In the middle of the ongo­ing feud over here, Kent John­son quoted this com­ment by Ange Mlinko,

Too bad the out­side doesn’t exist today.

and suggested:

Now *there’s* a propo­si­tion upon which to base a soci­ol­ogy of con­tem­po­rary poetry!

That’s true enough, but if you were inter­ested in, say, the his­tory of the United States in the 20th (and 19th, and 18th, and 21st) cen­tury, you might want to set your neu­rons ping­ing against this com­ment, by Regi­nald Shepherd:

But ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences among poets are not (repeat, not) as impor­tant as real (no quotes) dif­fer­ences like race and poverty.

I cite this not because I agree with Shepherd—I don’t—but to sug­gest it as a kind of his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cal litmus test, for the par­tic­u­lar way in which a person chose to dis­agree with Shepherd’s com­ment would say a lot about how that person thinks about this country’s his­tory in general.

Of course, it’s always pos­si­ble that some­one will come along and write a his­tory of this coun­try in the anti-​historicist mode rec­om­mended by Fou­cault, a his­tory that refuses to accept the given­ness of uni­ver­sals. But until that time, the five prim­i­tives invoked by Shepherd—race, class, ide­ol­ogy, the real, and poetry—are likely to remain the most basic ele­ments of our his­tor­i­cal thinking.

Usu­ally I do my best not to let this web­site degen­er­ate into a mere atten­tion redi­rec­tion device, but I feel com­pelled beyond pru­dence to rec­om­mend “Dreamlife With­out Angels,” Ange Mlinko’s review of John Ashbery’s Notes from the Air for The Nation. The review isn’t going to stand the world on its head—not even the narrow world of Ash­bery criticism—but it’s a beau­ti­ful exam­ple of the form.

Mlinko begins with this gem of a hook:

Every year that the Nobel com­mit­tee passes over poet John Ash­bery for a socially respon­si­ble nov­el­ist, it proves that the prize for lit­er­a­ture is just an arm of the Peace Prize, rather than–like the Nobels for physics or chemistry—a prize for rad­i­cal dis­cov­ery in the field.

She fin­ishes, barely winded, on this note:

As a dis­cred­ited theory of space, ether at least had spir­i­tual solace. I doubt many read­ers of this mag­a­zine shed tears for the death of God, but what do poets do in the absence of tran­scen­dent belief? Our jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for an art nei­ther pop­u­lar nor remu­ner­a­tive depends on a wager some­thing like Pascal’s: why not bet on one life to gain two?

Ash­bery has made this wager, and the con­se­quences are damn­ing for those of us who should have moved on, who should have suc­cumbed by now to the cheer­ful util­i­tar­i­an­ism that cap­i­tal­ism and tech­nol­ogy promise us. The promise Ash­bery holds out to us is this: lit­er­a­ture keeps set­ting the bar for our dreams not higher, but elsewhere.

Notes from the Air is a selec­tion of poems Ash­bery chose from his last twenty years of work (from April Galleons on). Whether his fans need it will depend on what kind of fan they are: casual (yes), seri­ous (no), or fanatic (yes). But any or all of them might be inter­ested in the new Con­junc­tions, which fea­tures an Ash­bery port­fo­lio that includes trib­utes by Brian Even­son, Eileen Myles, Chris­t­ian Hawkey, and others.

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: