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.

For those who get their daily digital emunction via RSS: Campbell McGrath and I have been discussing my Bookforum review of his Seven Notebooks in the comments section of my last post. (And here you thought the “Tenzone” was exciting…)

My review of Campbell McGrath’s Seven Notebooks appears in the summer issue of Bookforum. Check it out…

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.

This week’s New York Times Book Review features a number of books that have appeared hereabouts in the last couple of months:

+ Guy Martin reviews Patrick Symmes’s The Boys from Dolores, calling it “a masterly account of Cuba’s pathology” and “a rich, personal, meticulous, deeply layered work of narrative journalism.” Follow the linked title for more reviews.

+ Benjamin M. Friedman reviews Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Arms. Friedman seems attracted to Clark’s genetic hypothesis even though he can’t find much evidence for it:

One frustrating aspect of Clark’s argument is that while he insists on the “biological basis” of the mechanism by which the survival of the richest fostered new human attributes and insists on the Darwinian nature of this process, he repeatedly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actually genetic…. Nor does he introduce any evidence, of the kind that normally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capacity for hard work are heritable in the sense in which biologists use the term.

Click here for my preliminary take on Clark’s argument, which Ken Silverstein mentioned favorably on his Harper’s blog.

+ David Orr reviews Michael O’Brien’s Sleeping and Waking, which he describes as “a quietly startling collection that ought to earn O’Brien not only poetry-world attention, but actual readers.”
(more…)

Usually I do my best not to let this website degenerate into a mere attention redirection device, but I feel compelled beyond prudence to recommend “Dreamlife Without Angels,” Ange Mlinko’s review of John Ashbery’s Notes from the Air for The Nation. The review isn’t going to stand the world on its head—not even the narrow world of Ashbery criticism—but it’s a beautiful example of the form.

Mlinko begins with this gem of a hook:

Every year that the Nobel committee passes over poet John Ashbery for a socially responsible novelist, it proves that the prize for literature is just an arm of the Peace Prize, rather than–like the Nobels for physics or chemistry—a prize for radical discovery in the field.

She finishes, barely winded, on this note:

As a discredited theory of space, ether at least had spiritual solace. I doubt many readers of this magazine shed tears for the death of God, but what do poets do in the absence of transcendent belief? Our justification for an art neither popular nor remunerative depends on a wager something like Pascal’s: why not bet on one life to gain two?

Ashbery has made this wager, and the consequences are damning for those of us who should have moved on, who should have succumbed by now to the cheerful utilitarianism that capitalism and technology promise us. The promise Ashbery holds out to us is this: literature keeps setting the bar for our dreams not higher, but elsewhere.

Notes from the Air is a selection of poems Ashbery chose from his last twenty years of work (from April Galleons on). Whether his fans need it will depend on what kind of fan they are: casual (yes), serious (no), or fanatic (yes). But any or all of them might be interested in the new Conjunctions, which features an Ashbery portfolio that includes tributes by Brian Evenson, Eileen Myles, Christian Hawkey, and others.