My latest Lingo column, Linguistic Currency, is now up on the Nation’s website. It takes off from Ferenc Karinthy’s novel Metropole, and a fascinating book on the role of English in the transformation of Slovakia into a modern European (read: free market) nation.
With special reference to this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.
1/ (a) Is the form of poems like Seidel’s “Sii Romanitico, Seidel, Tanto Per Cambiare” adequately described as doggerel? (b) If yes, how does this affect your sense of his enterprise? If no, how would you describe it?
2/ One justification for the apparent lack of sense in Wheeler’s work is that this lack mimics the senselessness of the world we live in. (a) Do you think this is a valid justification? (b) If so, what do you take to be the point of the mimicry? (c) Does this justification apply to Seidel? How? (d) Does it apply to Flarf and conceptual poetry? How?
Having found myself positioned by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books and Ange Mlinko in The Nation as a representative of the party line on the kajillionaire provocateur poet Frederick Seidel—& cited with rather more subtlety by Harper’s senior editor Christian Lorentzen (writing for unfathomable reasons in the United Arab Emirates’ National newspaper)—I am pleased to be able to report that my review of Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009 appears in the August 6 issue of The London Review of Books
Devin Johnston in the Washington Post and Ange Mlinko in The New Yorker.
