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Tuesday, March 13, 2007 |
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One of the books I’d been unable to find is Tony Barnstone’s Sad Jazz: Sonnets. That was particularly depressing not only because I really like the book, but because it was a review copy. I should have just ordered another, but every day I thought "I’ll find it today!" and I was always wrong — until yesterday. I’ll have the review up this weekend.
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Recent reviews by Meghan O’Rourke and Adam Kirsch led me to buy The Notebooks of Robert Frost this last weekend. I’ve only read the introduction, but now I want his letters to Louis Untermeyer because of this passage:
I found that by thinking they [his students at Amherst] meant stocking up with radical ideas, by learning they meant stocking up with conservative ideas — a harmless distinction, bless their simple hearts.
It’s a wonderful description of the automatic liberal. The automatic conservative is not quite the exact opposite: for such a person, thinking is stocking up with conservative ideas, but so is learning. For them, radical ideas are just wrong.
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Last month I had a few words for Dana Goodyear’s rather nasty New Yorker article on the Poetry Foundation. Now David Orr has ably
replied in the New York Times. One interesting bit of information from that piece, concerning how the New Yorker selects poems these days:
… since 2000, Goodyear (who is 30) has appeared in the New Yorker more than Czeslaw Milosz, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Wislawa Szymborska, Kay Ryan and every living American poet laureate except for W. S. Merwin. She’s already equaled Sylvia Plath’s total.
Last year I noted that from Jan 1998 to Dec 2005, only 6 poets made a debut in the magazine.
2:10:13 PM 
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
2008 Michael Snider.
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