Link: YouTube - Introducing the book.

via Multiliteracies

you can sit trying to read Zukofsky selected poems or a remaindered Moyers collection of speeches … or Gilman on Chekhov or the introduction to Chekhov’s own letters … you can dip into the Brunetti-edited anthology of graphic fiction and get as far as the opening homages to Charles Schultz and remember how much peanuts always mattered even while it was being sold out for everything … you can carry on with Piombino’s fait accompli … Beckett’s unprotected text … all real books subject to gravity’s tug …

then you read … does anyone ever actually read … online … this and that … good student posting at the just-revised discussion boards … you read gobbledygook instructions for the AP audit … blogs here & there & bundled in Netvibes …

and the sun … reader … the sun … where were you when the sun arrived as it must have … did you see … the sun

NO STANK YOU.

There is, of course, one necessary statement - that there are no viable statements. It is from this apparent desert, this barren mappemonde, that poetry, the beautiful, must be constructed. It cannot be the language of statement or, indeed, of crisis. To dramatize a crisis - another aspect of “familiar” poetry - is to make a kind of statement.

… but what if it’s all crisis … as it well may be

… what if it’s all statement … nothing but

… what if beauty is not the point … or pointed off some other way

… what if the construction crew doesn’t eat a hearty breakfast … forgets the hammer … the ladder