Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Check Out e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s

Tom Beckett's blog Vanishing Points of Resemblance has vanished (well you can still read the year's worth of entries, including copious squirrel droppings, for now). But he's got a new idea and a new name to boot:

e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s

Entries will include primarily interviews about poetry, poetics, poets by Tom and guests. Check the interview posted today with yours truly.

Running Into Walls

Yet again Joan Houlihan has got poets running into walls without headgear. Or maybe these poets didn't have their heads or their heads didn't have gears. Maybe some poets don't recognize futility when it's slamming them with dull bricks. Maybe they give Houlihan too much credence. Duh.

Houlihan's got a "re"view of The Best American Poetry 2004 that's agitated the Poetics list and other websites. In her recent piece "The Best American Liturgy," a part of her ongoing diatribe "How Contemporary American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem," Houlihan bares her predictable barbs, supported by but two samplings -- a mere two selections of over dozens of poems in the anthology (she's a master of reduction, ala Karl Rove), that for the anthology's editor Lyn Hejinian there are deficient standards of craft, that "[Hejinian's] standards can only be known by other members of the church of new writing," and "[Hejinian] doesn't believe in standards because there is no “best”—one poem cannot be better than another."

For one, Houlihan has not convinced me that she has read more than a smattering of writing outside her comfort zone (though, surely, more than Karl Rove and his protege George Bush). She hasn't convinced me she understands the kind of craft that carries a poem beyond its generation. She has not convinced me in this series that she is reading and writing about her reading without a predetermined agenda. 

I ask one question tonight: how do poets write today to be read today and tomorrow?

Recommending PENNsound

One thing I love about Geoff Huth's blog is its energetic, comprehensive generosity. He writes and thinks and works his ass off for poetry, not for any single, paltry, pitiful slice of literary turf. For your intellectual health, I recommend a daily allowance of Geoff's blog. A heck of a supplement, to be taken aurally, is PENNsound.  Among a hearty sampling of writers shouldering American poetry beyond easy narrative and image, bend your ear to readings from David Antin, Rae Armantrout, Ted Berrigan reading the complete Sonnets, Christian Bok, William Bronk, Linh Dinh, Ed Dorn, Kathleen Fraser, Barbara Guest, Steve McCaffery, K. Silem Mohammad, George Oppen, Jena Osman, Bob Perelman, James Schuyler, and Hannah Weiner.

Visit this site often. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it, 300 miles from any reading series I’d wrap my earlobes around.