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Tuesday, February 1, 2005 |
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Ivy Alvarez's what's wrong was waiting in my PO Box yesterday morning so I took it to work with me and read it four or five times during the day. There's a lot of formal variety in these ten poems — even the two villanelles, which might have overwhelmed a lesser collection of similar size, have entirely different feels — and the glimpses of a narrative arc through the poems are very effective. Get a copy while she's here in the States.
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Two of New-Poetry's members have pieces in the current Jacket. Kent Johnson has a poem and an interview with Ben Lerner. I liked the title of the poem better than the poem (which is pretty funny), and I liked his questions better than Lerner's answers, which seemed pretty much boiler-plate. Tad Richards wrote a fine review, with appropriate attention to formal matters, of Annie Finch's Calendars. While I was there I noticed, but haven't yet read, Eileen Tabios's review of four books by Basil King. I barely glanced at the poetry — Clint Burnham's three sonnets are more pomo boilerplate and I cannot imagine, more than half-a-century after the first IBM technical manuals, how anyone could find Charles Bernstein's "This Poem Intentionally Left Blank" even remotely witty — it would have made a decent New Yorker cartoon in about 1965.
8:16:43 PM 
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
2006 Michael Snider.
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