Bill Knott is a cross between Yorick & Radio­head. Quite chop­fallen, he once was full of japes & gam­bols. His last “official” book was pub­lished by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, but he now prefers to self-​publish his son­nets & sell them for a song. His body of work—almost all of which he gen­er­ously sent me recently in the form of generic samizdat-​styled book­lets cre­ated by Lulu.com (see photo)—constitutes one of the bravest & most excit­ing projects in recent con­tem­po­rary poetry. But he enjoys pre­tend­ing that every­one, includ­ing him, thinks he is a tal­ent­less hack.

The Ducati and the Tri­corn: Coded Syl­lab­ics in Fred­er­ick Seidel’s Late Love Poems to Mar­i­anne Moore [George Van Waters]

Machi­avel­lian Democ­racy: The Secret His­tory of Steve Evans’s Atten­tion Span [Emma Lazarus]

A Dacha for Every­one: Poetry Mag­a­zine, Cul­tural Cor­po­ratism, and the End of the Amer­i­can Avant-​Garde [Alice Stone Blackwell]

The Man Who Imag­ined Too Much: Tri­umph and Tragedy in the Crit­i­cal Life of Joshua Bald­win [Theodore Parker]

Donner’s Return: Utopia and Can­ni­bal­ism in the Mac­ro­bi­otic Poetry Com­mune, 2014-2016 [Lydia Sigourney]

Panop­ti­con of Poets: Blog Com­ment Box Cul­ture from 2000 to 2020 [Joseph Rodman Drake]

The Remains of the Day: Essays on the “Hidden Plot” Cor­re­spon­dence between Ken­neth Gold­smith and Robert P. Baird [ed. David A. Warden]

National Iden­tity and Poetic Crisis: A Study of the Recep­tion of Paul Muldoon’s Ata­cama Earth­work Poems in Chile [Lizette Wood­worth Reese]

Taking Stock of the Master Shock: An Anno­tated Fac­sim­ile of Emily Dickinson’s Dis­cov­ered Cor­re­spon­dence with Karl Marx [ed. Abiah Root]

The Welsh Turn: Explo­rations of Third-​Generation Flarf Cyn­g­hanedd, in Con­text of Awdl-​gywydd, Byr-a-thoddaid, Cywydd Llos­gyrnog, Gorch­est Beirdd, Rhupunt Hwyaf, and Tawd­dgyrch Cad­wynog Meters [ed. Ben­jamin Fried­lan­der III]

Obses­sion with Obliv­ion: Tropes of Death in New Yorker Poetry, 2000-2050 [Graf von Auersperg]

A Bard for the People: Essays on Bar­rett Watten’s Tenure as U.S. Poet Lau­re­ate [ed. Lucy Larcom and Edward Row­land Sill]

Artist’s talks—up for review, like a gallery show or spread in Art­fo­rum? A few nights ago I saw pho­tog­ra­pher, video artist, and film­maker Laurel Naka­date give a pre­sen­ta­tion on her work at SAIC, and it was one hell of a mind­spin. As I see it, Naka­date makes two kinds of work: the kind she’s in, and the kind she’s not in. Inter­est­ingly enough, I can’t seem to find any images of the latter on the internet—which prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with the fact that, when Naka­date puts her­self in front of her camera, she’s usu­ally wear­ing little to no cloth­ing, unless she’s dressed up in what I roll my own eyes to call Lolita-​esque getups.

[Ed. Note: A little more than a month ago I passed around the prover­bial hat to sup­port the work that goes on here at Dig­i­tal Emu­nc­tion. The first person to respond with actual legal tender was fre­quent com­menter Henry Gould. When Henry asked if he could con­tribute a guest post, I was wary for all the right rea­sons, and feared I might find myself in the unhappy posi­tion of having to reject our first patron. I was there­fore much relieved when he sent in the fol­low­ing. I hope you enjoy it. --rpb]

Before there was a graft­ing, by that Min­nesota poet Robert Bly and others, 50 years or so ago, onto Amer­i­can poetry, of semi-​sophisticated, wire-​limbed, thin-​shanked sur­re­al­ism, there was a (per­haps one-​sided) debate going on, mid-​century, between the New Crit­i­cal ortho­doxy, of Wim­satt & Beard­s­ley, Ransom & Brooks & Tate et al., on the one hand, and one of the found­ing & now former crit­ics in that wave, R.P. Black­mur, and his fore­most dis­ci­ple, John Berry­man, on the other. This con­fronta­tion between dif­fer­ing ideas about the char­ac­ter and means of poetry is one of the main topics of a perhaps-​neglected work of schol­ar­ship, pub­lished in 1984, by Bloom. No, not Harold Bloom – rather, a fellow named James D. Bloom. The book is titled The Stock of Avail­able Real­ity : R.P. Black­mur and John Berry­man (Cran­bury, NJ : Asso­ci­ated Uni­ver­sity Presses, 1984).