Jonathan Mayhew takes on some of the more curious assertions in Ron Silliman's post on William Carlos Williams; I left my own comment at Ron's blog.
Eileen Tabios's Kelsey Street Press is going to publish a new book by Carol Mirakove, winner of Kelsey Street's Frances Jaffer First Book Award and one of the poets I'll be seeing this Friday. I hope you find that poem, Eileen.
Nada Gordon has posted part one of the interview/performance she did last week with Marianne Shaneen. It's a wonderful piece, championing unfashionable rhetorical forms in poetry—but Nada, what about meter, surely unfashionable and one of the few formal devices peculiar to poetry?
Yesterday George Wallace posted a creditable sonnet of his own (be careful of those early caesuras), and today he posts John Ciardi's "A Box Comes Home" for Veteran's Day. Thank you for remembering, George, and thank you for reminding me of John Ciardi, a poet I once read obsessively. I need to reread.
Last week Aaron Haspel wrote an interesting and provocative post about W. B. Yeats. It's one of the few times I think he's got it wrong about poetry, but I'm saving comments for my own "Instruct and Delight" post, which is slowly taking shape. There's been a controversy at New Poetry over a version of the same question: What is the relationship of the content of a poem to its aesthetic value?
Henry Gould's also been wrestling with the same thing:
Art & poetry are always being marshalled into somebody's scheme for world improvement. But to create an original work of art is a different & more difficult undertaking, because the work is a kind of end in itself : and AS AN END IN ITSELF it makes a statement about the nature of experience which jars with programmatic or politically-correct (in anybody's system) this-leads-to-that projects for world improvement.
As he says later, we "never get it right." (Maybe that's why my intended post is slowly growing.) Be sure to read the generous samples of his own poetry at HG Poetics.
Update: Thanks to Kasey Mohammad for reminding me to add Shanna Compton's Brand New Insects to the blog roll. And a little bird told me that my comments at Sillman's Blog don't show up on at least some Windows machines, so go read the post and then read my comment here:
Unless there's a typo in "thus poetic form comprises the words and its structural uses," there's no equation structure + words = form. If "its" should be "their" (there are only two nouns to refer to) then the equation is just words + structural use of words = form, which has no particular application to poetry. And if there is no typo, then "its" refers to "poetic form," and we have the nonsensical equation structural uses of poetic form + words = poetic form. It's typical of Williams's wooly-headedness when he tried to write about poetry. You'll need to find stronger thinkers and critics than Poe or Williams to support your supposed division of the poetic world.
2:26:54 PM 
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