digital emunction

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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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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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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