Kent Shaw's Blog, page 21
August 5, 2013
Fetish sculpture in the 2013 style from Djordje Ozbolt.
Fetish sculpture in the 2013 style from Djordje Ozbolt.
Glenn Shaheen, "Great Southwest," West Branch Wired
One thing I appreciate about Cal Bedient’s “Against Conceptualism” in the Boston Review is his drawing a connection between affect and protest, or in his words, melancholy and militancy: “The least appreciated and understood of the affects is sadness or, better, melancholy, without which militancy has no prod.” A strong motivation for poetry is indignation, a sadness and anger at discovering the world as it is and has been, or “melancholy is history as shudder.” This melancholic indignation with a political bark is something I’ve always admired about Glenn Shaheen’s poems. His Whitmanesque ode to Houston and Texas in West Branch is another example of this voice of bewilderment and frustration that comes from a place of caring about the world. It’s a righteous indignation without self-righteousness.
I second what Paul Otremba says here. And I think referencing Bedient’s article in light of Shaheen’s poem is fitting, especially because I think “Great Southwest" plays with the flattened rhetoric of text appropriation (i.e. I am simply the poet-machine copying and pasting text). But as with the best poems in Predatory, Shaheen’s personal concerns surface with this surprisingly sentimental glimmer. That tension between the flat and the sentimental sheds a very different perspective on this poem for me.
