digital emunction

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.

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:

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1/ From Don Share’s post at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, referring to an article by Richard Rorty that appears in the new issue of Poetry:

Rorty knew he was dying from pancreatic cancer at the time he was working on the piece. When asked by his son whether the reading or writing of philosophy gave him any comfort, he said, surprisingly… no: “neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation.” “Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” his son persisted. “Yes,” Rorty reports blurting out, “poetry.” He explained:

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…is not Aram Saroyan’s “lighght”—companies often pay consultants upwards of $75K for product names—but his was the one that got the attention of the U.S. Congress. The poem, which was first published in Chicago Review 19:4 (the Anthology of Concretism), made headlines after George Plimpton included it in an NEA-sponsored anthology that brought Saroyan and CR a $1000 honorarium. That’s when, in Ron Padgett’s words, things got amusing.

Ian Daly tells the whole story at the Poetry Foundation.

(Original copies of CR 19:4 are still available for sale—click and scroll to the bottom of the page.)