1/ Jane Dark:

Over at the sud­denly and excel­lently renascent Ads With­out Prod­ucts, the sud­denly and excel­lently erst­while CR has been making a vital record of the guilty half-​repressed flow­er­ing of nation­al­iza­tion talk in the national dis­course — patiently noting that while the mea­sures dis­cussed are always simul­ta­ne­ously dis­avowed, and not really full-​nationalization (much less social­ism), it remains the case that

…every time they dress the win­dows with this sort of talk, every time the gov­ern­ment play­ers offer the argu­ment that Gen­eral Motors or Chrysler would have been better man­aged by respon­si­ble, sane, and forward-​thinking bureau­crats rather than their board and cor­po­rate man­age­ment, they turn the wheel of dis­cur­sive nor­ma­tiv­ity a click toward state man­age­ment and the eco­nom­ics of planning….

…

[W]e fear one could make what is, in effect, a quite con­trary claim.

…Read More…

The com­plete absence of coun­try music on the whiplash­ing summer-​music chart New York put together last week is even less sur­pris­ing than the New York Times’s sim­i­lar sin of omis­sion a few weeks ago. And yet if New York is really, as I sug­gested to a friend the other day, the People mag­a­zine for people like us, you’d think they might try to imag­ine an “us” with a little less con­stricted sense of what counts as summer sonic fun.

There’s some­thing to Jane Dark’s sug­ges­tion that these blind spots are all about class, but I don’t know if that fully explains it. I mean, hell, in every respect save dis­pos­able income and zip code, I’m at the demo­graphic heart of the class their ads are gun­ning for, right down to Dr. Hakimi’s Art of Oral Har­mony. But there I go again, lis­ten­ing to—and, shh, even liking!–coun­try music.

Not that I’m too wor­ried; we all, some­how, find our own ways to sur­vive the dik­tats of glossy-​magazine taste. But still you have to wonder what it’s going to take to make coun­try music safe for the archi­tects of medi­ated cool, when even the high-​profile defec­tions of Jack White, Robert Plant, Jewel, Jes­sica Simp­son, and Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t do it.

You have to wonder, that is, until it hits you: Hootie!

Darius Rucker will save us all.

I’ll be frank: I got inter­ested in the Poetry Foundation’s Har­riet blog right around the time that Har­riet got inter­ested in Chicago Review, but since then it’s become clear that the blog is the hap­pi­est new prod­uct to come out of the infa­mous Lilly millions.

Har­riet is basi­cally an Op-​Ed page for poetry, with all the atten­dant charms and frus­tra­tions of that insti­tu­tion, includ­ing bizarre pro­nounce­ments (Major Jackson’s New Athe­ni­ans Man­i­festo, Chris­t­ian Bök’s plan to spawn a lit­eral poetry plague), auto­cathar­tic provo­ca­tions (A.E. Stallings’s brief for New For­mal­ism, Bök’s chal­lenge to the enemy of his genius), and year-​end lists (e.g. by Major Jack­son and the PoFound staff).

What makes Har­riet’s suc­cess so intrigu­ing is that despite impor­tant pre­cur­sors like the back pages of Sulfur and Silliman’s blog, it was never obvi­ous that poets needed their own Op-​Ed page—private let­ters and public reviews seemed to cover the field. And yet Har­riet seems to be work­ing. Just check those com­ment boxes: there’s Ben Fried­lan­der, Joshua Clover, and many others weigh­ing in weekly.

Har­riet has fast become the most inter­est­ing thing at the Poetry Foun­da­tion web­site, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from check­ing out two arti­cles by Peter O’Leary that they’ve now posted else­where on the site. The first is a review of W.S. DiP­iero that appeared in the Novem­ber Poetry. The second is an essay on Robert Duncan’s poem, “Often I am Per­mit­ted to Return to a Meadow.” Also, today on Har­riet Michael Marcinkowski named Peter’s Depth The­ol­ogy as his pick for 2007. It’s a great choice: check it out.

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.