Ken Babstock
Methodist Hatchet
“The Decor”
honked at. Is this about style? I remember being
warned ontology was ugly
by a poet who then ordered the chowder. Grass
tells a story of listening
It could have been:
But it wasn’t.
It was “the chowder”.
Could it have been Shark’s Fin? Bird’s Nest? Egg Drop?
And so for day 1752
30.09.2011
What one loses in reading The Sad Phoenician in Robert Kroetsch‘s Completed Field Notes is the design by Glenn Goluska for Coach House Press.
What one misses is the erased alphabet that graces the cover, the title page and the section dividers. What one also misses if one looks closely is the truncation of the already partially erased W. It happens only on the cover:
There’s a rhombic dot missing.
It’s there on the title page
And there in the section divider.
It is so easy to miss because the W is indeed made of two Vs. The alphabetically-educated eye simply backtracks and constructs the missing letter.
Design-wise the incomplete erased W appears on the cover in this fashion to balance the layout. Smart somewhat imperceptible adjustment worthy of the typesetter’s art.
And so for day 1751
29.09.2011
I am inspired by the recent work of Kathleen Fitzpatrick. She has undertaken to share in public preliminary work about what I would call an academic ethics. She is working to flesh out what she calls “generous thinking”. Key to that generosity is the manner in which we listen. She writes:
I am primarily focused on the ways that we as professors and scholars communicate with a range of broader publics about our work. And some focused thinking about the ways we communicate with those publics is in order, I would suggest, because many of our fields are facing crises that we cannot solve on our own.
In case you think this turn to reflect on broader publics is facile, consider how it is characterized as difficult work:
But I want to acknowledge that adopting a mode of generous thinking is a task that is simultaneously extremely difficult and easily dismissible. We are accustomed to a mode of thought that rebuts, that questions, that complicates, and the kinds of listening and openness for which I am here advocating may well be taken as acceding to a form of cultural naïveté at best, or worse, a politically regressive knuckling-under to the pressures of neoliberal ideologies and institutions. This is the sense in which Rita Felski suggests that scholars have internalized “the assumption that whatever is not critical must therefore be uncritical.”
http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/generous-thinking-introduction/
My own modest contribution to this dialogue is a comment riffing on humility as a way to recognize the experimental and the experiential as worthy objects of generous thinking.
Your invocation of humility brought to mind a formulation found in Catharine R. Stimpson. Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces: “humility, a recognition that the self cannot be an exemplum, only an experiment”. I am looking forward to reading more. I think that somewhere along the way you and your readers will be broaching the link between the experimental [which we associate with the sciences] and the experiential [which we associate with the performing arts] — the humanities seem to occupy the metadiscursive space that examines and comments upon the experimental and the experiential.
At the acuity of humility … a case to hear out…
And so for day 1750
28.09.2011
Susan Holbrook in the notes to Throaty Wipes helpfully points out that the lines in “What is Poetry” are anagrams of the title. The collection bears as its title one of these lines. I like the associations that arise from these letter remixes.
[…]
ear whist typo
[…]
throaty wipes
or what I types
The genius lies not just in the generation of the anagrams but also in their disposition in a sequence. Holbrook subjects two other phrases to similar treatment: “What is Prose” and “What Poetry Isn’t”.
A number of anagram generating engines exist on the WWW:
Go wild!
Dig Owl
Dig Low
Gild Ow
Id Glow
Old Wig
Or you can try your hand at solving.
And so for day 1749
27.09.2011
In her Notes on the Poems, Susan Holbrook provides a variant to the “blurred” section in “Poems for Andy Goldsworthy” in Throaty Wipes. Interesting that in my attempt at deciphering the blur, I gather “red drop” as the topmost layer and “ready” as the bed. The variant betrays my reading as giving “red” and “drop” on separate lines. What do you make of it?
red
drop
in blue
gut in red
tuft in
blue egg
in red belly
in blue
sky in
ready
Now that I squint I can see some blue. It all looks like a still from an animation. Much like a suitable ekphrasis of the sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy.
And so for day 1747
25.09.2011
Susan Holbrook produces new tricks using “what” to punctuate some old saws.
[…]
your head what is not heat
more than you can chew what is kept above water
a rose garden what is bitten off
an old dog what did I never promise you
the trees what cannot be taught new tricks
the dust what can one not see the forest for
[…]
“Aside From” in Joy Is So Exhausting indeed does keep us with an eye on both forest and trees until we grow cross-eyed: head above water, more than you chew is bitten off, a rose garden did I never promise you, an old dog cannot be taught new tricks, the trees can one not see the forest for, the dust … is bit.
And so for day 1747
25.09.2011
These snippets could be well at home on a T-Shirt.
Beekeepers for Lorca
[…]
Mestinks; you lather
Susan Holbrook. “Q & A” in Joy Is So Exhausting.
And so for day 1746
24.09.2011
By the time I reached the end of this reclamation poem, I chortled.
You might say the word lesbian with a shudder, like there are cooties crawling up your back porch.
You might say the word lesbian like you’re reading it out of a science textbook.
You might whisper the word lesbian because it’s naughty.
[…]
You might say the word lesbian like you’re keeping dyke for your friends.
You might say the word lesbian like salt-water taffy.
You might say the world lesbian with shudder and say let’s do it again, sweet pea.
Susan Holbrook. “Shudder” in Misled.
And so for day 1745
23.09.2011
André Alexis in A (BookThug, 2013) offers up for the reader’s delectation a tricolon in parallel. The weirdness (a hospital room with three mannequins that look like three versions of Anna Akhmatova) is alleviated by the classical poise of the prose concluding the paragraph.
They were all versions of Anna Akhmatova, young and beautiful, middle-aged and sensual, old and dignified.
We have here in miniature the course of a life with the implication that it was a life well-lived. This in part is realized by avoiding a rising tricolon where the segments get progressively longer (aka tricolon crescens) and emphasizing the modulation evoked by equally balanced segments. Such a life like such an expression lingers with finesse, impresses with gentleness and speaks with smoothness.
And so for day 1744
22.09.2011
January 22, 2010.
NY Times
Gary Snyder
Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh
Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,
Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,
[…]
Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent,
And it goes with me out every morning;
We fill up our baskets, get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/technology/personaltech/22sfbriefs.html
Domestication through harvesting.
And so for day 1743
21.09.2011
