the other posts in this series
- Part 1: Introduction, Matthew Sweeney, Guillaume Apollinaire
- Part 2: Eleanor Hooker, Franz Wright
- Part 3: Corey Mesner, Katie Peterson, Rae Armantrout
- Part 4: Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Cruz
- Part 5: Matt Hart
- Part 6: Randall Mann, Reginald Gibbons
- Part 7: Christine Gosnay, Claudia Emerson, James Longenbach
- Part 8: Quickly Now, Through the Rest
Before continuing, I would like to make a pragmatically motivated, technical adjustment and remove one work from the collective of examined texts which will speak for the October, 2015, issue of Poetry Magazine. That is, I want to remove Franz Wright's one included work from the body. His is the best of the bunch by far, and stands out from the rest of the works examined as being not poorly written but flawed. I still consider the work too flawed too have merited publication in a major magazine; but, comment on "The Raising of Lazarus" should be in the nature of "a flawed entry in an otherwise respectable issue" rather than as "the best of a generally poorly written and poorly chosen group." The verse, even for its flaws, is the exception against which the rest of the work examined might brought into contrast. To note, this not motivated by any personal opinion toward Wright or his work. I have read but little of his work, and my current stance on that work is, equally limitedly, that I have yet to read anything by Wright that I have found all that interesting or all that different from the better written fare of today's pop verse.
As for this series as a whole and my own opinion of how it turned out? I'll say only, not enough jokes.
head shots: crash davis vs. the zombies
1.
"Because you don't respect yourself,
which is your problem. But you don't respect the game,
which is my problem."
[Bull Durham]
Let's talk about discourse.
There is an article on the web site of The Federalist from about two years back that made brief rounds on that ersatz discourse known as Facebook, one of those articles that people will give vocal nod to but dare not dwell on or actually take to habit because of what it might mean for their own participation in the ersatz discourse that is, really, what constitutes most of the popular-oriented content on the internet. The article was "The Death of Expertise" [link ], written by Tom Nichols, then and still professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. Perhaps you saw it pass by.
