Adam Kirsch gives an in-depth look at Sharon Olds
She is declaring facts, especially bodily facts, to be good because for so long she was told that they were evil. An eyelid, menstrual blood, an embryo–also semen, sweat, the genitals–become signs of the justice, the harmony, and the joy that pervades all matter.
[…]
But this hymning of the facts is simply another way of bearding the universe, of arbitrarily investing certain precincts of experience with transcendent value.
This is from a rather nice poetry resource — new to me but around for a decade — MAPs. It has 161 Modern American poets reviewed in bios and book reviews and poem reviews. One could spent a long time there in the companion site to the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry.
Re-reading Lorine Niedecker by Jenny Penberthy has some fascinating level of details of context and content while overviewing her career’s work. For example, “The longest of the “For Paul” poems, 5 pages long, eventually appears in print eighteen years after its composition, condensed to half a page.” And “her notes for the poem [“Lake Superior.”] number close to 300 typed pages; the poem itself is condensed to five.”
Also of interest is a 20 page pdf (a couple years old now) on conceptual poetry that opens with Christian Bök’s bacterium project as an example. Kenneth Goldsmith pointed to it from his article on the “guilty pleasure” of flarf at the Poetry Foundation. Teaser? “Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building […] There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty.”
I also want to mention Brian of Baltimore’s senyru