Sunday, November 30, 2008

Springfield's weather

was forecast to be partly cloudy but, at slightly above freezing, this year's first snow is sifting blithely by, and has a 60% chance of continuing to most of today. The ghost of Ezra Pound waltzing/ with the ghost of Robert Frost. The snow leopard? The snow goose? Snowy owls? Something more later perhaps. 11:35 AM -- two quotes Curtis Faville in a Silliman's Blog comment to Ed [Baker]: "In the ideal society, all public identity would be banned in the campaign against the cult of personality, all works would be by 'anonymous.' Self-efacement is the new paradigm. All Hail, Anon!" See ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/history Tuesday, November 25, 2008 - Robert Archambeau in an interview of him published in ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com: "Roland Barthes was on to something when he said that the author, in the romantic sense of the isolated visionary, is dead. What we have now is the scriptor, whose sole power is to mingle writing. I like this notion, and see it as a sign of vigor in our literary culture, complaints from pessimists like Frederic Jameson notwithstanding." See Robert Archambeau link in my Rho00227 post. While I know both Faville and Archambeau express valid positions in that ultimately planet Earth will cease and that we are now not only post-agendas but are also becoming post-Homosapiens/ I remain committed to-- however self-congratulatory--the presence of signature. History (even corrupted history--remembrance, continuity, perception) matters. Nonetheless, I do not favor the my-car's-better-than-your-car attitude. My favorite flavor of ice cream was mint, and might still be, but these days chocolate chips are blended into mint ice cream. Tomorrow it will be chocolate ice cream with mint chips. I would rather there be no literary canons and no poetics skirmishes, but it can't be avoided. Humans--myself included--are always searching for new ways of seeing. 6 x 2 = 12 and 6 x 3 = 18. 6 x 17 = 102 and 6 x 18 = 108. 6 x 32 = 192 and 6 x 33 = 198. And the important number here is: 15. Just something else in my weather today. So what's new to me is old to you and what's new to you is old to me, or, or. You should read what that K. Silem Mohammad man posted recently. - 9:54 PM A comment by Dale Smith over at PFHarriet has moved me to add a link to a 17-page pdf excerpt from Timothy Morton's Harvard University Press book: Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics I am going to try to get this book through a library here. Rho00228

2 comments:

Archambeau said...

"I would rather there be no literary canons
and no poetics skirmishes, but it can't be avoided" -- yeah, yup, uh-huh. You're entirely right. But what we -can- do, I think, is change our attitude toward those disputes. I mean, if we don't let ourselves care about who wins the laurels (even if it's Jorie Graham or Billy Collins, even if it's not us, or the poets we love), we're freeing ourselves from a lot of agitation. Easier said than done, though, for sure.

Bob

brian (baj) salchert said...

I tried to free myself from agitation regarding James Tate by writing poems about me and him.
I've written four. I think it was late last year I wrote a letter to him in which I included three of those four. I had forgotten about the fourth one. I then called him, though I hadn't spoken to him since after a workshop at Iowa. I did so in part because I wanted to let him know that Bill Knott thought he was the best poet of our generation. Our subdued conversation was pleasant but brief. I sent my letter. Have no idea what he did with it when it arrived. It doesn't matter. I have a copy offline.

Thank you for the comment,
Brian