the American 1970s where labor was still a mainstay even as popular culture was only beginning to whitewash this country’s regionalism (i.e. Frost’s much fetishized provincial sound) into a media-ted, medicated, middle-going American suburbia…

What a year for prose! As a poet myself, this might sound partly like a concession, but many of the prosaic tones, long lines or paragraphs that I’m thinking about were ones found within poets’ volumes…

The convicted Norwegian murderer and black metal icon, Kristian ‘Varg’ Vikernes, is to appear at a hearing before the public prosecutor, having been charged with one count of public provocation of racial hatred, and one of glorifying crimes of war and crimes against humanity…