[Ed. note: dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion is pleased to wel­come Kent John­son to the wild world of blog­ging. Here­with, his inau­gural post.]

The New Chicago School

My pro­posal: That the clos­est thing we presently have to a “School” of younger, rig­or­ously inno­v­a­tive poets in the U.S. (one that stands clos­est chance of being ret­ro­spec­tively seen as akin in sig­nif­i­cance to the NY School in its first-​generation, proto-​formation years–and when I say “School” I mean in that sense of for­tu­itous con­stel­la­tion, some­thing very dif­fer­ent from a self-​identified ten­dency or “movement”) is what I’ll call the New Chicago School. It’s a list of accom­plished, exper­i­men­tal writ­ers, more poet­i­cally focused as a col­lec­tive, per­haps, than the con­tents list of the City Vis­i­ble anthol­ogy of a couple years back, and more geo­graph­i­cally focused, too, inas­much as all the poets have roots in the city, even though a few of them have recently moved else­where (though in most cases still nearby), and one now lives abroad:

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:

This 272-page double issue includes:

LISA ROBERT­SON SPE­CIAL FEATURE

With two long poems, two essays, an inter­view by Kai Fierle-​Hedrick, a check­list, and crit­i­cal essays by Ben­jamin Fried­lan­der, Chris­tine Stew­art, Jen­nifer Scap­pet­tone, and Joshua Clover.

POEMS

Stephen Collis, Ros­marie Wal­drop, Rusty Mor­ri­son, Genya Tur­ovskaya, Karen Weiser, Jacque­line Waters, Cesar Vallejo, Friedrich Hölderlin, Gnoetry & Eric P. Elsh­tain, Peter Gizzi, Michael Kindel­lan, and John Matthias

FIC­TION

Pamela Lu

ESSAYS

Stephen Rode­fer, Calvin Bedi­ent, and Eliot Weinberger

REVIEWS
Tim­o­thy Yu on the Future of Asian Amer­i­can Poetry, Norman Finkel­stein on Donald Revell, Dustin Simp­son on For­rest Gander, Leila Wilson on Eleni Sike­lianos, Ihor Junyk on Hannah Krall, Martin Riker on Patrick Oured­nik, Paul Mer­chant on Alan Halsey, and V. Joshua Adams on Bin Ramke.

A NOTE on Gnoetry and the period style.

Order it here.