I’ve been wait­ing for some­one to write a good long piece about the phe­nom­e­non that some have named the New Athe­ism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christo­pher Hitchens, Daniel Den­nett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the dis­ap­pear­ance of reli­gion as a cul­tural force. The arti­cle I wanted to read would have less to do with push­ing back against the argu­ments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phe­nom­e­non of their col­lec­tive appearance.

The most obvi­ous ques­tion that this imag­i­nary inquiry would tackle would be the ques­tion of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once? [Read more]

Yesterday Ron Sil­li­man jumped into the dis­cus­sion of Charles Simic’s review of Robert Creeley’s Col­lected Poems. Not sur­pris­ingly, Sil­li­man comes down firmly on the side of those who saw the review as an attack on a whole tra­di­tion of poetry. Echo­ing Mark Weiss’s orig­i­nal sen­ti­ment, Sil­li­man writes “[Simic] uses Cree­ley to make a larger—and much more pernicious—argument. His real target is the post-avant.”

Noth­ing in the dis­cus­sion on the POET­ICS list­serv that fol­lowed my orig­i­nal post con­vinced me on that point, though Simic’s hand in this year’s National Book Award nom­i­na­tions has cer­tainly made me recon­sider it. But since no one seemed espe­cially inter­ested in the point I was actu­ally con­cerned with—the effect of Creeley’s social stand­ing in cer­tain cir­cles on the recep­tion of his work—it didn’t seem worth car­ry­ing on, espe­cially since I wasn’t much in the mood to defend a poet (Simic) whose work I don’t par­tic­u­larly care for and whose idea of good poetry seems blink­ered at best.

Silliman’s post takes apart the Simic review para­graph by para­graph, [Read more]