At his new blog, Sycamore & Flow­ers, Dale Smith has been writ­ing lovely, strange, and wreathed med­i­ta­tions of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal kind, old photos accom­pa­ny­ing, clearly a book in progress. And what a book it will be. It puts me in mind a bit of Sebald, though it’s very much, cer­tainly, of its own nature. In his crit­i­cism and in prose works like Black Stone and The Flood and the Garden, Smith has shown him­self as an impres­sive, ele­gant styl­ist. And this gor­geous, often moving prose, where per­sonal memory and social his­tory are in subtle, con­tra­pun­tal con­sort, may be his best work ever. Here’s the most recent entry. Check out the rest.

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Tonight I trace words, fol­low­ing little threads; my mind drifts into barely vis­i­ble prints on the pat­terns of family his­tory. It is not the truth sup­pos­edly latent in the tree dri­ving me onward. All those branches with little leaves of gen­er­a­tion.

Kenny Gold­smith offers a plate of fodder to his critics—among which con­tin­gent I count myself an inter­mit­tent and half-​hearted member—in his new Jacket dis­cus­sion with Dale Smith. But rather than bang away at some of his sil­lier for­mu­la­tions, I thought I’d flag some­thing that struck me as use­fully provocative:

I really have trou­ble with poet­hics. In fact, I think one of the most beau­ti­ful, free and expan­sive ideas about art is that it—unlike just about every­thing else in our culture—doesn’t have to par­take in an eth­i­cal dis­course. As a matter of fact, if it wants to, it can take an uneth­i­cal stance and test what it means to be that with­out having to endure the con­se­quences of real world inves­ti­ga­tions. I find this to be enor­mously pow­er­ful and lib­er­at­ing and worth fight­ing for. Where else can this exist in our culture?

I’d never sign my name to that state­ment as it stands, because I’m too well acquainted with how claims about art’s excep­tion­al­ity have been deployed in the past (PDF). But as a defense of the imag­i­na­tion, and as a protest against the notion that a poet’s task is to create forms of life rather than forms of words, I think it’s pretty admirable.

The new Chicago Review—click here to buy the issue—includes a suite of arti­cles that dis­cuss gender rep­re­sen­ta­tion in poetry pub­lish­ing. The arti­cles include “Numbers Trouble” by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young and a response by Jen­nifer Ashton, as well as a short note on gender rep­re­sen­ta­tion in lit­er­ary mag­a­zines that I wrote with Joshua Kotin. (UPDATE: The arti­cles are now avail­able as PDFs at the CR web­site.) “Numbers Trouble” is a response to an ear­lier arti­cle by Ashton pub­lished in Amer­i­can Lit­er­ary His­tory and enti­tled “Our Bodies, Our Poems.” Ashton’s arti­cle was itself a response, at least in part, to Spahr and Young’s “Foulipo,” which was per­formed at the 2005 noulipo con­fer­ence in Los Angeles.

The Poetry Foundation’s Har­riet blog pub­lished a spate of posts yes­ter­day dis­cussing the arti­cles. Har­riet editor Emily Warn intro­duces the posts and offers her own take on the ques­tions raised. Har­riet blog­gers Ange Mlinko and A.E. Stallings also com­ment. (Update, 12/3/07: Stephen Burt has con­tributed a response at Har­riet as well. Update, 12/5/07: Click here for Burt’s second response.)

Update [2/29/08]: “Bachelorettes, Even,” a ver­sion of Jen­nifer Scappettone’s response to Jen­nifer Ashton’s “Our Bodies, Our Poems” (both of which were first pre­sented as talks at 2006’s “How To Read. What To Do” con­fer­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago) has now appeared in Modern Philol­ogy 105. Scappettone’s response was the first to make the con­nec­tion between Ashton’s argu­ment and Spahr and Young’s “Foulipo.” The arti­cle is also notable for immor­tal­iz­ing this blog in a foot­note in an aca­d­e­mic journal.

The Spahr/Young and Ashton arti­cles have been dis­cussed on sev­eral other blogs as well. I’ll try to keep an updated list of sub­stan­tive com­ments here. The list so far: