digital emunction

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.”
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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.

First reports had it that the new New York Review of Books includes a “hatchet job” by Charles Simic on Robert Creeley’s two-volume Collected Poems. “Let no one think that the other side merely ignores us out of carelessness,” said Mark Weiss in a post to the Buffalo Poetics List, “This is true venom.”

But with the article now available online (albeit for a fee), it’s hard to see what’s so upsetting. Simic is anything but spiteful, and his basic judgment—that Creeley did his best work early on—seems pretty accurate.

Simic, taking refuge in “broad agreement,” calls For Love Creeley’s best book. He finds Words “uneven,” says Pieces “doesn’t amount to much,” and thinks things go quickly downhill from there.* Still, he makes several efforts to qualify his judgments on the later books. For instance, “On rare occasions, when he comes out of himself and remembers William Carlos Williams’s injunction ‘no ideas but in things,’ to actually look closely at the world around him, he is a far better poet.” And: “In the last years of his life Creeley recovers some of his old touch.”

The disjoint between Simic’s article and the vituperations that it has already prompted might seem mysterious to an outsider. But it points to the legendary quality that Creeley’s life took on during his years teaching at Buffalo. [Read more]

The autumn 2007 issue of Chicago Review is at press and available to pre-order.

(The issue will be mailed in early October.)

The issue features: the second half of “Rising, Hovering, Falling,” C.D. Wright’s long poem about the Iraq war; Book V of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os; an article on feminism and innovative poetry by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, and a response from Jennifer Ashton; essays by Georges Perec (on realism) and Allen Grossman (on Hart Crane). Plus the next installment of Kent Johnson’s twelve-part critical novella, a review of J.H. Prynne’s “To Pollen.” And much much much more.

The full table of contents is posted as a pdf on CR’s website and is summarized below.

Pre-order the issue now!

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