Joel Calahan
Since my last comments about reruns of Dynasty in the U.S. Senate, Caroline Kennedy has not only expressed interest in the Senate seat vacated by HRC, but is starting to clear the field with political anglings and manueverings of various kinds (including but certainly not limited to secret phone calls and upstate New York “listening tours”).
Geraldine Brooks, though, gives us the reason to end all reasons for Kennedy’s worthiness for U.S. senator in a Daily Beast column:
She reads. She reads poetry. Anyone who doesn’t think that’s relevant needs to be reminded of William Carlos Williams’ observation: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for the lack of what is found there.”
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Robert P. Baird

Blagojevich, you rotten scoundrel. Not one day–not ten hours!–after we say something nice about you for the first time ever, in our entire lives, you go and get yourself arrested for selling Barack Obama’s Senate seat? Sure, you made my headline sound awfully prescient, but come on: if you really wanted to make a buck off Barack, couldn’t you have gone off and started a commemorative coin company or something?
And on the day before your birthday, no less? For shame.
From the (bankrupt, but that’s a post for another day) Tribune:
Blagojevich and Harris were accused of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that included Blagojevich conspiring to sell or trade the Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama in exchange for financial benefits for the governor and his wife. The governor was also accused of obtaining campaign contributions in exchange for other official actions.
Blagojevich was taken into federal custody at his North Side home this morning.
…
On the issue of the U.S. Senate selection, federal prosecutors alleged Blagojevich sought appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the new Obama administration, or a lucrative job with a union in exchange for appointing a union-preferred candidate.
(Tribune photo by Nancy Stone.)
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UPDATE (10:44am): How corrupt was this SOB?
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Robert P. Baird
Martha Ronk’s essay on Barbara Guest’s “Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights,” first published in Chicago Review’s Barbara Guest special issue, is up for the reading at Poetry Daily. Here’s Ronk on Guest’s ekphrasis:
As Guest’s ekphrasis enables a movement beyond what she calls “the locked kingdom of linearity,” it also suggests the ways in which ekphrastic failure, a failure built into the very project itself, produces various significant effects. No matter the effort, a poet can never bring the visual fully into language. Yet it is ekphrasis’s very apophatic nature that has the potential to unleash the unseen, the mysterious, the hallucinatory. Ekphrasis performs both impossibility and its overcoming in alternating fashion.
Robert P. Baird

I’ve posted some photos from last Thursday’s Chicago Review launch party. The event featured a set of tremendous readings by Eleni Sikelianos, Ed Roberson, and Dan Beachy-Quick, as well as a brilliant performance of Barbara Guest’s “The Office” directed by Peter Thomas.