Lateral Move

Dear readers, I am migrating to Bachelardette.typepad.com to experiment further with public diarizing. Though I am still unsure what my new blog is a vehicle for other than practicing sentence-making, one of its undeniable pleasures is the way it keeps me in touch with you, my farflung correspondents.

Also I think you can do other stuff at typepad like put up photos.

Thanks to Maggie for sharing her space with me!

The Crisis is Over...

I hope. Today I put a deposit down on a studio in Bernal Heights. Let's hope all the credit checks etc. work in my favor. These things make me paranoid. If I do get the place, it will mean my brain will be mine to use again. For you, that means more postings. -- M

No, no mon ami!

-- the media hype! about Anne Winters, whose book has been reviewed in Slate and The New York Times (this much attention constitutes, for poetry, "hype"!). As I never seem to like any contemporary poetry they publish or review (well, rarely) I was surprised to find myself sold on it.

It’s true my deepest affinities are to a poetry of imaginative freedom and play. But sometimes even high-handed poetry can be done well. I like to be surprised.

More about the novel, please!

[P.S.: My emails to you are bouncing!]

HYPE?

It seems like your last post Ange was indirectly responding to my appreciation of Bergvall's and Barr's semantic play, but if I remember correctly you and I both wished for the kind of playfulness in poetry that indie rock offered and that was exactly what that night was. Maybe it isn't your idea of POETRY but it seems like few work can fulfill that abstract idea of the Ideal Poem. The work was playful enough -- exciting enough -- to force me to examine my ideas of poetry. The "is it enough?". Today I feel like it is. And I just wrote a very "emotional" novel. -- M

When the Hype’s Justified

Dangerous to start discussing a book you haven’t entirely finished, especially if you plan to use it to make a point. But having read most of Anne Winters’s The Displaced of Capital in one rush last night, I feel even more strongly that experimental poetries, those concerned primarily with semantic play, are limiting themselves by what they leave out. One of the stand-out books by one of my peers last year was Jo Ann Wasserman’s The Escape, which courted controversy by allowing itself to be exhibitionistic. Just the premise—that it was about her mother’s death when she was 18—caused some poets I know to shut down.

It was about something?
It was about her mother?
It was about her mother’s death?

Getting past that hurdle, anyone who picked up the book then had to contend with self-mythologizing (sexy bad girl) that turned some people off (myself included) and some people on (Tony Towle reviewed it twice!). The point is, though, that she took a chance on writing a heartbreaking work, staggering genius arguable.

Thus Anne Winters. I’m not inclined to buy many books by University of Chicago poets, but I read “The Mill-Race” online, was blown away, got the book. Was blown away. Maybe I’m a sucker for the subject matter—the brutal economics of New York. Maybe, as with the Wasserman, I am too susceptible to the catharsis of tragic storytelling in whatever form (“An Immigrant Woman”). But if I’m attracted to her concerns I’m also attracted to her vocabulary: an engineering vocabulary, a vocabulary of infrastructure. It’s earthy, smithy, tough.

One could complain that she’s championed by Pinsky, complain that she’s too literal in some places, too ornate in others. I just don't want to hear that she’s not avant-garde. That’s a descriptor sought after by some of the most vapid books of our time, cf. Lisa Robertson’s The Weather—hiding its emptiness behind a quote from Arcades Project!—and, to bring it home for the movie-going friends, it’s the same reason In the Mood for Love is a hundred times greater than Chungking Express.

Chile Peppers in the Blistering Sun

Jordan hypothesizes me as Marianne Moore to Anselm's WCW.

As Jake would say, touching my coffee mug, "That's hot."

I'm totally judgemental about fem. poets using sexuality/desire to promote themselves. Except til I realize how in-the-eye-of-the-beholder it is.