RIP, Jason Molina

I'm still sad about it.

Levon Helm & Sissy Spacek, 1980

(Here)

@ Boston Review

Opposing Terms: A Symposium on the Poetic Limits of Binary Thinking: here.

"Marjorie Perloff’s essay 'Poetry on the Brink' in the May/June 2012 issue rekindled conversation about innovation and canonization in contemporary poetry. To continue and extend the discussion, we cast a wide net and invited 18 poets to address the following question: what is the most significant, troubling, relevant, recalcitrant, misunderstood, or egregious set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today, and, by extension, what are the limits of binary thinking about poetry? Their responses range from whimsy to diatribe, with meditation, appraisal, tangent, touchstone, anecdote, drollery, confection, wit, and argument in between."

Susan Howe

That This


Day is a type when visible
objects change then put


on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed


The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually


concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth


Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace


copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery


A secular arietta variation
Grass angels perish in this


harmonic collision because
non-being cannot be 'this'


Not spirit not space finite
Not infinite to those fixed—


That this millstone as such
Quiet which side on which—


Is one mind put into another
in us unknown to ourselves


by going about among trees
and fields in moonlight or in


a garden to ease distance to
fetch home spiritual things


That a solitary person bears
witness to law in the ark to


an altar of snow and every
age or century for a day is

art & introversion

Helen Vendler on admitting (and nurturing) creative undergraduates:

The truth is that many future poets, novelists, and screenwriters are not likely to be straight-A students, either in high school or in college. The arts through which they will discover themselves prize creativity, originality, and intensity above academic performance; they value introspection above extroversion, insight above rote learning. Such unusual students may be, in the long run, the graduates of whom we will be most proud. Do we have room for the reflective introvert as well as for the future leader? Will we enjoy the student who manages to do respectably but not brilliantly in all her subjects but one—but at that one surpasses all her companions? Will we welcome eagerly the person who has in high school been completely uninterested in public service or sports—but who may be the next Wallace Stevens? Can we preach the doctrine of excellence in an art; the doctrine of intellectual absorption in a single field of study; even the doctrine of unsociability; even the doctrine of indifference to money?

More here.

Vinyl

Many thanks to Vinyl for nominating my poem "The Soporific Well" (link here) for this year's edition of Best of the Net.