Me on Verse Daily!

Hi all. Hope everyone's having a happy holiday. I'm quite honored to learn that my poem "eye contact" was featured yesterday on "Verse Daily". Thanks! Cal's pissed that I'm typing, so I'd better stop.

So I had the blog on my personal website for the last several months, and I think nobody could find it, and then I had a baby and I haven't been blogging. But now it's back at good ole' blogger. Will anyone still read me here? I ain't got much to say, I'll admit--new partenthood takes a shitload outta me-but I miss blogging and maybe somebody will stop by.

Hiatus

As you have most likely figured out, I'm am on hiatus and will be blogging at my usual slow pace later this summer. Hope all is well in your worlds.

So the baby could come any time now. It's very strange to be waiting like this. Of course, we are scared to shed our current lives, if that's what happens, but I think we also both want to finally see what this new life might be, and we want to meet this person. It's not just a new roommate, it's a new person coming into the world to exist here for the first time. It seems, in a way, like there's no precedent for that, though of course each of us is the precedent.

Hey,

I've been remiss in not writing for a while. All's well. B and I are about to have a baby, which means there've been many distractions and little time to remember things. Due date is this coming tuesday--june 12th. Holy Cwap!

Was just fussing with Google--they have so many strange programs in the works. Like free web page design and hosting that works a lot like Gmail. I pay a bunch o' money per year for my website. Why? I'm a sucker.

The fine folks at McSweeney's are having a rare (for them) poetry event here in NY on monday at Mo' Pitkins: Ashbery, Bearnstein, and Emanuel. 7pm, 34 Ave A between 2nd and 3rd. It's a celebration for their new book, the McSweeney's book of poets picking poets, which is a reprinted edition of the poetry section of the most recent issue of McSweeney's, to which B, among many other fine poets, is a contributor.

My New Toy

i've always wanted a website; I don't know why. It just seems like everyone else has one and I want one too. Or it's like a toy that lives everywhere you go. Or maybe I'll have something to say to everyone in the world and will not want to post it on a blog. Or maybe I jus think websites make a person cool and official, like having business cards. Anyway, with my forthcoming book as an excuse, i've set up a website, www.craigmorganteicher.com, and even relocated this blog there. There's more info on this blog right now than there is here, but I'm working on it. I made the page with iWeb on my mac, which is a pretty amazing program. You can do anything these days without doing anything.

Beyond that, I've been reading Robert Frost. And getting ready for the other very big event coming in B and my life in the next few weeks...

Going to the second night of the PSA Festival of New American Poets tonight. That's really what I'm doing. No joke. I may go have a cigar before. That's what I'm doing too. Someone once wisely said, on this very blog, that blogs should be about what you would write about if you had the time. Then I think I referenced that very comment once before. I feel brain dead. It's the end of a long day of work. This is how I really am, brain dead, at the end, a long day...

Grindhouse

Have you guys seen this craziness--the new Tarantino/ Rogriguez double feature. It's perhaps the most violent movie ever made, and, in truth, an extraordinary experience of art at its most intense. Go. Go. Go see it!

It's snowing again

Why is it snowing in April? Why? To whom can I complain in the hopes of getting results?

Thanks to everyone who sent congrats and kind words about my book. I couldn't be happier about it!

So, guess what I'm reading? Bet you can't, so I'll tell you:

I'm on a fable jag, as I've been writing them (look out for a couple of examples in this summer's issues of A PUBLIC SPACE and JUBILAT), so I've been doing my homework, reading

GRIMMS'S FAIRY TALES
AESOPS FABLES
THE BOOK OF FABLES by W.S. Merwin (due out shortly from Copper Canyon--a reissue of two earlier books)
ITALIAN FOLKTALES edited and rewritten by Italo Calvino (this is really good--lots of kings and things getting cut open)

Then, of course, I'm working through many books of poems:

OTHERHOOD by Reginald Shepherd
THE NOVEL by Paul Hoover
SELECTED POEMS by Kenneth Koch (The American Poets Project Edition, just out)
TYRANOSAURUS REX AND THE COURDUROY KID by Simon Armitage (not liking it as much as I hoped I would)

Now it's stopped snowing, and only five minutes have passed....

My First Book

Here's my big news. I'm stupid excited about it: Paul Hoover picked my manuscript as the winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry. My first book, BRENDA IS IN THE ROOM AND OTHER POEMS, will be published this coming November by the Center for Literary Publishing, who have brought out first books by a whole slew of great writers, among them Steven Burt, G.C. Waldrep and Rusty Morrisson, and who also publish Colorado Review. I'm just really excited and honored and blown away. I think Hoover is a strange and wonderful writer (with whom I have no acquaintance), and I'm just amazed and honored that he picked my book.

Also, check out CARRIER WAVE by Jaswinder Bolina, who won the prize last year. It's a good book...

Roundup in TONY

Hi. So I haven't been very vigilant at blogging, but please check out this roundup I did for Time Out New York of four news books of poems: Geoffrey G. O'Brien's GREEN AND GREY, Meghan O'Rourke's HALFLIFE, Christian Hawkey's CITIZEN OF and Paisly Rekdal's THE INVENTION OF THE KALIDOSCOPE.

Publishers Weekly National Poetry Month Coverage

Just want to point folks toward the two stories I did for PW's National Poetry Month coverage, which we did early this year.

Peter Gizzi: An Author Profile

A Chance To Be Heard: on Literary Magazines


Also, take note of our new website, which launched this very afternoon.

Back in New York

Welcome home everybody. Hope the flights weren't too bumpy.

Just want to address a comment that was made on the post below about the fact that I said, during the NBCC panel, that I don't think friends reviewing frieds' books is really a big deal.

First, know that in my work at PW, I do everything I can to ensure that the reviews I run are fair.

In my own reviewing work, however, and in the reviews I read, I'm not convinced that friends or aquantances reviewing each other is really at the heart of any of poetry's problems. Friendship with a poet doesn't promise that a reviewer will be unduly hard or easy on their book. That's up to the reviewer. And, anyway, reviwers should not be in the business of simply praising or condemning books of poems. There's got to be something more at stake there, some argument to be made about what poems should or shouldn't, or do or don't do, and if a friend's book is the best example, so be it.

That said, if a reviewer is assigned a book by an editor under the supposition that the review will be "unbiased" perhaps that reviewer should come clean. I just don't believe that any review is unbiased. I think there are other problems--like taking the risk of saying something more than superficial about a book--to be dealt with.

Dispatch from AWP

From my very hotel room in Atlanta, here is a list of the books I picked up. Ain't that exciting!:

POETRY BOOKS

THE MAN SUIT by Zach Schomburg
GOLDBEATER'S SKIN by G.C. Waldrep
THE COMPLETE POETRY by Ceaser Vallejo
THE BOOK OF THE ANGEL by Medbh McGuckian
PENNYWEIGHT WINDOWS by Donald Revell
MISS AMERICA by Catherine Wagner
MACULAR HOLE by Catherine Wager
SHAKE by Joshua Beckman
SAINTS OF HYSTERIA
REVERSABLE MONUMENTS by Wiegers and De La Torre
ONE BIG SELF by CD Wright
THEORY OF ORANGE by Rachel M. Simon
A SEANSON IN HELL by Rambaud/Revell
IN THE ARCHIVES by Christopher Arigo
LIT INTERIM by Christopher Arigo
BREAKING NEWS by Ciaran Carson
SELECTED POEMS by Ciaran Carson
WEATHERING by Rusy Morrisson
IMMANENT VISITOR by Jaime Saenz

CHAPBOOKS

Octopus Chapbooks
Cannibal Chapbooks

PROSE

THE FIRE by Robin Blaser
THE VERSE BOOK OF INTERVIEWS edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki

LIT MAGS

JUBILAT 12
DENVER QUARTERLY VOL. 41 # 2 & 3
FENCE vol 9 # 2

ridiculous, no.

SEE YOU IN ATLANTA

As I imagine many of you will, I'll be at AWP starting tonight. I'll be doing some roving reporting, getting drunk with faraway friends, and a panel on saturday morning about poetry reviewing. Come check it out: NBCC panel, 10:30 am saturday.

see you there

TALK SHOWS by Monica de la Torre

I really can't express how exciting this book is. It's long-awaited and long overdue. De la Torre is about as smart as you can get about the ways different languages--Spanish, English, body, public, private, TV, radio, whatever--meet up and get kinda confusing at the crossroads. She's also funny as hell, aesthetically challenging, and always thinking about the ways a poem can make meaning. This really should be one of the books poetry people are talking about this year.

Books I'm excited about today:

GREEN AND GRAY by Geoffrey G. O'Brien
STYLES OF RADICAL WILL by Susan Sontag

ah, whatever. Gather ye whatevers while ye may. To be, or whatever--that is whatever. And so on.

the Poetry Foundation...ugh.

I'm going to rant here for a minute, as I don't think I can organize my thoughts and feelings into anything much better. I've just finished reading poet and New Yorker editor Dana Goodyear's excellent article about Ruth Lily's 200,000,000 bequest to the Poetry Foundation, which, if I understand it right, beyond my own biases, portrays the foundation as making poor use of it's unbelievable gift. I certainly think that it is. It's making terrible use of it. The foundation, and its president John Barr, is acting pompously, offensively and not in the best interests of the art form of poetry.

I'm not saying anything about the magazine, which, under Wiman's editorship, is much improved. It's still on the conservative side, but that's fine--that caters to its audience. And Wiman's added poems by poets like DA Powell and Tomas Sayers Ellis, acknowledging that some of the most important poets now writing are not doing anything conservative. Wiman's also turned the commentary section into a healthy place where minds can clash about poems.

The foundation--the governing body that oversees the magazine and the new website (for which, I admit, I have written), on the other hand, seems to want to ignore, or bulldoze through, the fact that poetry is a subtle and esoteric art. What is good for the general public--steady jobs, summers at the beach--may not be good for poetry.

Poetry--poems themselves, not the magazine--is good for poetry. The intense reading of poems, the steadfast belief that turning one's thoughts and imaginings into carefully considered language is an imperative human act--those are the things that lead to poetry growing and changing and becoming important in new ways to the culture. Not tie-ins in women's magazines (as Goodyear points out the foundation is trying to sell; they want to have poems, like little trinkets, next to spreads about how to set your table or whatever; ahhhhhh).

The most troubling thing for me is this: as far as I can tell, poetry is not something that should be thought about--at all--in terms of the masses. Poetry must be thought about in terms of individuals. It is one of the last bastions of individual experience. Poetry should be read by one person at a time, alone, just them and the book facing them, someone else's language and their language meeting up in their mind. That's where poetry happens. Exploding it into some cultural phenomenon could destroy that. Then poetry is destroyed.

Then, of course, there is the way the foundation has used their money--on themselves! Goodyear quotes Ethel Kaplan, the chair of the foundation's board, as saying, "Nobody wanted to sit back and read grant proposals--especially from poets." My god! How utterly offensive. They have an unfathomable fortune, which they could use, for instance, to help promising young poets who could not otherwise afford them get college educations, put poets in schools, or they could support the small presses that allow poetry to be published at all, and instead they've made a website that needlessly competes with the already wonderful Poets.org, they're trying to buy a building, and trying to turn themselves into some kind of flagship for popular poems. That's so--there's no better word--selfish.

Go read the article. Goodyear tries to be fairly balanced in, as the New Yorker always does, but, it's hard not to come out of it offended.

My Valentine to the World

I wrote this essay for the Academy of American Poets. It's about poet couples, including Plath and Hughes, Hall and Kenyon, CD Wright and Forest Gander, and the Waldrops. I interviewed the last two especially for the piece. They said very sweet things. Hope you like it.

Some new, or fairly new, Rosemarie Waldrop poems on the New American Writing website. Just can't get enough of her. Her work, as well as her husband's and a number of other like-minded (if that term is fair when it comes to such individual minds) writers', has become increasingly central to my poetic cosmology.

-


And this too--a book for the smart person's bedside table. Australian Critic Clive James (who made his name in England) has written a mammoth book of short essays about major 20th century cultural figures, from Kafka to Borges to Diaghilev to Miles Davis. In the 6 or 7 pages of each essay, he gives a short sketch of the figure under consideration, then proceeds to digress his way to a concentrated opionion. Strange, challenging, and certainly satisfying.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES will be, I bet, one of the big literary books (in English--it's already well into its life in Spanish) of 2007. And the world will be hungry for 2666, Bolano's last book, in 2008.

It's, as I said, a strange book, but enormously satisfying to read. Reading it, I have that sensation of reading a book that doesn't quite work like any other book I know. Not much happens, in a way, and yet, a lot happens: absurd encounters between slightly ridiculous characters, lots of promiscuous sex, and constant talk about poetry: how to publish it, which literary movements are cool, and who are the cool poets in the neighborhood. All the while, the political unrest in Chile flows through as an undercurrent. It's really an astonishing book.

Today I'm excited about Roberto Bolano, who became one of the most important Chilean writers of his generation, then died, at fifty, a few years ago. New Directions published his early books--short novels and stories--and now FSG will bring out the major book he published during his lifetime--THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES--this April, to be followed by his INFINITE JEST-sized postumous novell, 2666, in 2008.

I read some of the stories in LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH while riding the subways today, and tonight I started THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. Bolano is a strange writer. He's not much interested in things happening. He writes a lot about poets, these poet characters he likes, tortuted, self-obsessed, melodramatic. He may be a kind of spiritual cousin to Sebald. Susan Sontag liked both writers. But Bolano is also related to his Latin American forebearers like Garcia Marquez, though there is no magic, per se, just a slippery sense of what constitutes a book.

So far in the novel--and I'm only up to page 11--the main characters, who narrates the book as a kind of journal, talks about how he rebelled in his poetry workshop and joined a group of renegade poets called the viceral realists. There is some time spent waiting for these poets in a bar, a pretty waitnress, and a bad poem, which sends the protagonists into a fit of masturbation. And what is exciting or satisfying about this? I'm not quite sure, but it is certainly satisfying. There's an energy about it. More soon.

I'm reading this book, REMAINDER by Tom McCarthy. Vintage bought it from an English publisher. It's pretty good. Wants to be a bit more whimsical than it is, I think...

Also, check out this very thorough analysis of Rosemarie Waldrop's CURVES TO THE APPLE, by Ben Lerner, in Jacket issue 31. I wrote a bit about this book before when I was head over heels for it last fall. I've been reading some older Waldrop (both Keith and Roesmarie, actually), and have been no less stunned. They really are two of the best and strangest writers working in America right now.

Technology!

How crazy is technology. The reading Brenda, Wayne and I did on sunday is now available in its entirity in streaming web-audio at the Speakeasy website. See, you no longer have to do anything to do anything!

Yesterday's reading went very well, and was actually extremely well attended, especially for superbowl superday, and the coldest day ever.

A few books from the future that I'm interested in:

NOT FOR MOTHER'S ONLY: edited by Rebecca Wolf and Catherine Wagner, published by Fence. An anthologhy of women poets--ranging from Jean Valentine to Elizabeth Robinson--writing about "child-getting & child-rearing." Out in May.

FATA MORGANA by Reginald Shepherd. Out this month. Very intense.

THE NIGHT by Jaime Saenz, translated for Forest Gander and Kent Johnson, published bu Princeton. Book length poem by major bolivian poet, in English for the first time. Looks really good. March.

So, like many of you I'm sure, I did not win the APR book prize. But the thing that really annoys me is that there were no finalists listed on the letter, meaning I don't even have the satisfaction of cursing their names. Anyway, congrats to Gregory Pardlo, the winner. I look forward to seeing your book this fall.

Other books--old and forthcoming--which I am excited to dip into this weekend:

WAKEFULNESS--John Ashbery: Robert Hass wrote one of his poet's choice columns about a poem from this book way back in the late 90's or early aughts--his columns are about to come out in book form--and I liked the poem when I read it, so I got hold of the book. It's time for Ashbery and me, it really is.

FRAIL-CRAFT--Jessica Fisher: Gluck's forth yale pick, due out in April. A seemingly unknown (except, as it happens, to Robert Hass) poem--unknown, at least, to me--who writes compact, intense, mournful lyrics. Looks promising. Gluck has been the best Yale judge in decades.

ONE BIG SELF--CD Wright: this book really kicks ass. I expect we'll all be talking about it come april when it's out and about.

"I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free."

How good is that line? It's so odd, and yet right on--we want things that are "immortal and free," don't we? I've had a difficult relationship to reading Ashbery. When I first discovered "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" in college, I was spellbound. The poem thinks so hard and so obsessively about its many subjects. But there are no other Ashbery poems like it. It took me years to learn how to read his more typical poems, the ones that range everywhere and anywhere, held together only by the bemused, somewhat kermudgeonly voice that utters them. But he's inescapable, and for poetry that thinks its way through itself, there's nothing better. But so many of the poems are unsatisfying. Or are they? I'm never sure what I think when I pop out the end of one, which, perhaps, is a testament to their, as Kafka said, "indubitableness."

Next week his new book, A WORDLY COUNTRY hits stores. It's not unlike his last few--full of that same Ashbery product--but there are a number of standout poems, especially the first one, which is rhymed. And maybe there's something about those trademark poems that we still need. Maybe he's still struggling to say something that needs to be said, and that struggle is important to bear witness to.

What I'm reading this fine, wild thursday:

Still finishing PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. In some ways, I think this is one of those books that must have been incredibly radical at the moment it was published, and is now a bit sleepy because its innovations have been completely digested into the culture, those being the repressed Jewish character (who Woody Allen subsequently developed and popularized completely) and the sex, which is now as common as cracks in the sidewalk.

Also finishing NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU, filmaker and performance artist Miranda July's forthcoming book of stories. If you like her work, this book will seem perfect to you. It's sweet, unabashidly sentimental at times, and sad in that satisfying way that sad can be sad.

And CD Wright's ONE BIG SELF, a revised, poems-only version of her collaboration with a photographer. They went into a handful of southern prisins and made work based on the experience. The book was only available as a fancy art book for a few years, and now Copper Canyon will bring out a handy paperback. This'll be one of the much talked about poetry books of the year, not that that will mean much talk.

I'm three years late on everything, I know, especially on sensitive-person-soundtracks, but I can't get enough of Sufjan Stevens. Especially the album Seven Swans, which was my constant companion at MacDowell.

Let me say this: the nice thing about going to an artist's colony (or on a vacation or something of that nature) is that when you're there, you don't have any problems. At all. The trouble with not being there, then, is of course the fact that problems abound. Who knew?

New Poem on Verse Blog

Check it out. And come to the reading on sunday. and and and

Superbowl Sunday Poetry Touchdown

Brenda Shaughnessy, Wayne Miller, and Craig Morgan Teicher (me!)
read poems
this sunday, 2/4, at 5pm
Speakeasy @ The Bitter End
147 Bleecker between Thompson and LaGuardia

The superbowl is boring. Football is boring. Everything but poetry is boring.

--

Once again I acknowledge my laziness. I was away for the holidays, at MacDowell, where I wrote a heap, and then am just now getting organized again.

But I still like my new format idea, so here goes a reading list. Lately, I've been reading:

*Several books, some out of print, by Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop (who are both truly brilliant writers)
Rosemarie
-WHEN THEY HAVE SENSES(Burning Deck)
-CURVES TO THE APPLE(New Directions) [this is really one of the best books of poetic writing I can think of. I didn't get her before. Now I can't get over her.]
Keith
-THE SPACE OF HALF AN HOUR(Burning Deck) [this is amazing--the poem "Elegy" is perfect.]
-THE REAL SUBJECT (Omnidawn) [A strange book, musings on books and anything else hung on the scaffolding of a character. ]

*Peter Gizzi
-all of his old books, and his new book
-THE OUTERNATIONALE, due out next month. Check it out.

*Sylvia Plath
-The new version of ARIEL
-COMPLETE DIARIES

*Ted Hughes
-THE BIRTHDAY LETTERS

*Phillip Roth
-PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT [this book is not the stunning thing I imagined it would be, but it's engrossing, and, as a Jew who grew up near where the book is set, I can't help but find much of it familiar.]

*Joan Acocella
-TWENTY EIGHT ARTISTS AND TWO SAINTS (Pantheon) [This is one of the most pleasurable books I have read in a long time. It's just out. Go buy it. It's essays, book and dance pieces. Acocella (the dance and book critic for The New Yorker) writes alost pure insight. She writes things like this, which I just can't get over: "...it's a species of sentimentality to think that the end of something tells the truth about it."