digital emunction | a multiauthor blog founded and edited by robert p. baird

Babel vs. Lingua Franca

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.

Pop Quiz: On the Later Poetry of Frederick Seidel and the Assorted Poems of Susan Wheeler

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?

What Living Is For

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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

Two Poems for a Monday Morning

Devin John­ston in the Wash­ing­ton Post and Ange Mlinko in The New Yorker.

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