Update: Now with 100% more self-​promotional links!

Our own Michael Rob­bins has two reviews out this week:  a wickedly hilar­i­ous take­down of Robert Hass’s selected poems in the new issue of Poetry mag­a­zine, & a less wickedly hilar­i­ous appraisal of John Ashbery’s latest in the London Review of Books (sub­scriber only, but per­haps a copy could be pro­vided backchan­nel), which con­tains the first cita­tion of our own Oren Izenberg’s forth­com­ing Being Numer­ous. Please check ‘em out.

Just wanted to post, belat­edly, a link to Ms. Dark’s excel­lent inter­view with Gopal Bal­akr­ish­nan in Lana Turner, since I have of late found myself non­plussed by the skep­ti­cism with which what seems an utterly uncon­tro­ver­sial, even triv­ial, claim is too often met—that cap­i­tal­ism will come to an end.

The fail­ure of this phase of cap­i­tal­ism, pre­sag­ing maybe wider prob­lems and fail­ures of cap­i­tal­ism, is that end [of his­tory], again, posing the ques­tion what it means for some­thing to come to an end. Cap­i­tal­ism, one is fairly sure, will not come to an end in the same way the Roman Empire did or Feu­dal­ism did or even the Soviet Union did. So we should be able to track the vec­tors of a declin­ing system in ways that allow us to grasp the speci­ficity of our own sit­u­a­tion, to gauge, as it were, the var­i­ous levels and dimen­sions at which a system can be con­tin­u­ing for­ward and then other levels at which it might be flat-​lining. And so I think we’ll have very com­plex prob­lems of both thought and polit­i­cal prac­tice in this coming period.

But I would encour­age every­body not to think about the his­tor­i­cal prob­lem of the future of our way of life: cap­i­tal­ism. Is it long for the world? How much longer? What might we do both to improve con­di­tions in the here and now and to think about alter­na­tives to it. Every­thing, as we know, all modes of social life, even­tu­ally come to an end and I think we’ve been a bit too accus­tomed in this period that we’re just coming out of to think that that truth, while cer­tainly true of every­thing that came before, might not be true of us. And if it were true of us, it might some­how be the case it would only matter in the very long term. And I think we might increas­ingly be con­fronted with evi­dence that that is not the case.

If you’re in Hyde Park on Sat­ur­day, please come see me read my poems at Majel Con­nery’s fan­tas­tic Salon per­for­mance series.

On the Program:

Larry Zbikowski (guitar)
Harold Olivey (voice)
Michael Rob­bins (poetry)
Des Pickard (singer/songwriter)

at the home of
Sidney Nagel & Young-​Kee Kim
4913 S Kim­bark Ave.
Chicago, IL
7:30p doors
8:00p performances

& if you’re in Hyde Park tomor­row night, please come see Nick Demske & Gina Myers read their poems at Series A, at the Hyde Park Art Center!

Browsing the poetry sec­tion in 57th Street Books today, I dis­cov­ered that Knopf has placed the fol­low­ing blurb on the back of the paper­back edi­tion of Jack Gilbert’s The Dance Most of All:

“The best poems here are valu­able bul­letins from a dis­tant, pri­vate war fought over resources for affir­ma­tion, in which the most precious weapon is the capac­ity to ‘say grace over / almost every­thing.’” —Poetry

Poetry didn’t say that, of course. (That mag­a­zine talks a lot, but rarely in pro­pria per­sona.) Like Ange & Jordan & Bobby, I’ve had this expe­ri­ence before—although this is the first time someone’s pulled a quote from one of my (largely) neg­a­tive reviews. And I have con­flicted feel­ings about it—it grat­i­fies one’s sense of self-​importance, but is that why I do this, to sell books for Knopf? Anyway, it got me think­ing about blurbs.

When did blurb­ing begin? When did it begin to be called blurb­ing? Does anyone else spend as much time as I do think­ing about blurbs? Have you read Zizek’s blurbs? There’s a web page where you can read every blurb Thomas Pynchon’s ever writ­ten. Have blurbs ever been the cause of enmity? Does anyone else remem­ber Bruce Conner’s blurb for John Yau? What is the best blurb ever?

I know the answer to that last one. It is a blurb writ­ten by Tom Raworth & it appears on the back of Ted Greenwald’s 3: “Just read the fuck­ing book.”