Comments on: Memory Cards and Adoption Papers http://www.constantcritic.com/jordan_davis/memory_cards_and_adoption_papers/ Timely poetry reviews Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:37:06 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 By: tom thompson http://www.constantcritic.com/jordan_davis/memory_cards_and_adoption_papers/comment-page-1/#comment-13 tom thompson Mon, 10 Feb 2003 14:49:00 +0000 http://www.constantcritic.test/jordan_davis/memory_cards_and_adoption_papers#comment-13 To my dear not quite dead yet Sorrentino Ghost:<br> <br> Ole!<br> <br> Over-ebullient, perhaps. Myopic, indeed. "Offensively bourgeois"? OK. There are lots of ways one gets attached to the world; this is obvious. That a young parent emerges from the nursery with babies in his eyes--babies, babies, everywhere he looks!--is not I think something that would worry Marx too much.<br> <br> An amendment:<br> <br> "And a keelson of the creation is love." So testifies Whitman. Better, hm? Why yes.<br> <br> Biographically yours,<br> <br> the alleged<br> To my dear not quite dead yet Sorrentino Ghost:

Ole!

Over-ebullient, perhaps. Myopic, indeed. “Offensively bourgeois”? OK. There are lots of ways one gets attached to the world; this is obvious. That a young parent emerges from the nursery with babies in his eyes–babies, babies, everywhere he looks!–is not I think something that would worry Marx too much.

An amendment:

“And a keelson of the creation is love.” So testifies Whitman. Better, hm? Why yes.

Biographically yours,

the alleged

]]> By: Ghost of the Not Quite Dead Sorrentino http://www.constantcritic.com/jordan_davis/memory_cards_and_adoption_papers/comment-page-1/#comment-12 Ghost of the Not Quite Dead Sorrentino Tue, 04 Feb 2003 08:23:00 +0000 http://www.constantcritic.test/jordan_davis/memory_cards_and_adoption_papers#comment-12 Since I'm just lurking around reading all of this I'd like to comment not only on 'the suprise ending' of the review but on the review of the review by someone allegedly named tom thompson... tom, dear man, friend of language poets everywhere, are you serious? Am I reading People magazine or are we discussing poetry? Having babies isn't going to make anyone a better, more socially responsible person, and it certainly won't advance anyone as a poet (except, perhaps, at dinner parties.) This is an offensively bourgeoise idea if there ever was one.<br> <br> POETRY, THE APOGEE OF THE ARTS<br> TESTIFY! Since I’m just lurking around reading all of this I’d like to comment not only on ‘the suprise ending’ of the review but on the review of the review by someone allegedly named tom thompson… tom, dear man, friend of language poets everywhere, are you serious? Am I reading People magazine or are we discussing poetry? Having babies isn’t going to make anyone a better, more socially responsible person, and it certainly won’t advance anyone as a poet (except, perhaps, at dinner parties.) This is an offensively bourgeoise idea if there ever was one.

POETRY, THE APOGEE OF THE ARTS
TESTIFY!

]]> By: Tom Thompson http://www.constantcritic.com/jordan_davis/memory_cards_and_adoption_papers/comment-page-1/#comment-11 Tom Thompson Mon, 06 Jan 2003 20:18:00 +0000 http://www.constantcritic.test/jordan_davis/memory_cards_and_adoption_papers#comment-11 Well, that last paragraph kinda gets popped on you, there, like the end of a mystery novel where it wasn't the butler did it after all, but Clarice the neighbor (who doesn't appear in the book until the last page). I read an implicit intra-generational sweep of the paw in the implication that Schultz' first book was brilliantly pre-occupied with fragmentary pyrotechnics of wit, but that we want that AND more. Is this a statement we can carry to broader regions? Something's going on in the land Ron Silliman calls "post-avant." There's a generation of poets whose first books dazzle in bits and pieces, but recent appearances in journals suggest a horizon newly staked with attachment points, somethings "worth attending to" (in Davis' smart, clear phrasing). This is the way Ron Silliman thinks another post-avant, Jennifer Moxley, is pointing (he cited her recently on his blog http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com). If you doubt something's turning, see the freak-out that Silliman's appreciation of Moxley (and her apparently new-found penchant for straight-talk) caused on the Buffalo Poetics List. I don't know the link, but you can get the gist at Silliman's blog. And now, as Rebecca Wolff points out in preface to the most recent Fence, babies are busting out all over: be it with Susan Schultz or countless others coming of age. Nothing disjoints consciousness like a newborn; and nothing makes you so simultaneously long for and realize a joining. A post-langPo generation that dazzled with syntactical disjunction (yes, beautiful, but...) is coming out with work that attaches at the body familial (see Rachel Zucker's poems rife with the rips and ties implicit in young parenthood -- appearing now from Colorado Review to Pleiades, and forthcoming in book form from Wesleyan). I haven't read Gabriel Gudding's book but a look at the review on constantcritic makes me wonder what next for an auto-arse-admiring poet who has a young child (as Gudding does, I think). Will Gudding's child demand entry into so frantically self-smart and auto-erotic a poetry? Should s/he? My two young sons are nodding their heads, vigorously; but like I usually do with them, I say, "OK, guys, but gimmee a minute here, I've got to think about this." And while I'm thinking they run out into the street or wherever and the time for thinking is done. So then: a generation so intent on its (our) own navel is now squinching through oomphalos and out the other side? with skills sharpened to a steely new glint by attachment? Or is it merely narcissism + one? I think it's a different animal than narcissism -- very different -- but also think it a question worth raising in broader context for this promising generation that includes Schultz and, for that matter, Davis himself... Well, that last paragraph kinda gets popped on you, there, like the end of a mystery novel where it wasn’t the butler did it after all, but Clarice the neighbor (who doesn’t appear in the book until the last page). I read an implicit intra-generational sweep of the paw in the implication that Schultz’ first book was brilliantly pre-occupied with fragmentary pyrotechnics of wit, but that we want that AND more. Is this a statement we can carry to broader regions? Something’s going on in the land Ron Silliman calls “post-avant.” There’s a generation of poets whose first books dazzle in bits and pieces, but recent appearances in journals suggest a horizon newly staked with attachment points, somethings “worth attending to” (in Davis’ smart, clear phrasing). This is the way Ron Silliman thinks another post-avant, Jennifer Moxley, is pointing (he cited her recently on his blog http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com). If you doubt something’s turning, see the freak-out that Silliman’s appreciation of Moxley (and her apparently new-found penchant for straight-talk) caused on the Buffalo Poetics List. I don’t know the link, but you can get the gist at Silliman’s blog. And now, as Rebecca Wolff points out in preface to the most recent Fence, babies are busting out all over: be it with Susan Schultz or countless others coming of age. Nothing disjoints consciousness like a newborn; and nothing makes you so simultaneously long for and realize a joining. A post-langPo generation that dazzled with syntactical disjunction (yes, beautiful, but…) is coming out with work that attaches at the body familial (see Rachel Zucker’s poems rife with the rips and ties implicit in young parenthood — appearing now from Colorado Review to Pleiades, and forthcoming in book form from Wesleyan). I haven’t read Gabriel Gudding’s book but a look at the review on constantcritic makes me wonder what next for an auto-arse-admiring poet who has a young child (as Gudding does, I think). Will Gudding’s child demand entry into so frantically self-smart and auto-erotic a poetry? Should s/he? My two young sons are nodding their heads, vigorously; but like I usually do with them, I say, “OK, guys, but gimmee a minute here, I’ve got to think about this.” And while I’m thinking they run out into the street or wherever and the time for thinking is done. So then: a generation so intent on its (our) own navel is now squinching through oomphalos and out the other side? with skills sharpened to a steely new glint by attachment? Or is it merely narcissism + one? I think it’s a different animal than narcissism — very different — but also think it a question worth raising in broader context for this promising generation that includes Schultz and, for that matter, Davis himself…

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