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]

KJ: The phenomenon’s largely for­got­ten now, but in ret­ro­spect, 20-some years since its apogee, how would you regard Flarf?

Foster: Well, the Flarf reduc­tion of post-​avant lyri­cal abstrac­tion to buf­foon­ery, dis­gust, kitsch, and unem­bar­rassed super­cil­ious mock­ery was noted, back in the century’s first decade, by cer­tain crit­ics like you, the late Michael Rob­bins, Ben­jamin Buchloh (who just cel­e­brated his 100th birth­day!), or Peter Schjel­dahl. Curi­ously, I think neo-​geo paint­ing of the 1980s offers a good heuris­tic model for its his­tor­i­cal fram­ing, now that we have a bit of per­spec­tive. Neo-​geo: Sounds fun­nier than Flarf when you say it outloud…

I noted in the com­ments thread in response to Don Share, under the post on Hilda Morley–don’t ask me how the thread wound its way to such–that Robert Pinsky (whom Don refers to as “Plotus,” intro­duc­ing a com­ment by said “Plotus” to the effect that poets who want to be famous better write like famous dead poets) had cer­tainly helped him­self become famous by appear­ing again and again on the Lehrer report to dra­mat­i­cally intone words by famous dead poets.

There. Except for cer­tain things writ­ten by Franz Wright in past com­ment boxes here, I have just set the record for the most unread­able sen­tence ever writ­ten on Dig­i­tal Emu­nc­tion. Not bad, eh?

Anyway, after I wrote my com­ment to Don, I started to think (Don is Senior Editor of Poetry, an influ­en­tial person, maybe that’s what got me onto the ambi­tious thought): What about U.S. poets and TV? Why haven’t U.S. poets, a breed of people so deliri­ously desirous of fame and recog­ni­tion, even though they deny the desire, exploited the medium more than they have?

Hilda Morley.