Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

Update on Bullet Train: this is a very enjoyable book. At the risk of using an overused term, his writing is cinematic. He's very skilled at maneuvering his characters within the confines of his chosen setting of the Shinkansen. Plus, it's funny AF.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if it won a Pulitzer, calling a book "experimental" might just not be accurate.

Plenty of people who aren't in their twenties get MFAs, the pinefox, tho it seems like Egan just did the normal Ivy to Cambridge rich kid route.

Yes, I'm sure a range of people get MFAs. My original point about them was that for those many of us who don't have them, we can't really tell what is an "MFA exercise" and what is something else.

GOON SQUAD may not be experimental. But the question of what that word actually, in practice, means, abides. I am inclined to think that posters O. Nate and Chuck Tatum are going along the right lines, on this question.

I tend to agree, too, but when I'm describing a book in a forum like this one, I'm not writing a book review for the LRB or anywhere else. Using the word 'experimental' as shorthand, both here and on ILM, is completely reasonable and not 'lazy' as these posters would so have it.

MFA exercises: play with this wacky formal constraint that readers will find charming and interesting, but don't make it so challenging that you can't get a book deal or sell the story to the New Yorker.

Also I was merely trying to be kind before, Goon Squad is fucking garbage.

In poetry, for what it's worth, the debate about descriptors like 'experimental,' 'innovative,' and others continues to rage.

What I often think is ignored in these debates is that the state of mainstream poetry and literature is as such that words like 'experimental' serve an important function in establishing a work or poet as against a dominant hegemonic aesthetic. Other than this function, the words don't mean a whole lot.

And if you want to know what the dominant hegemonic aesthetic might be, look toward the dilatory epiphanic tone that permeates the most popular English language poetry: Gorman, Kaur, Billy Collins, etc.

Ugh. When I hear the name Collins that’s when I reach for my ….

Anyway, I like your term “dilatory epiphanic.”

It's been growing on me since the first time you used it

I always like this takedown by August Kleinzahler, although I don't know if I have had any takers yet on this borad: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/60488/no-antonin-artaud-with-the-flapjacks-please

Ha! Apart from the forced imbecilic simplicity of Collins' verse, I thought his mortal sin was going straight for the arena rock climax in the first stanza.

You can also find it in the inexplicable fawning of the mainstream presses and book reviews of mediocre dead poets like Robert Lowell, who seems to have a new book around him every year for some godforsaken reason that no one I know can figure out. Heaping praise on dead people who were lauded mostly for their ghastly biography instead of engaging in challenging work of the present is not new, but it still irks.

Billy Collins was in attendance at a good friend's wedding. It didn't end well.

Norman Mailer's son was there too, to add to the fun.

You can also find it in the inexplicable fawning of the mainstream presses and book reviews of mediocre dead poets like Robert Lowell, who seems to have a new book around him every year for some godforsaken reason that no one I know can figure out. Heaping praise on dead people who were lauded mostly for their ghastly biography instead of engaging in challenging work of the present is not new, but it still irks.

mmm I disagree. Lowell did change the course of American poetry briefly even though I prefer the chillier early stuff like Lords Weary Castle and have little to no patience for most anything after 1960; those 1970s collections he shat out are doggerel at best.

He wrote one good poem afaic, and it's the most unlike the rest of his other work. Just a crazy racist Boston Brahmin who never should have been given a second thought.

But even if you love him, why does his work still command so much attention when...well, he's been dead for 45 years? I think it has a lot more to do with mainstream fetishization of mental illness than the quality of his poetry.

In a sense, what I'm getting at is there *is* an industry that keeps certain types of writing in circulation and has a vested interest in doing so. To my mind, being called 'experimental' often means that the work cannot be totally subsumed into the flow of capital that guides this industry's decisions. That's the kind of writing that I'm interested in, and similarly with music.

The idea that there is anything profound about ubiquity is a bankrupt one.

You mean like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-nxdyTOtE8

(xoost to your previoius post)

Any book with a spine is too structurally unadventurous to be called experimental IMO.

Lol

user Tim v much walking the walk

At what point should we shit out dead poets? As soon as the doctor calls it? Get back, Homer! You too, Jethro!

lol

Nice to see that people are taking reasoned points and shitting on them for the purpose of dunks.

Instead of engaging with them in any meaningful way because you know I'm right.

Really no wonder so many people are leaving this site, tbh.

If you’re talking to me, let me be clear that I wasn’t dunking on you or anyone (except myself, slightly).

Yeah, I didn't notice any dunking. Just some friendly disagreement about when Robert Lowell jumped the shark or whether he was ever even on the right side of the shark.

FWIW I think, per TTITT and Daniel that “experimental” is used as a catch-all (marketing) term for art which resists being incorporated into the mainstream. I think it’s a bad term because it doesn’t say anything about the nature, content or quality of that art.

Non-ubiquity, in and of itself, is no more profound than ubiquity. Less so if anything because at least ubiquity has the kind of profundity that comes from shared experience (see Ewing, T; “Come On Eileen”, 2009).

Pretty much agree with all of this.

Totally disagree with the point about ubiquity vs non-ubiquity, but whatever.

There’s that meaningful engagement

Go fuck yourself.

But even if you love him, why does his work still command so much attention when...well, he's been dead for 45 years? I think it has a lot more to do with mainstream fetishization of mental illness than the quality of his poetry.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! the table is the table)

Lowell made a lot of friends in the poetry and publishing world; he was, as you point out, an establishment figure. His persistence well into a new century makes sense when you consider how many dads and grandads of writers he may have talked up.

Also, though you and I will recoil from this point....he commands attention because people still like his poetry. As a junior in college I was quite alone in thinking, say, "Skunk Hour" and Lowell generally not particularly interesting if not gauche. I wanted to spend more time on Bishop and Merrill, the contemporaries who still command MY attention; the latter in particular's a queer lodestar for me. THERE'S a guy with millions at his disposal who was lighter, gayer, and wittier in verse than 187 Lowell lines.

But what I'm saying, Alfred, is that I really believe that a big part of his popularity has to do with establishment publishing and academic types manufacturing an idea that Lowell is what quality poetry is. Even John fucking Berryman is a more interesting poet than Lowell, and there's comparatively little attention given to him.

Give Harold Bloom this: he wished with all his being that Lowell would remain a period piece.

re Berryman: have you seen the new editions of Dream Songs? The New Yorker spent a lot of words on him a little over a year ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/the-heartsick-hilarity-of-john-berrymans-letters

I think that people liking Lowell's poetry and that people will tend to consume what's most available can both be true and not necessarily in conflict. I think there's something of Don Draper about Lowell. He's an archetype of a particular east coast intellectual and particularly when you factor in the weird ongoing fascination with the Elizabeth Bishop relationship, his mental illness etc you have a very sellable package.

Also, doesn't it also come down to how invested you are in this - as in, I can imagine as a poet vying for real estate in what is the smallest of marketplaces anyway you're perfectly entitled to be pissed off at how much of a colossus Lowell still is.

That second part is clumsily expressed. I hope I don't come across as a patronising dick.

No, it makes sense.

I thought Lowell was finally gone until that collected poetry tome came out in 2003, goddamn it.

^prestige publishing

"when you factor in the weird ongoing fascination with the Elizabeth Bishop relationship"

It is my impression his behaviour towards Bishop is over-used to write about Lowell, no matter any actual quality of the poetry.

I've never heard anybody bring up Lowell in conversation so don't feel in any way oppressed by the continued appreciation of his poetry by people I don't know

I feel like at this point he's just an American Ted Hughes, a figure of dwindling prestige that people more easily remember the gossipy unflattering stuff about

So are you guys telling me I should or shouldn't bother to read the Ivana Lowell memoir I eventually bought after seeing it for months if not years near the checkout counter at the old RIzzoli Bookstore flagship on 57th Sttreet?

I would read it if it appeals to you

Chinaski otm about some of the anger coming from being a poet, finding the Lowell's work to be largely trash, and being totally confused by the ongoing attention paid to him and his work. It's worth noting, too, that I don't know a single poet who will stand up for Lowell besides a few poems, if that.

Another thing that concerns me about his prominence is that it reinforces the idea that poetry is largely dead. Obviously that isn't true, so why do mainstream critics and publishers pretend it to be so? I don't want the just-died David Melnick, whose work is astounding and irreplaceable and obscure, to be hailed in the Times review, but I'm also tired of hearing about this one motherfucker when I know there are so many others whose work is amazing but remains hopelessly lost in frightfully expensive original editions. Only a year or two ago did John Wieners get a selected, for example, and he's considered one of the great queer poets of the past 100 years. Full editions of his most important books go for $150-- that's a shame. Instead, we get another book of Lowell's farts to Hardwick or whiny letters to Bishop.

I don't want the just-died David Melnick, whose work is astounding and irreplaceable and obscure, to be hailed in the Times review

ooh -- my uni library's got Wieners' 1986 collection.