Having once somewhat cheekily included a sentence diagram in a book review, I was charmed this morning to see grammarian Kitty Burns Florey take on the sentences of Sarah Palin over at Slate. Check it out here.

As Guest’s ekphrasis enables a movement beyond what she calls “the locked kingdom of linearity,” it also suggests the ways in which ekphrastic failure, a failure built into the very project itself, produces various significant effects. No matter the effort, a poet can never bring the visual fully into language. Yet it is ekphrasis’s very apophatic nature that has the potential to unleash the unseen, the mysterious, the hallucinatory. Ekphrasis performs both impossibility and its overcoming in alternating fashion.

It strikes me that in the last 48 hours the notion of a commander-in-chief test has gained new relevance. May I suggest this one?

[T]his alliance may be an even shrewder move for [Caroline] Kennedy Schlossberg than for [Barack] Obama. It’s been 45 years since the fall of Camelot, and the family brand has begun to fade. A growing portion of the electorate was born after the deaths of John and Bobby and has a tough time relating to the Kennedy fixation of its elders. Under such conditions, what’s a committed custodian of the family legacy to do? Hitch her clan’s wagon to the hottest political star in decades. With a little luck, even as that old Camelot magic rubs off on Obama, the candidate’s energy and relevance will help sustain the Kennedy brand for a little longer.

2/ From my February Chicago Tribune article (PDF) on the Kennedy Obama endorsements:

The Kennedy name is the gold standard in Democratic politics, and it will remain so as long as John Kennedy’s assassination is a part of living memory. But the youngest people to vote for him in 1960 are 68 today, and seven out of eight Americans are too young to remember him as anything more than a historical figure, no more or less real than Roosevelt, Lincoln or Jefferson.

Edward Kennedy himself is 75. Besides his son, no third-generation Kennedy holds national office.

And thus, when Kennedy said Obama would not be trapped by the patterns of the past, it might not be because he was comically or tragically unaware of his own or his family’s position. It might be exactly the opposite: Perhaps he was too aware of that position. If that’s the case, then last week’s endorsements should be seen as an acknowledgment of just how fragile the patterns of the past can be.

By midnight Tuesday [i.e. February 5], after more than 20 states have weighed in on the Obama-Clinton race, we’ll have a better sense of how the Kennedy calculus affects the election in the
short run….

But in the long run, I wouldn’t be surprised if the endorsements do as much to help the Kennedys as they do to help Obama. Casting Obama in the Kennedy mold offers him authority, but it also offers the Kennedys a future, a way to keep the mystique alive.

QUICK UPDATE (7/1): Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me.

From “The Energies of Words,” Peter O’Leary’s history of the famous 1931 “Objectivists” issue of Poetry:

For an issue that launched a movement, it’s not particularly memorable for its poetry, most of which was written by second-rate poets who happened to be friends of Zukofsky, or by now canonical poets who are not regarded as Objectivists, such as Williams, Bunting, or Kenneth Rexroth, a progenitor of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s.

My review of Campbell McGrath’s Seven Notebooks appears in the summer issue of Bookforum. Check it out…

Ecce Monstrum, Jeremy Biles’s study of Georges Bataille, got a nice review by Tomasz Swoboda over at H-Ideas recently. Here’s the upshot:

All in all, among recent studies on Bataille, Biles’s book is the one that perhaps approaches best Bataille’s thought while proposing new interpretations of his work. Indeed, readers who are not familiar with Bataille’s work will be rather well introduced to its main aspects. At the same time, specialized readers will find in Biles’s book reformulations and reinterpretations that will likely become pivotal in Bataillean studies.

The book came out with Fordham University Press last year and is available for purchase (at an awfully steep $65) here.

A memo to all interested parties: I’ll be reading this Sunday, May 25, at The Charleston Bar in Bucktown (2076 N. Hoyne, to be precise).

The reading, which is happening under the auspices of both the Sunday Salon Chicago series and the Pilcrow Literary Festival, features fiction editors from Chicago literary magazines reading their own work. The other writer-editors on the card are Mike Zapata of Make, Simon A. Smith of Bruiser Review, and Michael Newirth of Fifth Wednesday Journal.

I’ll be reading a bit from my novel-in-progress. The reading starts at 7:30pm and shouldn’t last much past 9pm. If you’re in town and available, come out for the reading and I’ll buy you a beer…

The present review seems to be the first of a poem I think the most remarkable poem in English published this century. Having seen the shell-shocked response of two very different audiences I am at a loss to account for the speechlessness unless we’ve been outdone in our jabber and feel abashed (I’m assuming there is some kind of operative ‘we’ about, I hope so). The poem is doing some work nonetheless. A passion for new British poetry was admitted to me more than a year after this poem had been detonated in their heads, by some graduate students on a major poetics program in the US. But given the absence of print or internet commentary, I feel compelled to write a fan letter rather than a critique, and to say a possible poetic future starts here — and if it doesn’t, I suppose I can go and grow vegetables.