1/ From “Writing in the Margins,” James Longenbach’s omnibus poetry review in today’s NY Times:

The strength of Amer­i­can poetry depends on the fact that hardly any­body notices it. To emerg­ing poets, eager for an audi­ence, this mar­gin­al­ity may seem frus­trat­ing, but it is the source of their free­dom. Because noth­ing is at stake except the integrity of their medium, poets may write about any­thing in any way, from deco­rously rhymed cou­plets to son­i­cally driven nonsense.

…

Through­out “Vellum,” [Matt] Dono­van con­fronts not only the power of art but also its poten­tial use­less­ness, its beauty inex­tri­ca­ble from its unnerv­ing refusal to serve.

2/ From John Wilkinson’s “Off the Grid: Lyric and Pol­i­tics in Andrea Brady’s Embrace” (first pub­lished in Chicago Review 53:1 and reprinted in Wilkinson’s new book, The Lyric Touch):

As lyric has become spe­cial­ized and dis­tin­guished from other lin­guis­tic usages, its saving grace has been per­ceived from every angle as con­nected with its resis­tance to profit, instru­men­tal­ity, and mate­r­ial progress—a per­cep­tion that echoes all the way from con­ser­v­a­tive human­ism to social­ist melior­ism, from reli­gious author­ity to new the­ol­ogy, from for­mal­ist tra­di­tion­al­ism to post-​theory, Language-​influenced poetics…. Use­less­ness is art’s use. The more art’s use­less­ness has fig­ured as an exalted reduc­tion, the more lyric poetry has been drawn toward prosodic move­ment as pri­mary, with analy­sis and argu­ment con­ducted under the aegis of this last-​ditch spirit—spirit now lodged in the ruts of lin­eation and the angles of enjamb­ment. For use­less­ness is merely status, while spirit is its work­ing afflatus….Uselessness gives rise to spirit and spirit to the ten­ta­tive sublime.