James Franco is a Marlon Brando sometimes. I will commence to use 'Brando' as a synonym for 'dope' ( noun, verb, adj ). This is Brando:
I hear Kimya, Patsy, Kath Bloom, Jimmie Rodgers in there ( ! )
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Southern Festival of Books is soon to be roll into Nashville like a carnival ( sure to be other ), presentations, discussions, readings. Over at Lipscomb. Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
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I don't, on the whole, agree with the bloke ( he objects to a supposed simplification to the whole of poetry into simple dichotomy - traditional/ experimental - within anthologized poetry ... ), but I find this textured with horses, months of horses: "As the radical tendency became more and more institutionalised the writing within it has increasingly catered to an academic market demand. To me much of it now seems like a narrowing, at worst a betrayal ..."
Riley wants a solutionesque poetry that yields, not one of parts, but of wholes: "Disruption and problematisation are terms of praise here, as if we didn’t already have enough of both of them to cope with in the world..." That mirroring, that play between banks, and that happens on the water holding them to each other, the water being the thing that carries a relation of all the thingness of things in and on the water. Often, in this a time of woe decrepitude, a legitimate photo of the world does not arrive with praise, heavy with agency, or over-infatuation of the fracas from which it is derived. Riley wants a phenomenological absence in language, vessel to be through, but not itself, vessel to carry that not effect the carrying?
Plus the review reads like a whine, fundamentally, on the state of poetry america. And the schools ( both as coteries, and institutions whose function in Poetry is so skeletal I dismay).
I want to mention Arielle Greenberg's article on 'Hybrid' poetics from the last American Poetry Review, go read it a bit. She wants more out of poetry, formal category smearing, intermedia things, cross-utility things, things that become, in their artistic actualization, finality, not-things. Unfortunately, until APR figures out that placing more of their content online could work too, you gotta go read it in meat-space.
