The New Yorker is my favorite means of discovering new poetry and poets. Just a few minutes ago, I finished an article by Dan Chiasson in the August 31, 2015 magazine about Linda Gregerson who is a professor at the University of Michigan. Apparently her specialty is Elizabethan Renaissance poetry which has greatly influenced her own work. Chiasson uses a t called “open voicing,” which I am not familiar with. But it seems to be some descriptor of the pauses created by syntax and lines to craft a speaker voice which responds to an unseen audience. 

He writes this sentence, integrating Gregerson’s opinion with his own, “‘I think of grammar as a social contract’ she has said; without it, relations of all kinds cannot be expressed.” Now that is a very interesting statement, especially for me when I have just finished trying to teach reluctant students grammar. She elevates grammar to a stratospheric importance, suggesting that our correct sequencing of verbs, nouns, conjunctions determines how we live together as people in a community and the world. I am not sure my students would buy that idea at all.

After reading Chiasson’s article, I want to buy her book, Prodigal: New and Selectd Poems, 1976- 2014. 

The other poet or form of poetry which The New Yorker has brought to my attention is the concept poetry of Kenneth Goldsmith, which was discussed in an article last October. Concept poetry is poetry based upon an abstract idea or perhaps predetermined method. For example, Goldsmith turned the New York Times as printed on a single day into a 900 page long poem. That is definitely NOT something I even want to look at. But the author did quote from his poem “The Day” which was a series of poems drawn from the New York Times as printed on 9/11. With line breaks and selective capitalization, he made the weather report ominous and foreboding. In addition to Goldsmith, I learned the names of some other conceptual poets such as Christian Bok and Cathy Park Hong. Hong does not like Goldsmith in the least. And according to the article Goldsmith got himself into quite some trouble with an ill-conceived poem based on the autopsy report for Michael Brown. 

This article I had my junior class read and my next post will be about their response to Goldsmith and his poems and the nature of poetry.