In lieu of orig­i­nal thought, a few items of pos­si­ble interest:

+ John Conroy is back! But he’s on WBEZ now instead of writ­ing for the Chicago Reader. (This is not exactly news, but a story today–not up yet on the WBEZ web­site–reminded me to men­tion it.)

+ Emily Wilson (the clas­si­cist, not the poet) reviews John Tipton’s Ajax: “He suc­ceeds bril­liantly at cre­at­ing a living, con­tem­po­rary Sopho­cles. His ver­sion is a chill­ing mirror.” (The original’s in The Nation, but trapped behind a paywall.)

+ Marty Riker inter­views the Flood fel­lows: “Just for the record, I was not, in fact, an angry young man. Con­fused and obnox­ious, but not really angry.”

+ Auf­gabe’s edi­tors undo “Numbers Trouble”: “Should we be thank­ful or irri­tated that the draft is gendered?”

+ Danielle Allen speaks for her­self on the Obama Muslim smear: “Worse than mud.”

+ Kent John­son is still not sure about “A True Account of Talk­ing to the Sun at Fire Island”: “‘It is a real mys­tery, that poem.’”

Apologies for that last. Rather than waste your time on William Kris­tol and Leo Strauss, can I instead sug­gest you ease your Monday-​morning pro­cras­ti­na­tions with John Latta on William Logan on Frank O’Hara? Thanks.

Enchanted by this little mys­tery over at John Latta’s Isola di Rifiuti, I set myself to poking around Google Books, which coughed up this page and its delight­ful list of the “key words and phrases” in Ken­neth Koch’s Selected Poems 1950-1982:

sleep­ing with women, circus girls, Thes­mopho­ri­azusae, Poros, asleep and sleep­ing, Frank O’Hara, O’Ryan, Saint Ursula, Fer­nand Leger, Jane Freilicher, Art of Love, John Ash­bery, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, lim­burger cheese, Amba, poetry, brassiere, Larry Rivers, Strangler

No, kids, it’s not flarf; it’s just a little fun.

A few days ago at Isola di Rifiuti, John Latta named C.D. Wright’s “Rising, Falling, Hovering” “the most ambi­tious U.S. anti-​war poem of the bloom­ing idi­otic twenty-​first century.”

Latta being Latta, that praise—and I don’t think it’s ten­den­tious to take it as such—is asserted only after he’s com­pleted his shift of crit­i­cal heavy lift­ing, here cen­tered on the con­nec­tion between the two halves of the poem. (Which, dear reader, I beg for­bear­ance to repeat were first pub­lished in Chicago Review 51:3 and 53:2/3.) Latta writes:

The move­ment between “Rising, Falling, Hov­er­ing” and “Rising, Falling, Hov­er­ing, / cont.” is one of refus­ing surcease, increased con­cern, anger unabated and rising. (Indeed, one fully expects the poem to con­tinue for­ever with purer and purer distill’d rage, dog­ging the “end­less war” sce­nario of the crim­i­nal U.S. policy-​makers.) If the “cont.” story wor­ries about a son trav­el­ing unaccompany’d in Mexico and about tend­ing to a friend’s “bad diag­no­sis” and appar­ent cancer treat­ment in Mexico City (jux­ta­posed against—on the flight down: “The mon­i­tor from the over­head / begins its info­tain­ment Not shown: white phos­pho­rous falling / on the city of minarets”), thus seem­ing to focus in, off the high civic stakes of its beginnings—too, it ends by bray­ing out a mag­nif­i­cent curse…

Latta’s review gives me occa­sion to men­tion that the forth­com­ing issue of CR, due back from the press in a few weeks, includes C.D. Wright’s own take on the poem, an auto­com­men­tary some­what along the lines of the expli­ca­tion de soi-même that John Matthias under­took for CR 52:2/3/4.