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.

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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Let’s get this straight: the New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear writes an article highly critical of John Barr, head of the Poetry Foundation. The next week, the New Yorker publishes a poem (titled, coincidentally, “After the Diagnosis”) by Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, which is published by the Poetry Foundation. Around the same time, David Orr, sometime contributor to Poetry, uses his occasional column in the New York Times Book Review to bite back at Goodyear and the New Yorker’s editors, accusing the former of a conflict of interest and the latter of nepotism and bad taste. At least one of the accusations is confirmed a few weeks later, when the New Yorker publishes an editor’s note acknowledging that Goodyear submitted poems to Poetry as recently as 2003. Now this week, the NYT Book Review has published a review by one Dana Goodyear.

May the circle be unbroken.