Major Jackson, “Roof of the World”

I live on the roof of the world among the aerial
simulacra of Things, among the faded: old tennis shoes,
vanished baseballs, heartbreak gritted with dirt. My mind
flickers like lightning in a cloud. I’m networked
beholding electric wires and church spires.
I lean forward and peer at the suffering below—
Sartre said: man is condemned to be free.
I believe in the dead who claim to believe in me—
says, too, the missing and forgotten. Day darkens
on. I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you, now.

The poems in Holding Company, the third collection from Major Jackson, share the formal bond of a ten-line structure—because, he told Identity Theory, “I wanted to teach myself how to create an exalted utterance in a poem, how to create something that was emotionally heartrending, that did not need a lot of scaffolding. I wanted to go in a new direction and allow that compression to sing the poem’s themes louder, sing emotive declarations by shrinking it further.” Sometimes there are other interesting connections between the poems; the last line of “Roof of the World,” for example, will turn up again in “Forecast” (from Poetry Out Loud), and another line from that poem finds its way into “White Power.”

Other poems in Holding Company include “Here the Sea,” “At the Club,” and “Maithuna” (all from Salt Magazine) and three other poems that inspired short animated films: “Leave It All Up to Me,” “Zucchini,” and “Migration.”

27 September 2010 | poetry |

Book Bloggers Still Ruining Everything

I should know better by now than to concern myself with old-school culture pundits moaning about “the blogosphere,” because frankly that battle’s over, but a fellow book blogger sent me a link to a recent conversation between Charles McGrath and Daniel Mendelsohn that included roughly 15 minutes of blog-panic that revealed to me just how little that line of attack has done to substantiate itself in the last half-decade.

I mean, really: McGrath is still trotting out lines like bloggers are a bunch of resentniks who “didn’t have the patience or… the connections to become a reviewer for The New York Times, to hook up with The Atlantic or The New Yorker, [and] all of a sudden they have a pulpit.” And Mendelsohn is privileging his professional criticism because “I’m not just saying what I think—I am saying something to the people who read The New York Review of Books. It’s a public function… It’s not just me sitting in my underwear at three in the morning being pissed off because I didn’t like a movie.” (How, one wonders, would Mendelsohn react if he ever discovered a NYRB contributor wrote his or her essays underwear-shod at 3:00 A.M.?)

Really, guys? Is that the best you can do? That and lamentations that “snark is, I think, the lingua franca of the blogosphere,” and that you’re “concerned about… a kind of critical discourse by people who are rich enough or crazy enough to write for nothing”? Even as the majority of mainstream media outlets have begun to incorporate the rhetoric and infrastructure of blogging into their reportage and their cultural criticism, you’re still trotting out those tired clichés? That’s just sad.

(more…)

22 September 2010 | theory |