digital emunction

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.

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.

Photos from the April 6 launch party for the new Chicago Review British Poetry Issue. Keston Sutherland, Peter Manson, and Andrea Brady (all featured, with Chris Goode, in the new issue) read at Elastic Arts Space.

This 192-page issue of CR features:

POEMS
C.D. Wright’s long poem “Rising, Hovering, Falling,” Devin Johnston, Alan Bernheimer, Joel Felix, Arkadii Dragomoschchenko, Peter Larkin, Peter O’Leary, Geraldine Monk, Ray DiPalma, Merrill Gilfillan, Gavin Selerie, Medbh McGuckian

FICTION
Jerzy Ficowski, “Filzbad” by Diana George [PDF], Brian Lennon

INTERVIEW
with Stefanie Marlis (by Eric P. Elshtain)

ESSAYS
John Wilkinson on Marjorie Welish
Robert Archambeau on James McMichael

REVIEWS AND NOTES
Robert P. Baird on Harry Thomas’s Montale in English
Daniel Borzutzky on Daniil Kharms’s Blue Notebook
Brian Whitener on Svetislav Basara’s Chinese Letter
Matthias Regan on Jena Osman’s An Essay in Asterisks
Eric P. Elshtain on Carol Moldaw’s Lightning Field
Melissa Girard on Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors
Michael Robbins on Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome
Paul Hoover on the Chicago literary scene

This issue costs $10. Order it here