Commentaries - December 2007

Hoover planned mass arrests

The AP wire is running a story today that is both unsurprising and also shocking. It begins this way:

From Sunday morning to Tuesday evening

The year '07 brought us a "selected later poems" from John Ashbery, a gorgeously designed volume (a large pastel-color-surrounded lower case mod-yet-serif "a" on the jacket) called Notes

One-eyed poetry

The poets who founded the Berkeley Review were deliberate moderates. They admitted that they were one-eyed poets, although the ideal is the poet with both eyes open. Political poets had been one eyed, too, but it's the other eye, so the two — the Berkeley moderates and the old rads — share the fate of the half-done not-great, and yet they can be said to be opposites. Such a classic (and typically confused) metaphor of the post-political moment.

More than political

Shock and irresponsibility

In his review** of The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (1952), the modern art critic Thomas B.

Down with 1937

Poetry Review of London was for many years a magazine that specialized in publishing poems that were not only conservative but were indeed themselves about the campaign that would have to be