[New-Poetry] gusto

[Mark Weiss]

First rule: never reply to a critic. Best to get 
drunk and howl by oneself, or complain to 
friendfs and loved ones until they tell you it's enough.

It's difficult to imagine what the poet thought 
he would gain. Change your mind? Get you to retract the review?

At 03:15 PM 11/29/2010, you wrote:
>Saint Annie of Poetica:  yes!  Let the canonization process begin.
>
>As for that other gentleman, he pleads guilty to 
>all past & future lapses of knowlege and taste, 
>and he was also (don't tell) the man on the 
>grassy knoll who took out not only Roethke and 
>Frost but also W. C. Williams in 1963.  Aimed 
>for Pound but missed.  Would have gone after 
>Wilbur and Ashbery, but they were too spry back then to get a bead on. . . .
>
>But speaking of taste, I believe Mark has 
>mentioned something that frequently gets elided 
>in such discussions: that admiration and 
>awareness are two very different things.
>
>A number of years back I was asked to do a 
>review of a new-and-selected volume by a poet I 
>think it would be fair to slot well within the 
>"experimental" wing of American poetry.  It was 
>for a newspaper in a state I've never lived in, 
>and I was specifically enjoined by the editor 
>not to feel I had to pull punches.  Apparently 
>my main qualification for doing the review, 
>aside from being a poet who did occasional 
>reviews, was that I wasn't part of the clubby 
>scene that surrounded this particular 
>poet.  They were sick of running back-scratching reviews, I gather.
>
>Not a problem for me, in any case.  As it 
>happened, I liked the book a good deal, but also 
>felt that, unfortunately, the poet in question 
>got rather steadily worse as he developed.  I 
>tried to express both my admiration and my 
>reservations clearly in the tiny space allowed.
>
>Soon after publication I got a very aggrieved 
>letter from the poet himself.  Two things were 
>most striking about his complaints. First, he 
>was sure he knew what kind of poet I was, and 
>make a number of disparaging remarks about the 
>poetry he admitted he had not read.  And second, 
>he was equally certain that I just didn't 
>understand his work, that I was ignorant of the 
>traditions in which he was writing.
>
>I did not reply. But if I had, I probably would 
>have simply pointed out that there were other 
>possibilities beyond his dichotomy of ignorance/admiration.
>
>
>
>On 11/29/10 12:32 PM, 
>"<jforjames at aol.htm>jforjames at aol.com" 
><<jforjames at aol.htm>jforjames at aol.com> wrote:
>
>Well, Anny's a saint, after all. That gentleman 
>you mention is a little too enamored of the 
>'natter mannerists' (those ultra-talkers).
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Barry Spacks <<barry.spacks at verizon.htm>barry.spacks at verizon.net>
>To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.htm>new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>Sent: Mon, Nov 29, 2010 1:08 pm
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] gusto
>
>On Nov 29, 2010, at 9:00 AM, jforjames wrote:
> >
> > Who is the mythical literary figure who 
> manages to know all poets/> poetries (all the 
> compass points), is well-versed in all schools 
> and > sub-genres, and who loves, reads, and 
> promotes them all with equal > gusto? I don't 
> know that person. Is he/she is on this list?
> >
>   Yes, he is: David Graham. And she is: Anny Ballardini.
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>--
>
>
>====================================================
>David Graham
><grahamd at ripon.htm>grahamd at ripon.edu
>Home Page:
><http://web.me.com/drjazz/>http://web.me.com/drjazz/
>
>Poetry Library:
><http://web.me.com/drjazz/Site/DGPoLibrary.html>http://web.me.com/drjazz/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
>====================================================
>
>
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New from Chax Press: Mark Weiss, As Landscape.
$16.  Order from http://www.chax.org/poets/weiss.htm


"What a beautiful set of circumstances! What a 
lovely concatenation of particulars. Here is the 
poet alive in every sense of the word, and 
through every one of his senses. Instead of 
missing a beat or a part, Weiss’ fragments are 
like Chekhov’s short stories­the more that gets 
left out, the more they seem to contain
 One can 
hear echoes from all the various 
ancestors...[but] the voice, at its center, its 
core, is pure Mark Weiss. His use of the fragment 
is both elegant and bafflingly clear, a pure 
musical threnody
[it] opens a window, not only 
into a mind, but a person, a personality, this 
human figure at the emotional center of the poem."

M.G. Stephens, in Jacket. 
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-weiss-rb-stephens.shtml
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