I haven't been cross-posting pieces I've written elsewhere to this blog, which is perhaps a mistake, as I have ownership over this site (archival purposes) and also I have no idea who (if anyone) is reading this.

Nevertheless, I've recently posted the following online:

On Lemon Hound, a cheeky read of the movie Bright Star:

A Few Things I Learned About Life as a Poet from Watching Bright Star


I approached this movie ready to be snarky and suspicious. No romantic frippery for this lady, in either senses of the word. However, with a deft cinematic hand, Jane Campion "trace[s] the comminglings and collisions of poetic creation and amatory passion" in this tale of young John Keats (Ben Wishaw) in love. 1. Her cinematography in Bright Star is at once gorgeous and lived in, brilliant fields of lavender heath and daffodils in a meadow, roughly hewn wooden door frames and sparse furnishings. And the costuming, especially on budding seamstress Miss Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish,) from whose point of view the movie is told, caused many a wanton cry to erupt from my mouth. (Wanton = I want one.) Cornish wears a series of empire-waisted jumpers in striped linen or brown satin with frilly blouses underneath. Ruffly bonnets or "triple mushroom collars" frame her face. And the most fantastic pair of multi-buckled shoes I have seen in any movie. Oh, it is to swoon!

Read more.

On the 95 Books Blog, a review of Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post-World War II America by Abigail Cheever:

Exhaustive, erudite, fascinating read of the notion of subjectivity and how it is produced, in a thorough examination of non-fiction and fiction works from the 1950’s (Rebel Without a Cause, The Catcher in the Rye) through to the end of the century (Jerry Maguire, Six Degrees of Separation.) Cheever works through cultural conceptions of authenticity in chapters examining: Teenagers, Madness/Depression Narratives, Serial Killers, Jewishness, Performativity and the Corporate Narrative, and Collage as “the art form of the twentieth century.” Intensively researched and intellectually sound, Real Phonies gives a compelling picture of North American cultural mores and the production of the individual vis a vis the group. 

My only tiny quibble with the book was—and I assume the book was adapted from a dissertation—the continual summation of what had been told and what was yet to come. (The last chapter blah blah blah, this chapter blah blah blah, etc.) This might be necessary in an academic work, but as a mass market paperback, these unnecessary summaries slowed down the reading.

Beyond that, Real Phonies is a marvelous discourse on the self. Highly recommend.

And on publisher Talonbooks' website, a review of Ken Belford's Decompositions:

 
In the Headwaters of the Nass: Reading Ken Belford’s Decompositions
9780889226319sm

by Nikki Reimer


In Ken Belford’s latest book Decompositions the biotext is in charge, shaping and routing the poetic narrative as a stream or a vein. Belford’s book is an astute politically-charged ecology of land and language that also contains a sonorous verbal music.

Belford begins with a self-referential mythology of the man whose “pen name was Ken” (6). His “misprints are not random events, but near misses;” here an “error is a starting point” (7). No glib joke of Beethoven decomposing in his grave, these are living decompositions: Belford’s text disintegrates and is chemically decomposed and recomposed. Mulch is made. The organism’s body breaks down and becomes food for other words, other phrasings. New sentences grow out of the compost, “recombinations/as a naked piece of DNA in the environment,/not passed vertically/from generation to generation,/but by means of the conjugation of plasmids/into the occupation of the new” (9). His is a poetics of respect and honour for the land and the creatures upon it, an occupation that has fallen out of fashion in the flarf vs. conceptualism arguments of the time.

 Today I write poems that have high mutation rates.
I’m a new type that became more common,
an old sequence recopied upstream (9) 
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