June 20: Two things today. The first is from the website of The Poetry Project, which I consider an Enemy of Poetry. Kaz Maslanka sent me to it because a famous poet I'd never heard of, Sherman Alexie, show himself to be a mathematical poet, however uninspired. Here's what Stacy Szymaszek says about him and a collection of his poems:
Sherman Alexie’s newest collection of poems, Face, has just been published by Hanging Loose Press. He has a new young adult novel coming from Little, Brown this spring (his last one, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, won the National Book Award ). He also has a new book of stories coming out with Grove/Atlantic in the fall. He has published over 20 books altogether. The New York Times called him one of the major lyric voices of our time. An enrolled Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, Alexie lives in Seattle.
In 1992, Hanging Loose Press published Sherman Alexie’s first collection of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing. He has held our attention ever since. His work takes on the difficult legacy of colonial America and its cultural and personal aftershocks in the 21st century. Alexie says: “One of the ways in which colonization works is that it destroys family units, and it destroys generational contact. I had no grandparents because they all died for various colonial reasons. Without that connection to grandparents, I lost my connection to my history.” We’ve all heard the adage Comedy = Tragedy + Time, and humor and satire are used provocatively by Alexie, but he throws in another equation: “Poetry = Anger x Imagination.” It makes sense that his emotional dexterity also serves to crush racial stereotypes as well as formal assumptions. In an essay on Alexie’s work, Kenneth Lincoln writes that he “knocks down aesthetic barriers set up in xenophobic academic corridors, and rebounds as cultural performance. He can play technique with mock sonnet, breezy villanelle, unheroic couplet, tinkling tercet, quaky quatrain in any-beat lines.” It’s a great pleasure to present Sherman Alexie.
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The second is another bit of drollery from endwar, in reaction, I presume, to Andrews's "take bananas for instance":
New Poetry -- Old Joke, for Bruce Andrews
take my wife,
please.
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