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.”

From Yves Smith, quot­ing Martin Wolf quot­ing Raghu­ram Rajan, a number that should sur­prise even those who have never doubted capitalism’s ten­dency to take money from the hands of the many and put it in the pock­ets of the few:

If you have any doubts about how easy it is for some­one who works hard in the US to get ahead, con­sider this fac­toid from Martin Wolf’s latest com­ment in the Finan­cial Times, on Raghu­ram Rajan’s new book (see Satya­jit Das’ review here:

Thus, Prof Rajan notes that “of every dollar of real income growth that was gen­er­ated between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the top 1 per cent of households”.

Once again I find occa­sion to drag out the hearsay results of an unsource­able poll that found that 20% of Amer­i­cans believed that their income put them in the top 1% of earn­ers, with another 20% believ­ing they would make it to the top 1% in their life­times. The reason I cling so des­per­ately to this sec­ond­hand sta­tis­tic is that it’s the only way I can explain to myself why we don’t have a cred­i­ble polit­i­cal move­ment that would seek to reclaim even half of what the top 1% makes for the other 99% of Amer­i­cans.

Just a note to say that I have four poems in the new issue of Fence (printed at the editor’s behest under one title as a single poem in four sec­tions, although they’re four sep­a­rate poems in my man­u­script & in my mind). Fence doesn’t post its con­tents online, so I hope you will track down a copy & sit back with a root beer float or a tor­tilla or some oxy­con­tin & give your­self over to reams of good poems & stuff—other con­trib­u­tors include Carl Phillips, Anselm Berri­gan, Loren Good­man, Rodrigo Toscano, Alyssa Wolf, Tomaz Sala­mun, & Tim­o­thy Donnelly.

I don’t talk about it much, but I spent part of my child­hood in the care­less & tacky con­di­tion of the very poor. Small town Col­orado was where I learned what an evic­tion notice is, what food stamps could & couldn’t buy, & what the terms “dry out,” “blackout,” & “bail bond” mean. I also learned, by watch­ing & lis­ten­ing to the adults around me, about grow­ing, buying, sell­ing, & smok­ing mar­i­juana. And I learned how to make myself very small, nearly invis­i­ble, during the seem­ingly random explo­sions of casual vio­lence that I spent much of my time dreading.

But besides the humil­i­a­tion & anx­i­ety, I remem­ber the aes­thet­ics. I remem­ber over­sized t-shirts printed with styl­ized uni­corns & wolves.