It’s hard to know if we have talent. Here and there, a drunken
grad stu­dent expresses admiration….
—Kent John­son, “To John Bradley”

If you’re read­ing this, chances are you’ve prob­a­bly already seen Linh Dinh’s encomium to Kent John­son at the Har­riet blog. If not, go have a look and remind your­self of what you already know—in Dinh’s words, “Kent John­son is a deadly seri­ous, bril­liant subversive.”

This round­table at Boston Com­ment, which I found via the com­ments sec­tion here, is one of the more inter­est­ing things I’ve read recently about the state of poetry in a post-​Langpo world. Less a dis­cus­sion than a set of coor­di­nated responses to a series of ques­tions posed by Joan Houli­han, the page brings together “five fore­most critics/poets with ratio­nal abil­i­ties and powers of articulation”: Oren Izen­berg, Norman Finkel­stein, Stephen Burt, Alan Gold­ing, and H.L. Hix. (The responses to an ear­lier essay by Houli­han were her inspi­ra­tion for host­ing the round­table, but the absence of female respon­dents is still a little disconcerting.)

The participants’ pro­lix­ity makes the whole thing a bit weary­ing to read on screen, and so I’ve excerpted some inter­est­ing sec­tions below. It’s worth noting too that many of these remarks are con­densed ver­sions of longer argu­ments made else­where. Check the full dis­cus­sion for ref­er­ences to these other works.

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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.

An ode for Paula Dobri­an­sky, John Baird, and all the other nihilists in Bali who press on toward a “triumph where all things falter.”

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A For­saken Garden
Alger­non Charles Swinburne

In a coign of the cliff between low­land and high­land,
At the sea-down’s edge between wind­ward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brush­wood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blos­som­less bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.