I’m not working this week, so I got a head start on my reading. I had originally said that I was going to read Adam Banks’ Digital Griots, but in light of the ideas I’m kicking around for my upcoming dissertation prospectus, I chose to read Perloff instead.

POETRY: Traffic With Macbeth is the fifth collection of poetry by my MFA professor Larissa Szporluk. This collection didn’t grab me in quite the same way as her previous work; the poems are more severe, perhaps, in comparison with the richness of the invented myth cycle in Embryos and Idiots, her previous book. Still, I felt humbled by the clipped, authoritative turns in the language, and the poems I did connect with are startlingly good: “When / taste was gone, Time / ate his children too. / And so did God, / and so will you” (“Orrido”).

I should say that It’s always hard to talk about my teacher’s work, mostly because I feel like she’s a genius, and I still feel kind of embarrassed of myself in comparison. I studied with her, and found her to be an incredibly intuitive and giving teacher, but even now I don’t feel my talent worthy of her time.

SCHOLARLY: Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means In the New Century takes as its subject the poetics of citation, appropriation, collage, remix, and, in general, other people’s words. For most of the book, Perloff looks to explicating conceptual poetries that I’m not very familiar with. I did, however, find her discussion of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project interesting, if only because the conclusions she seems to come to are somewhat obvious to a rhetorician; for example, near the end of the chapter, she states “The lesson here is that context always transforms content” (48)–simple enough, but perhaps it indicates that those of us who study poetry do not attend to context in the ways that we should. Perloff’s closing statement in the Benjamin chapter could very well stand for the entire book: “In this new arcade-world, writing a poem is no easier than it ever was. Just different” (49). Even though we may have the power to copy and reappropriate at will the work of others, the creative act remains the creative act (provided the context is appropriate and effective).

Next week in poetry: Catie Rosemurgy’s The Stranger Manual. Next week in scholarly reading:  Morris and Swiss’ New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories.