Over at sillliman dot com, here's the roundup roundup:
The Voice’s roster contains just 25 books, and in it we find poets doing everything but poetry: writing fiction (Sesshu Foster, Kenneth Koch, Dennis Cooper), writing letters (Robert Lowell), writing a memoir that may or may not be fiction (Harry Matthews’ My Life in CIA, tho one might counter that Matthews is really a novelist who writes poetry, an argument one might make with Cooper as well), and just one book that might be poetry, Geraldine Kim’s marvelous Povel [....] The implication, at least as I read the Voice selections, is that poets exist, but the poem maybe not. That’s something to ponder.
Which reminded me...distantly...of something...familiar...:
This is the paper's vaudeville; as ever, poets and the idea of poetry have a pretty decent chance of making it to the Sunday Times' Carnegie Hall, and long as no actual poetry is performed onstage. As long as the book in question is the letters, the journals, the year in Tuscany, the cookbook by or biography of—poetry is a hot ticket [....] "Poetry" has become a category revered only in proportion to its absence. Give people a novel, a film, a memoir that's "lyrical" or "poetic" and the critics will swoon and the blurbs will fly. It means these things are light and lovely. Poems themselves, however, are too heavy to bear.
Silliman simply redirects the analysis from the Times to the Voice—and rightly so, I would say, though it misses the ways that the Voice doesn't endlessly play-act how important it thinks poetry is, and does actually publish poems occasionally. Nonetheless, I think the cultural assumptions played out in both the Times and the Voice (and, and, and) bear thinking about, recongnition, articulation.
Truth be told, the two books I wrote for at the Voice moved me more than any poetry books released this year, with the posssible exception of Juliana Spahr's book reviewed elsewhere, which I continue to think of as dating from last year—that's when I read it. My two favorite books of 2005 weren't poetry, yup. My fault, I'm sure.
Posted by jane at December 15, 2005 11:28 AM | TrackBack