East/Aside

i'm in wash d.c. this wknd, with my family. i snuck away long enough to read this excerpt from an interview with cal bedient. the interviewer is matt "please god don't let me get stuck next to this guy in the bathroom line at the party" miller. it's an interesting interview, though it starts out with a real generalized (if, probably true) attack on the skeptical nature of contemp poetry. then it veers into this interesting little comment about the nature of books that are centered around one theme. this came up when we had that reading in iowa last summer. a student asked why no one wrote epics anymore - and if i remember correctly, those of us who took on the question approached it in historical terms. then mark gaba brings up the idea of the book-length subject kind of book. anyway, cal herein takes that on:

So to me violently personal feeling is instantly and automatically
continuous with the vast Impersonal. Of course, poems about specific
loves are often constricted things, unrocked by the complex jumble of
possibles and impossibles that human existence is, untouched by the
primordial. All the more reason to favor collections in which the
whole range of feeling is investigated — in which "love poems" are
mixed with several other kinds, so as to insure the widest and deepest
possible view, or, rather, views. As both a reader and a writer, I
resist the recent trend to base books on a particular theme or a
uniform method. A collection will have a deep coherency if it comes
from the reaches of a single (even if it had better be a
self-contradictory) sensibility. More and more poets are becoming
temporary specialists of a topic, now this one, now that. Fortunately,
the stronger ones make of their ostensible, easily labeled subject
something large and elastic. But the model behind this movement is
scientific, or academic, or devout: the tract, the monogram, the
prayer. It has no necessary value for poetry.

anyway, i like this. peppy. not conservative, but cheerily anti-academic. i'll email the rest of the article to any of y'all who'd like it. though be forewarned, the opening parts are pretty hard on comtempo poetry. not in a bad way, but too generally, for my taste. i would've loved examples, and the thing came off as a bitchy rant. articulate, but bitchy.

been reading hejinian along wit ro jo. "my life." breath taking, breath abandoning.