Bobby Baird has offered a won­der­fully idio­syn­cratic quiz about Fred­er­ick Seidel below. And Geor­gia Cool, if that’s her real name, writes in, offer­ing a link to another Fred­er­ick Seidel quiz, one she’s recently authored for McSweeney’s Inter­net Tendency.

This made me remem­ber some­thing–a story I have about McSweeney’s. So I’m going to tell you, now, my McSweeney’s story.

When Daniel Nester was editor of the McSweeney’s Ses­tina Sec­tion (where did Daniel go, by the way, does anyone know*–last I heard he was a colum­nist for Huff­in­g­ton Post), he’d asked me to send him a poem in the ven­er­a­ble form. I did, and it was a ses­tina about poets of the NY School, quite charm­ing, if I say so myself. Daniel liked it very much, too, and wrote promptly to say that it would be up on the site in the next few days. Hey that’s great, I said. Thanks. Because I’ve always wanted to be pub­lished in McSweeney’s!

When John Ensign is not attend­ing Promise Keeper meet­ings, or hold­ing forth against the threats that gay mar­riage poses to het­ero­sex­ual mar­riage, or cheat­ing on his wife with a mar­ried staffer, or fend­ing off that staffer’s husband’s black­mail threats, he occa­sion­ally falls into a revery of unwit­ting hon­esty from which the things that he and his col­leagues have been doing their best to con­ceal for months froth out. During dis­cus­sion lead­ing to today’s vote against adding a public option to the Baucus Sham Health­care Plan, Ensign sud­denly cleared the air (from the Times):

Senator John Ensign, Repub­li­can of Nevada, said he feared that a gov­ern­ment plan would prove so pop­u­lar it could never be uprooted. “Does any­body believe Con­gress would let this public plan go away once it has a con­stituency?” Mr. Ensign asked. “No way. Once it’s started, you will never get rid of it. Con­gress will sub­si­dize it more and more, allow it to grow and grow.”

And all this time I thought we were fight­ing to pre­vent the gov­ern­ment from taking from us every­thing that we hold dear.

1/ From One Poet’s Notes:

When Har­riet Monroe, editor at Poetry, requested per­mis­sion in 1916 to reprint in an anthol­ogy “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which had first appeared in the journal’s pages in 1915, Eliot declined her request. His poem would have been a most appro­pri­ate con­tri­bu­tion to Monroe’s gath­er­ing of poems, The New Poetry: An Anthol­ogy, which she co-​edited with Alice Corbin Hen­der­son for pub­li­ca­tion in 1917. How­ever, Eliot wrote a letter to Monroe on March 27, 1916, explain­ing his reluc­tance.

…Read More…

With spe­cial ref­er­ence to this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

1/ (a) Is the form of poems like Seidel’s “Sii Romanitico, Seidel, Tanto Per Cambiare” ade­quately described as dog­gerel? (b) If yes, how does this affect your sense of his enter­prise? If no, how would you describe it?

2/ One jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the appar­ent lack of sense in Wheeler’s work is that this lack mimics the sense­less­ness of the world we live in. (a) Do you think this is a valid jus­ti­fi­ca­tion? (b) If so, what do you take to be the point of the mim­icry? (c) Does this jus­ti­fi­ca­tion apply to Seidel? How? (d) Does it apply to Flarf and con­cep­tual poetry? How?