tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29410078681216093672011-07-07T17:19:49.505-04:00Hopefully the title explains itP. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.comBlogger281100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-66673803357455514252010-04-24T19:27:00.003-04:002010-04-24T20:25:49.204-04:00

Somehow, without trying, you got a woman in the audience to raise her hand and say, "Do you care about art history?"Enough said. Smashing success.

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-37917888110935257392009-07-06T14:30:00.003-04:002009-07-06T14:47:15.117-04:00

I read Sarah Thornton's "Seven Days in the Art World" for a book group meeting at MOCA in North Miami.It's a breezy read--and a good introduction to the contemporary art world as far as I can tell--but I don't feel the need to spend the time necessary to write Ms. Thornton a personal letter.One note however: I wonder why publishers and writers don't make longer versions of "accessible" books

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-49947690217632963712009-06-30T09:40:00.003-04:002009-07-01T09:48:09.431-04:00

Your book has four parts, but actually two. One, the first, (and represented by the first section), preoccupies itself with the passion of translation, with words themselves, and this section slowly bleeds into the second half of the book, which, as it moves towards the fourth and final section, is more and more about Israel as a political entity. That age-old question, "What does it mean to be

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-41089188867730229942009-06-30T09:35:00.002-04:002009-06-30T09:37:41.437-04:00

I reviewed your book at the paper. Not as personal, but hopefully fair and worth reading.http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2009/06/review_please_step_back_by_ben.php

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-88327250906041215222009-06-11T09:46:00.002-04:002009-06-11T10:26:01.331-04:00

I'm gradually making my way through everything you wrote, hopefully in time to read your posthumous novel (when it comes out) with all the other books behind me. Not sure if I'll get there, especially with Infinite Jest looming, but I'm trying.It's hard not to read "Brief Interviews" without reading the biographical knowledge of what we now know about your psychic history into it--the 20-some

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-79525344054070751442009-06-11T08:32:00.004-04:002009-06-11T09:44:47.334-04:00

I hadn't heard much of you previous to going to the show--a couple of older songs my friend Ryan had given me (and that I'd never really responded to) and My Girls (oh, and Comfy in Nautica which I guess counts but struck me as "Beach Boys Lite")--so I downloaded (and paid for! I'm old) "Merriweather Post Pavilion", listening to most of it on the way up. And liking it but also anticipating that

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-32952396464276237902009-06-04T23:45:00.009-04:002009-06-11T14:43:56.902-04:00

I was definitely prepared to dislike your book, Keith. Not because of n+1, but in spite of n+1. Basically, I hate the title. "All the Sad Young Literary Men" is both a terrible, terrible title, and also a very fitting one for the book you've written, which I did like very much. How these two things are compatible I'm not sure. I mean, after I finished the book, I understood the tone in which the

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-34980373067157271162009-06-04T19:51:00.006-04:002009-06-04T23:34:20.210-04:00

You swallowed my month of May. April, too actually because I finished you in April, but I was so exhausted from reading 2666 that for awhile I was only capable of reading articles here and there, poems here and there, etc., not an actual book [though, I did read two books-more on those in the next two posts]. Exhausted and exhilarated, too--a post marathon feeling. A marathon in which I also got

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-30418948156956561462009-04-18T18:34:00.003-04:002009-04-18T19:04:57.483-04:00

You're highly entertaining, Abe--hilarious and lyrically dense at times; at others, merely amusing. (Rarer still, flatly ironic.) I like a journal low on production cost but still attractive, with the focus squarely placed on the poetry. I'm a little wary of the similarity of voice inside you, as if the poets solicited wrote their pieces with an aim to please you. I've read other work by Sandra

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-50673301277203360932009-04-11T10:06:00.005-04:002009-04-11T11:02:47.933-04:00

You are worth every single shilling it takes to get you across the ocean and into my garage in Miami. I may even--and I so rarely do this--renew my subscription."As I'm leaving the poetry reading a colleague tells me that I have the air of someone always about to leave. Which strikes me as possibly being true. It's maybe the beard. And the pockets stuffed with books and sweets, and pens. And the

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-13143455047996006332009-04-07T09:49:00.003-04:002009-04-07T10:23:06.657-04:00

I really admire the stance your book takes, Charlie; how it asserts the known in the face of grief, a.k.a. the unknown. In your son's absence, you've examined other things more closely--crabapples, oak trees, birds--and let them be as they are, rather than investing them with more meaning than they're capable of handling. I learned much more about you than about Charlie, Jr., and that's a major

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-67408953684312655762009-03-29T21:32:00.003-04:002009-03-29T21:33:33.985-04:00

"Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game....Only poetry--and let me be clear, only some of it--is good for you, only poetry isn't shit." -Roberto Bolano, 2666

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-42312075944050056512009-02-27T16:07:00.011-05:002009-03-22T14:58:41.464-04:00

I bought your book online, at a site specializing in small presses, because they were having a big sale. (I think Kasey Mohammad's blog alerted me to this...) And since you're one of the giants of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and as a poet, I feel like I need to have some kind of understanding of every major 20th Century movement, I bought "disfrutes". Which I don't understand, except for as a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-36697436619504314262009-02-27T10:34:00.004-05:002009-02-27T10:49:08.670-05:00

What can I say to you that you don't already know? I envy the 50 years you had to yourself before publishing, your years in Paris with Jack Gilbert (Of all the romantic friendships in the world in all the romantic times, I might choose this one over all of them), and I envy your age, as you, I'm sure, envy mine. "Lucky Life" is so far--and by far--my favorite book of yours. That plain-spokenness

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-11673274729385816272009-02-26T09:16:00.002-05:002009-02-26T09:18:43.223-05:00

My favorite and least favorite aspect of your book was its ambition. I love, perhaps adore, the first and last stories (especially the first, which I first read in Zoetrope by accident and was struck dumb by it), and I love how they interconnect: the story the protagonist writes for his workshop becomes the last story (“The Boat”), and despite the fact that it’s destroyed, we get to read it (or

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-51721532406301367692009-02-23T09:06:00.003-05:002009-02-23T09:27:14.455-05:00

I would have loved to have substituted you as author of this article, David, with someone like Anthony Lane. In other words, someone who would enjoy poking fun at an establishment that openly frets at its potential "greatness", instead of asserting that "poetry needs greatness" and then defining "greatness" in large part as a costume party, as you do in this essay, without so much as a wink. No

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-14824487291136138092009-02-10T16:43:00.002-05:002009-02-10T16:48:28.396-05:00

I read this in college and read it again today, and one part felt close to the way I see things at the moment, close enough to copy it down here: "...interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world--in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-45666086297290850862009-01-30T16:47:00.004-05:002009-01-30T17:35:39.838-05:00

M.,Someone told me about your poem when I was running a workshop on "Inscrutability in Poetry" at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival last week. At that point, I'd seen the title in the table of contents but hadn't read it--I have a subscription but with the festival coming up I'd fallen behind in reading it. I loved the title; I mean, how can a poem called "Alien vs. Predator" be bad? and made a

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-15650115293686901782009-01-30T15:21:00.004-05:002009-01-30T15:30:51.033-05:00

Ms. Carson,Thank you for this essay, which, like most of your poetry, is violently direct even while tackling subject matter that is inherently indirect. Your writing style invokes mystery while retaining clarity, and I guess that's why you're so good at writing about the ineffable.“In his tower overlooking the river Neckar, Hölderlin had a piano that he sometimes played so hard he broke the keys

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-73175284811648953712009-01-27T18:06:00.004-05:002009-01-27T18:57:43.189-05:00

Mr. Aira,Books like this rarely get written in the United States, I think perhaps due to our literary obsession with some fictional thing called "The Great American Novel", one of the stupidest concepts my country has come up with. I Googled the phrase "book with 87 pages" and these are the titles that came up: "Mormonism and Masonry" by E. Cecil McGavin, "Sculpture" by David Smith (a book of

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-88581319678745893552009-01-26T14:06:00.004-05:002009-01-26T14:48:52.157-05:00

Kasey,I discovered your blog {LIME TREE} via Linh Dinh on the Harriet blog and was impressed with it so I bought your book, "Breathalyzer" (link to the book in the title). In the middle of reading it, I was interning at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and got into an extended discussion about inscrutability in contemporary poetry (a dead horse probably but we enjoyed it) and I showed everyone your

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-29047005727795733262009-01-26T13:06:00.005-05:002009-01-26T13:08:43.411-05:00

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-25729137388676441902009-01-17T21:54:00.005-05:002009-01-17T22:01:10.647-05:00

Poets or Literature buffs,I don't have anything particular to say about it--I'm new to it and the speakers involved have the angles well covered--but if you're at all interested in movements in contemporary poetry, start following K. Silem Mohammad's blog {LIME TREE}, especially the frequent posts about the Flarf collective he's one of the founders of.

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-68453820251420140352009-01-17T20:06:00.004-05:002009-01-17T20:58:29.379-05:00

R.,What would I say to you if you could really hear it? I'm not sure. I always tell myself not to be too effusive towards my literary idols, but I always break my promise--sending juvenile, unfinished poems with quaint dedications, like the one I sent to Kevin Young, "Ode to the Curator", written on a tram in Basel, but then later edited into something a little worse. He politely glossed over it

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-72500942991590225192009-01-13T13:57:00.001-05:002009-01-13T13:58:23.796-05:00

Just realized my last post on Mark Strand is a "blizzard of hyperbole". I'll try to avoid that in the future, but the book is really very lovely. (oops...)

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-45933261769302923042009-01-12T20:49:00.002-05:002009-01-12T20:55:59.494-05:00

Because I believe that form and meaning are inseparable, I'll just talk about the form: a loose iambic meter that doesn’t break syllabically or accentually but by phrase. Comes from years of writing iambic pentameter, then letting out the reins a little. Except of course for the villanelles, the second of which is sublime. “Some Last Words” = sublime. Only poem I don’t like is the one for Joseph

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-77374886340662483812009-01-12T20:35:00.004-05:002009-01-12T20:48:46.722-05:00

Highlights from the Rand Contemporary Report on Contemporary Art (2004):-75% of American art museums were founded after World War II, yet a majority of the artists shown in them were dead before the end of World War II-“indirect government support for the arts through tax policies provides considerably more funding for the arts than does direct funding.”-“Because judgments of aesthetic quality

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2941007868121609367.post-29673761911618608712009-01-05T13:57:00.002-05:002009-01-05T14:05:10.289-05:00

Reminded me that the verb “to be” and all of its iterations is entirely pleasant, wholly useful, and utterly welcome in prose. In a more macro sense, the grammatical structure of the sentences of this book puts an emphasis on clarity, and thus you see an overabundance of subject-verb construction; long, sinuous trains of clauses are rare. Why is this? I think it’s because these stories are so

P. Scott Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05452991409389972714noreply@blogger.com0