Guest Post: Anthony Madrid’s Ongoing Planisphere Notebook 2
ONGOING PLANISPHERE NOTEBOOK
Anthony Madrid
4. Some Common Objections to Ashbery—Answered
OBJECTIONS
(a) Doesn’t all this allegory and code on the subject of poetry-writing itself get a bit wearisome after a while? I mean, it’s not like he’s saying anything bold. And it’s every other poem.
(b) The persona of this book—gentle, quirky, finicky, likable, 100% harmless in every way—don’t you ever get sick of the coyness of all that, the self-satisfaction?
(c) Aren’t seventy or eighty percent of these diction oddities just a bunch of honors dorm humor?
[p. 129] A stupor like sheep’s nostrils
chases the ground. Day arrives with a thwack
and is left to sit all day.[p. 134] I’ll have a mustard coke.
ANSWERS
(a) When people object to poetry about poetry, it’s usually because they don’t like the specific attitude being struck. Anyhow, in my experience the same readers who reject Ashbery’s devotion to writing about poetrywriting never seem to mind it when, say, Hafez or Han Shan relentlessly handles the exact same theme. The difference is that those two guys never do anything but vaunt poetry’s powers. Meanwhile, Ashbery is a relentless skeptic, both of the art in general and his own stuff in particular. Which is the very reason he is attractive to some readers.
(b) Is Ashbery coy and self-satisfied—? Take the case of Ashbery’s references (supposedly much multiplied since Flow Chart, 1990) to his own can’t-be-very-far-off death. Ashbery always handles the theme in exactly the same tonal register:
[p. 2] I guess I must be going.
[p. 6] Now it was time, and there was nothing for it
[p. 64] Don’t forget to write!
[p. 70] I was halfway out the door anyway
[p. 75] There is nothing like putting off a journey
[p. 81] Yet one says, so long
[p. 99] I’ll be on my way
[p. 108] I have to go
[p. 129] Well I can’t stay
[p. 130] We’re moving today
[p. 135] We’d better be getting along before it gets dark
[p. 139] Soon it was time to choose another climate
Now, obviously the tone here is appealing. Modest, inoffensive, quotidian—and above all, reconciled. (He even has a poem here that begins, “As virtuous men float mildly away….”) And the question isn’t even whether all this is a sham or not. It’s whether there’s an unseemly self-amusement/self-satisfaction evident.
Say it is a sham. A fantasy of going gently into that good night. As fantasies go, it’s not ignoble. The poet is led away to the common slaughter, his eyes wide open, his mind somewhat fuddled, his mouth full of neither fulsome blessings nor thrilling curses. He says merely Bye now! and Que sais-je?
Sounds like as good a way to go as any. The obnoxious thing would be if Ashbery were rubbing that ideal up the reader’s snout. Certain people can’t help but take it that way, depending on how strongly they think it’s the wrong fantasy. If your aesthetics of deathbed speeches calls for Shakespearean oratory (of one form or another) or zoinks of Zen cold fusion, then you’re bound to feel like Ashbery’s trying to score a point off ol’ Shakespeare or whatever.
In other words: “self-satisfied”? Sure, if you like. But if you say the li’l guy routine is a smarmy put-on, I say unto you: Examine your conscience. I bet your objection is more to li’l guys than to put-ons and smarm.
(c) Diction oddities and honors dorm humor. Now, here I’m happy to admit Ashbery’s sense of fun does not do it for me, a whoppin’ percent of the time. Phrases like “mandrills on the turnpike” leave me cold, cold. But there is a very great difference between being left cold and being provoked to the kind of rage represented by a certain familiar illustration from Through the Looking-Glass. (It’s in the chapter called “Tweedledum and Tweedledee”; you can gaze upon it here.) That’s how I used to react.
What made me change? That’s easy. I stopped thinking Ashbery was grinding an axe with that stuff. Making a point. Mocking expectations. Being deliberately lame. These days, I just figure he thinks all that stuff is swell, and I calmly disagree.
I still have Tweedledum-style meltdowns from time to time, but latterly I reserve that kind of thing for situations where I have to listen to the dorks defending the yaks and the thwacks and the mustard cokes by recourse to high-sounding words and philosophy. (This is actually a deep point about misplaced dislikes of Ashbery. Gotta take care not to hate him when you should be hating the people who smack their silly lips over the worst parts of him.) [Sloan dixit: "It's not the band I hate, it's their fans."—mr]
On (a), I always figured JA figured it were good enough for Stevens it were good enough for him. And he was right. Yet another phenomenon of life where Sturgeon’s Law is useful.
Sturgeon wasn’t enough of a curmudgeon.
What? I should think I, Libertine would show that he was quite the curmudgeon!
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Libertine
The again, as Sturgeon’s Law says, “Nothing is always absolutely so”
I think my favorite Ashbery line is the Erratum slip found in the first edition of Houseboat Days, a correction for “Fantasia on ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’” :
*Due to an unfortunate typesetting error, a line has been printed in an incorrect position. Line 6 on page 83, “falling back to the vase again like a fountain. Responsible” should be deleted. It appears in the correct place on page 88.*
One wonders how such a thing could happen. And would anyone have noticed, without the erratum note? My guess is that Ashbery planned it on purpose, the inserted slip meant as a detached, movable line in the book.
Close, Kent, close. The errata slip was included by JA to remind him to write another poem today, on that subject. He also uses it as a bookmark.
I confess to asking myself questions (a), (b), and (c) every now and then. I think the answers here are as good as any I’ve seen, and better than what I usually come up with. But what about question (d), which is:
(d) isn’t it all a bit like looking at some really, really good wallpaper after a while (I mean, good wallpaper, like WIlliam Morris good)? I mean, doesn’t the same set of figures, tones, attitudes sort of circulate endlessly, without much sense of movement other than (to steal a Wallace Stevens phrase), “merely circulating”?
Bob
Aaah, now I must say, the baroque arguments surrounding and supporting the thin clear deep low flow of art and word ARE a lot like good-ass William Morris wallpaper. They move and writhe slowly within their set yet slowly shifting forms. Fun if you’re in that sort of mood, and especially if prone to pattern-hallucinations. I think you’ve actually defined for me a major reason I’m nosing back around the serious art world again after so long – hungry for that long weird trippin.
PG
Speaking of errata slips, and because I know some people here are interested in Bourdieu, thought I’d mention that Gabe Gudding and I are locked in position-taking battle over matters related to PB at Archambeau’s Samizdat.
Nobody seems to be objecting to the objections to Ashbery, even Archambeau’s — and I share the objections too. What I don’t get is why the felicities have made him the consensus Number One Poet of our time.
I wrote a poem about Ashbery in May of ‘08.
[This comment has been edited for length.
Folks, in the future, please don't post your own poetry in the comments unless you can keep it to 5-10 lines. If you've got your own blog, post the poem there and add a link to it in your comment. If you don't have your own blog, you can get one here, post your poem on it, and then add a link in your comment. --rpb]
This seems
like a bit
of an overreaction.
And that’s
my poem.
What a funny policy! Discourse must be in prose? What an old-fashioned notion! Or are you just miffed because I approved of Zizek calling Foucault a yuppie? To avoid confusion, you might want to post your comments policy prominently.
I posted the excerpts from my poem because I had posted on my blog, and it anticipated a number of Madrid’s concerns. I’ve since revised the poem and didn’t want to post a link. Ah well, if anybody’s interested I’d be happy to send you a revised copy.
I don’t read all the poems in Harriet’s comments streams, but I’m glad they’re there.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment:
If John Ashbery happened to send in a poem to DE, would it be edited down if it went over ten lines?
I am completely baffled whenever anyone posts their own poetry in a comments stream. It’s, well, obnoxious. If Ashbery tried to do it on one of my posts, I’d delete it in a second. I had nothing to do with editing the above poem, but I wholeheartedly support the policy.
The policy is here. There should be a link to it right near the comment box, but for some reason that’s disappeared. I’ll try to fix it when I can.
I edit (and sometimes delete) comments for the simple reason that I want DE to be a place where conversations can take place. When people post 800 pixels’ worth of their poetry, it acts pretty effectively to kill whatever conversation came before it. This doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions, and I feel quite at liberty to make them as I please. (Sovereign is he who decides the exception, and all that…) John’s poem, needless to say, didn’t warrant one.
If Ashbery sent in a poem to DE I would not only leave it in situ, I would also probably reproduce it in its own post. I don’t know why that would seem mysterious or interesting to anyone, but there it is.
The Medici!
[Eleven lines by Paul Muldoon]
Holy Thursday
–for Michael Robbins
They’re kindly here, to let us linger so late,
Long after the shutters are up.
A waiter glides from the kitchen with a plate
Of stew, or some thick soup,
And settles himself at the next table but one.
We know, you and I, that it’s over,
That something or other has come between
Us, whatever we are, or were.
The waiter swabs his plate with bread
And drains what’s left of his wine,
Then rearranges [the tiny chairs], one by one…
I wrote a bit about Ashbery as Consensus Bigwig in the intro to Laureates and Heretics, which comes out in a month or two. Email me at my Lake Forest College address if you want, and I’ll see if I can dig it up for you.
B
John,
This is from an early draft, but it’s the only one I have on this computer. And the only version, I think, that’s short enough for the present context:
When I first read Kellogg’s essay “The Self in the Poetic Field,” I knew I had found a paradigm for understanding poetry that would make the project I had in mind possible. Kellogg’s work, based on the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, provided two things: a set of compass points by which one could begin to understand the vastness and the variety of American poetry; and a way of reading that could account for both aesthetics and sociology. His model proposed a reading of American poetry in terms of the social and aesthetic claims made for it by its readers, and offered a way of constructing models of the poetic field as it shifted over time.
Kellogg’s article defines the field of American poetry in terms of two axes of value, one aesthetic, ranging from the traditional to the experimental; the other sociological, ranging from the individual to the communal. Readers, critics, reviewers, prize committees, anthologists, and publishers define the relative prestige of these different values, as well as the relation of individual poets to the various values. They do this through the selection of works for publication or prizes, but also in subtler ways, such as the claiming a certain poet is relevant to or represents an identity group, or by placing of a poet’s work in the context of a tradition or a school of innovative writing. To simplify greatly, you could say that the poet who is claimed from the most positions (or is claimed most strongly for a certain position) wins — if by “winning” we mean gaining a large readership or a prestigious reputation. One becomes important by being claimed as a representative of a community (like, say, Adrienne Rich, as representative of feminist, disability, and queer communities); or as an icon of individual sensibility (like Robert Lowell, or others in the confessional movement); or as a standard-bearer of one or another version of tradition (think of Dana Gioia as a New Formalist); or as a luminary of the avant-garde (like, say, Bob Perelman, one of the Ivy League’s language poets). If the critics, anthologists, and prize-givers from a number of different communities happen to need what you have to offer, you could be claimed from several sides at once — the career of John Ashbery being a shining example. For some Ashbery carries into our own time the great tradition that runs from Keats through Wallace Stevens (people like this write articles with titles like “John Ashbery’s Revision of the Post-Romantic Quest”). For others he is the great linguistic innovator who inaugurated a new era in poetry with The Tennis Court Oath (people like this write articles with titles like “Houses of Poetry After Ashbery: The Poetry of Ann Lauterbach and Donald Revell”). For some Ashbery is the most personal and private of poets (people like this write articles with titles like “John Ashbery: The Self Against Its Images”). For others he is a representative of the gay male community (people like this write articles with titles like “Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Politics”) . If not exactly all things to all people, Ashbery is, at any rate, many things to many people. His way of creating his time happens to be useful to useful to representatives of all quadrants of the American poetic field that Kellogg maps. It is surely no coincidence that Ashbery is one of the most canonical American poets of our time.
So there’s my 2 cents on Ashbery’s popularity.
Bob
Hey Bob, where can one find the Kellogg essay? Is that *David* Kellogg? I’ve always liked his stuff. Smart guy.
Good thing that didn’t come with line breaks, Bob. You’d be out of your 2 cents.
>If Ashbery tried to do it on one of my posts, I’d delete it in a second.
Oh, yeah, RIGHT!
David Kellogg, yep. The essay was in Fence 3.2, Winter 2000-2001. Not online, as far as I know. Good essay — witty, too.
B.
Thanks, Bob.
David Kellogg is great. He valiantly defended me, on his blog, after Scott Simon attacked me, about two years ago, on NPR’s All things Considered. This really happened.
David Kellogg is great.
Scott Simon is great.
Kent Johnson is great.
Ain’t it great to be great!
Just like me.
A fine application of the lower end of the DE verse-length limit.
More quintains!
> quintains
Deep fried, with pollo al carbon please.
“John’s poem, needless to say, didn’t warrant one [an exception].”
Oh, you are a saucy number!
Thanks for posting the comments policy. Nothing about posting poems in it, so you may want to update. I’m sure I’ve gone over the limit for stupid and/or offensive — but the poem — well, it wasn’t a poem — it was an excerpt from a very, very long poem, and now the excerpted excerpt is practically meaningless. Please delete the whole excerpt, if you wouldn’t mind — but, please note, it was on point. I actually took out the line breaks to look at it as prose with the thought of re-posting, but it didn’t read as well, so forget it.
I would like to re-post this observation, since I haven’t seen it elsewhere: Romanticism wrapped in irony. That’s my take-away from reading JA. Brilliant romanticism — the “hit lines” are gorgeous, and the Nation reviewer I mentioned (Ange Mlinko, FWIW) as well as the NYTimes reviewer (whose name I didn’t know and have forgotten) both focused on them, as did A. Madrid. I happen to find JA’s habitual digressions vexing, and his syntactical sleights-of-hand an annoying stylistic tic (the antecedent-less “it” is everywhere in his stuff), but his great lines blow me away.
Great post, Bob Archambeau — makes a lot of sense to me — thanks for putting it up!
p.s. RPB, we’re neighbors! If you live at your mailing address, I walk near your place on the way to the Capitol Hill Library all the time. Howdy, neighbor!
Bobby Baird is great.
Bob Archambeau is great.
Ange Mlinko is great.
Ain’t it great to be great!
Just like John Shaw.
(I’m serious, by the way, and I hope that comes through. SRSLY.)
Jordan is my best boyfriend.
Ron Silliman is my second-best boyfriend.
John Ashbery is on my back.
He digs his spurs deep in my thighs.
Don Share combs Miguel Hernandez’s hair on the moon.
You lie!
. )
The St. Marks Series is fabulous.
The SEGUE Series is terrific.
The PENN Sound Series is magnificent.
None of them have ever contacted me!
In 2000, I smoked with Pierre Bourdieu in Delft.
Apologies. Overdose of decongestants, it seems.
Glad to hear it John. We’ll have to hit up Vivace one of these days.
Sounds good!
Thanks for deleting the rest of the excerpt.
>If Ashbery sent in a poem to DE I would not only leave it in situ, I would also probably reproduce it in its own post.
Yes, I know. I was lying.
Michael Robbins lies about John Ashbery.
Gabe Gudding lies about Pierre Bourdieu.
HTML Giant unscrolls its Ode to being hip and twenty-nine.
Where is Franz Wright, the hermit of Habsheim?
He is a pillar of snow, with a carrot for a nose, and a tulip for a mouth.
Rae Armantrout is a Finalist for the NBCCA.
D.A. Powell is a Finalist for the NBCCA.
Rachel Zucker is a Finalist for the NBCCA.
Keith Waldrop has won the NBA.
Language poetry is like the USSR.
Henry Gould imitates loon calls in Ely.
Kenny Goldsmith copies the Times in New York City.
Lara Glenum talks kinky in Poughkeepsie.
Pakistanis scatter, a mile below, like ants gone crazy.
Who says American poets don’t have manifold talents?
Don’t you remember being 29, Kent? As I recall I spent that year thinking I was an old man.
Maybe I’m mistaking description for putdowns again.
Names! interchangeable.
Joshua Clover leans into the wind, like Lenin.
Juliana Spahr sprays bullets into a Seven Eleven.
Once I was in the Soviet Union with Barrett Watten.
Where are you going, Barrett, I said to him near the Neva.
The sun was behind him, and his face was like a disc of fire.
The fury of Flarf has one oil against two vinegars.
The atavism of Conceptualism has two shovels against one can.
Why did Helen Vendler flee across the fields, beyond Erzurum?
Leaving her garments neatly folded, atop this mossy stone?
Because, Frank O’Hara, those are Capital’s dumps that were our coral towns.
OMG OMG OMG RAE HAS GONE AND DONE NAMED HER NEXT MSS M*O*N*E*Y S*H*O*T
I know, she told me & Anthony Madrid this as we walked her to her reading at the U of C the other day. Both of us were pissed we hadn’t thought of it first.
YES WE KNOW WE KNOW YOU AND ANTHONY MADRID THIS YOU AND ANTHONY MADRID THAT… YOU COULD HAVE SHARED THE NEWS WITH US ***THE OTHER DAY.*** THANKS A LOT.
THE BEST POSSIBLE AMERICAN POETRY BOOK TITLE IS NOW TAKEN. GAME. SET. MATCH.
She knows it, too. She said, “You guys will like the title of my new manuscript,” then she told us, & we both went, “Oooooooh.”
YES YES WE KNOW JAMES FRANCO WILL PLAY YOU IN THE MOVIE. SHEEEEEESH
.)
I can’t tell a simple story without being accused of logrolling?
You can do anything you like, Michael. I can too.
I’ll say this for that title, though — it will make it less likely that I purchase several copies to give as Christmas gifts to family members.
The day I start trying to impress people by namedropping Rae Armantrout…. Well. Whatevs.
Touchy! I’m envious, obvs. Consider the all-caps dropped.
It’s a great story all the same. (Cue Kentaine.)
It actually depressed me. I realized I wanted that title really bad.
Yeah! Rae has had that effect on me a few times in the past. Glad, I think, that she’s still capable of it.
Then we made fun of Anthony for not being in The New Yorker & prank-called Richard Wilbur.
Ha ha. Then Obama said, “They didn’t send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of steel-cage match to see who comes out alive.” Only *that* one really happened.
I’d pay to see that! Money shot!
@Jordan: “Just like John Shaw.”
Thanks, but, I am not great, I am life.
Re: Rae A: sex and death, sex and food, sex and money.
More songs about death, food, and money! (Robert Graves: Pluto, god of death, was also god of wealth. Freud: money = excrement.)
Rereading my first quintain (or cinquain, whatever the term) I laughed in horror, realizing the unintended sexual innuendo! So here is the proper version:
Jordan Davis is my boyfriend.
Ron Silliman is my second-best boyfriend.
I carry John Ashbery on my back, up the mountain.
He digs his spurs deep in my thighs.
Don Share combs Miguel Hernandez’s hair on the moon.
Rae Armantrout has come to visit, in her full, stylish burqa.
She rushes towards us, across the quad, out of a zone of dark and storm.
You must know it, and a thousand times: We are both in the New Yorker.
Also, the campus is great, a spot of tranquility, orbited by garbage.
Two hours with her in the Library, and our faces go wild; clouds turn into animal crackers.
Change “Frank O’Hara” to “Frank.”
A chap of thirty, solicited yesterday, is in process; it will be dedicated to Jordan Davis, with thanks for the inspiration.
Congratulations to you both!
Looking forward to seeing the whole series. Please keep me informed!
Thanks, John.
Change “garbage” to “dross.”
Kent, I prefer the “improper” version. Why would anyone begrudge been mounted by America’s greatest poet? Come on!
Cy, thanks for the suggestion.
However, it’s not so much that *I* would begrudge it; it’s just that it comes across as incredibly presumptuous on my part that Ashbery would want to mount, in that fashion, an overweight, ugly guy like me.
I was pretty good looking in my day, though.
Btw, Anthony’s reading at Myopic Books Sunday night (Jan 31) at 7 pm. If you’re in the Chi, please come! I will be performing various card tricks.
In addition to Madrid’s The 580 Strophes, there is another major (I said major) first book by a “more-or-less younger” Chicago poet coming soon:
John Beer’s The Waste Land and Other Poems.
Now I have the complete, signed advance manuscripts of both.
Inquiries and offers from well-endowed libraries and private manuscript collectors are welcomed.
Oh, and one more true stunner of a book related to Chicago, though the poet is from North Carolina, out of the now deeply underground Lucipo group, and it’s possible you haven’t yet heard of him, he’s never been in the New Yorker:
Tim Earley’s forthcoming big collection from Cracked Slab, and now I am blanking on the title, even though I wrote a blurb for it, the manuscript is at home, but I’m very serious, it’s going to knock holes in people’s skulls, you’ll see.
Ah, Kent, I’m sure you’re being unduly modest. I have seen that photo of you, in a prospect of flowers, on some South American street. Anyway, poetry should be presumptuous.
Anthony (is Anthony is the house? If not, I will talk to the empty air), I find objection/answer (c) especially interesting, primarily because there seems to be a strong element of puckish, even juvenile, humour in your own poems, what with those moments of goofy surrealism and self-apostrophizing (sic).
Back to Kent: is Lucipo some kind of Oulipo offshoot/mutant?
These are strawmen, Mr. Madrid. Come now.
Kent: I wish you’d put me in one of your poems.
M. Hansen has murdered an innocent deer.
He saws fast her haunches and snaps frothy two beer.
Eftsoons and with yare, he cuts forth the heart.
“Gramercy,” says Robbins, “Your courtesy’s an Art;”
“I shall stuff it for Zizek, in a free-range fowl tart.
Well, I sure didn’t do a very good job with my quotation marks in the last two lines, there!
FOR JORDAN, KENT, ROBERT, AND NOT FORGETTING MICHAEL
There once was a Digital Emunction
Whose editor showed no compunction.
Then came clinky, linked chains
Of marvelous cinquains.
Hurrah for the poetic function!
The paragraphe organyzes the sentences.
The paragraphe is a unity of quantitye, not logick or argumente.
Sentence lengthe is a unyt of measure.
Sentence structure is alterede for torque, or increased polysemie/ambiguitie.
Once, on his blog, he comparede post-avant poets to Civil Rights marchers.
Cy,
Lucipo was a once-vibrant movement of young poets in Durham, North Carolina (and environs), ca. early first decade of the current millennium. Then my good friend (and still good friend) Gabe Gudding posted his famous, brilliant Poetic Narcissism manifesto on the Lucipo Listserv, a barely disguised attack on my person, as well as a brave self-analysis of his own (though he claimed he was thinking of Allen Ginsberg). This precipitated a great and legendary convulsion, too complicated to reconstruct, in these boxes. The short of it is that the List imploded and the group went private, retreating to the hills, settling in to a long period of isolated polygamy and inbreeding, from which it has not yet emerged.
Here is the entry written for them by the mysterious feneon collective [unified tendency]. The book of the fc collective’s 242 faits divers (some of them updated, I’ve heard, from their original appearance last year online) is rumored to be in production and out in the coming months:
And given up for dead! An ethnography crew, stumbling through a lost hollow of the Smokey Mountains, has found the bearded survivors of the Lucipo group, their lean-tos arranged around a copper still.
“But if you say the li’l guy routine is a smarmy put-on, I say unto you: Examine your conscience. I bet your objection is more to li’l guys than to put-ons and smarm.”
It *is* a routine — it’s writing! it’s a rhetorical effect! — and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the ubiquity of the effect that becomes objectionable — too much of the same thing. IMO, YMMV, caveat lector, et cetera, et cetera.
Are there any earthworms in New Jersey?
Just asking.
Kent, Even if I weren’t in that little poem, I’d find it brilliant.
MH,
As you might imagine, I find my deer-dressing cinquain brilliant, too, so thanks for the confirmation. (Though I’m really mad about screwing up the quotation marks at the end there, as it makes it seem that *you* might be speaking the last line.)
MR took it well, and much as I meant it: a gentle, affectionate poke. He wrote me to say he was going to send it to Paul Muldoon, urging its publication in the New Yorker.
I wrote another cinquain yesterday, about W.S. Merwin, composed of double hexameters, but it didn’t quite work, so I decided to scrap it. Here are three disconnected lines, though, that I thought were kind of good:
One thing that really blew me away when I first started reading Merwin was that he didn’t use punctuation.
I have no idea how he does it; it’s kind of ghostly and disembodied, like drizzle, or the Congo.
[....]
His vixen, for example, though a more abstract sentient creature, is endowed with both a totally modern mind as well as deep old foresty knowledge, and if that’s not awesome, well, send a drone after me and the whole mud town.
> urging its publication
You don’t say.
>MR … wrote me to say …
Of course I didn’t write to say any such thing; I haven’t read the piece in question. I stopped reading this thread some time back. I am, however, glad I clicked on this particular email to learn that there is a poem I don’t need to read to which I don’t need to respond.
Hey guys, “you don’t say”…
I thought the reference to MR contacting Paul Muldoon was the giveaway! Geez.
In any case, MR, of course! I didn’t write it so you would respond, so no need, at all, to assure us that you don’t “need to.”
How about a report on Madrid’s reading?
> giveaway!
Oh, you were kidding around.
You gotta flag those hoaxes, Kent! Use the hoax tag:
[hoax]He wrote me he was going to say…[/hoax]
Hey, it makes me feel good, Jordan, that you and MR seem to think there was *plausible* ring to the smiling line about The New Yorker being contacted on my three-minute little poem. Maybe it’s better than I suspected!
That’s what the internet is all about, Kent — making you, Kent Johnson, feel good.
Forgot to add, it’s also great for making me feel superior!
You *are* superior, Jordan.
> You *are*
Just ask me.
By the way, there’s a *great* Steve Reich composition with that name — I know a lot of people think the harmonies are very ’60s pastel/metallic tumbler but they are wrong wrong wrong.
Did you know that the internet in its entirety is retained on the inner lining of your retina?
[Redacted!]
[Get it?]
You’ll be famous for that someday, Michael! You’ll be famous for being famous for being famous!
btw, if you repeat “famous” at top speed 45 times, you start seeing lil’ green devils.
(“Boy will I!” or variations thereof constitute predictable & predicted responses.)
I would be shocked if the New Yorker republished poems that first appeared on the web (blog comments, no less!) — *that* should have been the giveaway. (Though I passed glancingly by the comment too.)
And who couldn’t use more gentle affectionate pokes?