The YBPs

Pictured above is 30 year-old Luke Kennard, who Todd Swift argues is the standard bearer for a group of tyros he's dubbed The Young British Poets (YBPs). Swift has curated a selection of their poetry for the Winter 2013 issue of the online lit journal The Missing Slate. What sets the YBPs apart?

The YBPs of course emerge at a time of unprecedented social networking and digital over-stimulus. For them, the post-modern apprehension of ubiquity and omnipresence of cultural feed(ing) is a reality. All everything everywhere at once, their norm. As such, these poets are freer than in the past, to draw on outside or unlikely cultural influences.

Poseur Alert

"we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented. . . . i feel i am blundering in concepts too fine for me"

Anne Carson discussing...who the fuck knows.

Doctored Doc

Random House has reordered sentences from Jason Guriel's skeptical review of Anne Carson's Red Doc and created a positive blurb. It's astonishing that the publisher of one of the most celebrated poets of our time feels the need to fabricate praise. Several years ago Steven Beattie caught another publisher peddling a remixed blurb. He called it "dirty pool." Sounds about right.

Name Drops

Noreen Malone takes Sheryl Sandberg to task for saddling her new book, Lean In, with a fulsome acknowledgments page:

Sandberg is not entirely to blame: As a first time author, she was merely following recent convention. And as a high-achiever, she was merely outdoing everyone else who has written an acknowledgment section in the past few years. Where readers used to see, perhaps, a paragraph thanking the writer’s editor and agent, a few key researchers, and maybe a family member or two, now we are confronted with a chapter-long laundry list of name after name. Sandberg’s seven-and-a-half page section, for instance, thanks more than 140 people for contributing to her 172 page book. She doesn’t just thank her superagent, she thanks her superagent’s boss, Ari Emanuel, “for his friendship as well as his ever-amusing and supportive check-in calls.” She doesn’t just thank her editor, she thanks “Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of Knopf, whose unflagging support kept this project on the fast track.”

Sunday Poem

THE LAND OF NOD 

Growing up, I barely knew the Bible, but read
and reread the part when Cain drifted east
or was drawn that way, into a place of desolation,
the land of Nod, there to begin, with a wife 

of unknown origin, another race of men,
under the mark of God. As a boy, I thought Nod
would be a place where the blue scillas
would bloom gray, a country of the rack and screw, 

the serrated sword, where the very serving cups
were bone. As a grown man, I’ve heard that Nod
never was a nation—of Cain’s offspring, or anyone—
but a mistranslation of “wander,” so Cain 

could go wherever, and be in Nod. Far more
than in God, I believe in Cain, who destroyed
his own brother, and therefore in any city
could have his wish, and be alone.

From Charms Against Lightning (2012) by James Arthur.

(Painting "Cain Kills Abel" by Bartolomeo Manfredi.)

María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira

Catherine Chandler files a fascinating entry on one of the most underrated figures of Uruguayan poetry, María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira (you'll find one of her poems here). Loved this bit:

In the summer of 1914, during an air show organized by the National Aviation Centre, a fun-loving and daring María Eugenia became the first Uruguayan woman to board an airplane, flying over the Hippodrome in a military-type Dupperdussin piloted by the Englishman John Barron, who safely crash-landed later that day. A diehard practical joker with huge black velvety eyes, a rich contralto recitation voice and an infectious, hearty laugh, María Eugenia was known to disconcert friends and acquaintances by wearing two different shoes or torn dresses either buttoned incorrectly or held together with pins, in order to make a statement that clothes don’t make the man (or woman).

The Red Menace

More than a name to conjure with, Anne Carson remains—13 years after her breakout success, Autobiography of Red—a name to pick a fight over. Mention her in conversation and battle-lines get drawn. Jason Guriel's provocative new review explores some of what bugs him about the Canadian classicist's verse, namely the way she's always grabbing some new form, but the content never changes

Like other recent Carson productions, Red Doc, the sequel to 1998’s verse novel Autobiography of Red, is a feast for first glances. But when I resolve finally to turn away from surface pleasures and reckon with the words, I encounter nothing less than the voice of, well, Anne Carson!—learned, deadpan, comma-less, and frequently carried away by tangent....A consistent, distinctive voice isn’t usually a problem. (Most poets should be so lucky.) But I’m not very far into Red Doc> when I find myself wondering why a voice so unperturbed by its latest packaging—long and short lines, rival columns, the screenplay, the essay, opera—needed such packaging in the first place. It’s hard to think of another more restless poet, whose adventures in form and genre, from book to book, have left less of a mark on her sensibility. Is it that the medium isn’t so much the message as the marketing strategy? Carson poems, I’m convinced, will soon come packaged in a Cornell box—but they will sound like Carson.