Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | yesterday
Moved to read Guy Davenport’s essays by something I had written, Bill Sigler writes: “This is the first extended reading I've done of Davenport. Besides seeing a little of where you get your sensibility and a lot of how ignorant I am, I see that familiar and particular kind of Southern outcast, the gentleman who likes books. In a society where all manner of mental ailments are considered...
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
“Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood, once the tediousness of Sunday school and the appalling boredom of church were over with, corrosions of the spirit easily salved by the roast beef, macaroni pie, and peach cobbler that followed them, my father loaded us all into the Essex, later the Packard, and headed out to look for Indian arrows. That was the phrase, `to look for Indian arrows.’...
Squandermania and other foibles (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
From Katy Evans-Bush, via her outstanding blog, Baroque in Hackney : In June 1918, a young poet called Eloise Robinson, touring the Front on behalf of the YMCA, was giving a poetry recital to an audience of American soldiers. Guy Davenport tells it: “Reciting poetry! It is all but unimaginable that in that hell of terror, gangrene, mustard gas, sleeplessness, lice, and fatigue, there were moments...
Elusive Lucidity (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
'Primitive' flickers . "What we call the twentieth century ended in 1915. Those artists who survived the collapse of civilization at that point completed the work they had planned before then, when they looked forward to a century of completely different character. Joyce wrote his Ulysses and Finnegans Wake , both implicit in the nineteenth-century idea of literature. Proust, aware that tanks...
Isola di Rifiuti (Free subscription) | 10/12/2009
Detail of a Painting A YEAR CCLXXXV E—, Against the unworldly torrential constant exchange of goods, the mechanickal brute circus of reify’d gain depict’d by the monstrous, bigger and bigger volumetrics, charts and graphs, I put my human paw, scrawling out niggardly words execrable, a brief insouciant mess of a memo to defer the stock catastrophic importunings, the dud complaint compliant....
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 10/01/2009
October, not upstart April, is the true Poetry Month, as I’ve demonstrated before, though the explanation remains elusive. Long, cold January nights seem no more conducive to conceiving poets than plumbers or osteopaths. Here are more poets born in October: Fulke Greville: Oct. 3, 1554 Yvor Winters: Oct. 17, 1900 Leigh Hunt: Oct. 19, 1784 Alphonse De Lamartine: Oct. 21, 1790 And additional honorary...
National Corn Growers Association - (Free subscription) | 09/28/2009
Sept. 28: National Corn Growers Association Corn Board member Guy Davenport, of North Carolina, joined representatives of the U.S. Grains Council for its annual China corn tour last week. The Grains Council team toured China’s corn growing regions, surveying crop progress and estimating the yield and quality of this year’s production. read more
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 09/13/2009
by Patrick Kurp Anecdotal Evidence What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging? Essays, reviews, feuilletons, maxims, commonplace books, journals, letters, bull sessions, reveries, mental rambles. Some of us were born bloggers and waited for the technology to catch up. Posts are digital editions of words and thoughts that would otherwise evaporate, and the internet permits us to inflict...
Books, Inq. (Free subscription) | 09/07/2009
... of our age. Patrick Kurp reviews Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) How odd to think that Hill, the bane of postmodern poets and critics, may be the most “avant-garde” poet working today. He pushes the resources of English—etymology, music, multiplicity of meaning, rhetorical devices—further than other writers dare. His poems can be as densely allusive,...
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 08/21/2009
The Cleveland Museum of Art owns 64 works by Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) but only "White Violets and Coal Mine" is on public display. I viewed it Tuesday and remembered "Sadness," a poem in which Donald Justice mentions the painting in the fourth of its seven stanzas: “Burchfield describes the pinched white souls of violets Frothing the mouth of a derelict old mine Just...
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 08/19/2009
The discovery of the day at the Cleveland Museum of Art was “January,” painted by Grant Wood in 1940-41. Snow partially covers tepee-like stacks of corn stalks on a winter night. Visible in the foreground are tracks left by rabbits in the snow. The painting is small and hangs by itself in a corner, and feels like an anti-pastoral. The Midwestern winter is claustrophobic, reducing an Iowa...
Culture Industry (Free subscription) | 08/02/2009
Off at the crack of dawn for Tennessee, for six days. Probably no blogging. *** The big Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, which I’d postponed going to for weeks & weeks, was overwhelming, as I feared it might be. I think what I came out of it with was two things: 1) a sense of how carefully worked Bacon’s canvases are; no matter what bits of aleatory or gestures...
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 08/01/2009
“There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.” There is, as well, a poignancy in these lines from Richard Wilbur’s “Clearness” (from Ceremony and Other Poems , 1950) and in others from his seven decades of work and, of course,...
Southeast Farm Press RSS Feed (Free subscription) | 07/16/2009
Guy Davenport of Creswell, N.C., has been elected to the board of directors of the National Corn Growers Association.
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 07/16/2009
A 40-percent-off coupon lured me to a second-hand bookstore where the kids burrowed in the comic books and I wandered the desert without expectations. Instead I found a cheap, mint-condition copy of Guy Davenport’s Twelve Stories , the sampler selected from three of his eight books of fiction and published in 1997. I never bothered to buy it because I already own most of his books, but the coupon...
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