Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The subtitle delivers what it promises: a secret history of poetry and kitsch. We look at kitsch differently when we see it as originating from controversies and scandals about poetry during the rise of popular culture in the eighteenth century, and not just with reference to the visual arts and material culture in the twentieth century. We also look at poetry differently when we see how entangled with kitsch elite poetry was, and still is, despite Wordsworthian attempts to purify the language of tribe, and Modernist efforts to denounce kitsch and switch attention from diction to form. As a poet, I'm rather more interested in looking at poetry differently, and this volume casts new light on, finds a thread through many apparently different lots of poets: the renovators and falsifiers of the ballad revival in the eighteenth century, the Shenstone and the Walpole sets, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, the first and second generations of the New York School, and five twentieth-century American...

Turning 48, or Post Your Birthday Wish, If You Wish, Below this Post  I’ll write one true thing a day in the week running up to my birthday. John Ashbery is boring and I’d rather eat cardboard than read his poetry. I’m a poor judge of character, which is my saving grace in making friends. Angrier. Sadder. Heavier. I look at the young and am disconsolate. There are no moral phenomena, but I have to act as if good and evil exist. Last week I wrote a respectable poem about sex with a party of cyborgs.  John Ashbery is boring but “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is brilliant. Love, I have been under increasing pressure to make a false allegation.  Photo by Guy E. Humphrey. I name it "Wallflowers."

Too tired to say much about the reading, but just want to note it on the blog. Hosted by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, at the newish Battery City Park Ferry Terminal, the event commemorated the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery of the river that now carries his name. The poems were written for the occasion, and read by the poets: Eavan Boland's "The Port of New York, 1956," John Ashbery's "In One Afternoon," Toon Tellegen's "A Poem for Henry Hudson," Jorie Graham's "No Bearing and Disproportion" (an extract), Paul Muldoon's "Lines for the Quartercentenary of the Voyage of the Halve Maen ," and John Koethe's "The Great Gatsby." Michael Schmidt introduced each poet. The ferry engine, coming by at regular intervals, competed with and accompanied the voices.