Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 9

Dept. of Monday

"Shall we gather at the river? On second thought, let's not."

Georgians on My Mind

Nicholas Manning & I traded comments about Robert Graves, wondering how far his opposition to some key strands of literary modernism shapes what we make of the formal & metrical directions he took in his poetry. If Graves's verse doesn't float your poetic boat, should he get a pass, or take more kicks, for his principled rejection of the period style? Do the Georgians come off any better for writing like they didn't know the 20th century was happening? (As late as the 1970s, Philip Larkin's span

Robert Graves's Poems Selected by Himself

To add to the this. (A click on the books tag summons the rest.)

I'd like to like Graves's poems: his surefooted defiance of Modernist convention is the kind of sacred cow-tipping that often shows better over time. Graves was badly off in his gamble, though. Sure that free verse was a fad, and the Pound/Stein school would go the way of cocktails and the Charleston, he willfully closed himself off from the main creative seam of 20th-century poetics, building his own house on flat...

Dept. of Laborless Monday

Two-thirds through the Harold Pinter/Joseph Losey film collaboration, & about to lose him with The Go-Between, I'm giving over my small corner of Labor Day to the languorous Dirk Bogarde.

George Hitchcock

Poet George Hitchcock died in Oregon last week, and while I knew next to nothing about his life and career (shame on me), Stephen Kessler's moving remembrance did more to bring him to life for me than all the info-rich obits. Thanks to Pierre Joris for pointing to it.

Hitchcock, Bruce Boone, Beverly Dahlen, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen—all born or raised in Oregon, all moved to San Francisco as young adults. That's a weird legacy to brag about, but you get what you get, and anyway looks like the...

Bryan Coffelt's The Whatever Poems

Sun didn't start until nearly July, rain came yesterday, so the 2-month summer is almost a memory whose madeleine for me is Bryan Coffelt's The Whatever Poems. Though he's Portland's now, Coffelt's a founding member of the Ashland School, which surely has as much right to the name as Ashbery's "soi disant Tulsa School" ever did. Draw a loose circle around poets like Maurice Burford, Jess Rowan, Lacey Hunter, Mike Young, and Willie Ziebell, throw in a rejuvenated West Wind Review, check the So...

Steve Evans On Coteries, Infrastructure, and Gossip

On the sonic tick, just got around to Steve Evans's talk about phonotextuality—what happens to poems when they get recorded—at Naropa this summer. In a sleek 12'14", he points out that the ability to record readings goes back to just 1860, which hasn't given poets (or their assassin-critics) much time to figure out what taping will mean for the art. So anecdote, gossip, and group indiscretions leak into these supposedly ephemeral recordings in a way that's not usually permitted within the sta...

King of the Beach

What Bruno says. Wavves' King of the Beach and Ariel Pink's Before Today have been two of my summer's bigger disappointments, in almost exact proportion to the excitement of their earlier efforts. Both scrubbed and buffed all the cool burrs away, or enough of them to reduce their songs to just a crafty catalog of their influences. But I've learned you look square and bitter when you criticize pop music, as if you expected something from it in the first place, so let's end on the musically pos...

Epistemology

"Sir Matthew Dudley turned away his butler yesterday morning, and at night the poor fellow died suddenly in the streets: Was not it an odd event? But what care you; but then I knew the butler."

—Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella

Everything Is Quiet

It's one of those lose/lose questions that makes you look old, prurient, and clueless all at once, but what is "dirty period sex"?