Perhaps this is better suited for two posts, but who doesn’t like a melange?  It’ll be like Spumoni ice cream!

Johnathon’s last post has me wanting to read “The Anthologist.”  For another novel that takes a (fairly unflattering) look at the psyche and process of the poet, give Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow” a try.  At over 400 pages, it might make the most verbose of poets tremble, but it’s such a beautiful novel with an almost palpable sense of place.

Second, I have to admit right now to reading the letters section of each Poetry magazine before getting into the commentary.  Like most self-disrespecting poets, I’ve got a bit of the weasel in me, and I like to see who’s starting fights or who’s ending them.

This month, I rather enjoyed Kevin Young’s response to a letter asking why he chose to use the “irritating” ampersand in his poem “The Mission.”

As a former raging anti-ampersander (can I get one of those for Christmas?) I know what motivated the original letter, but Young’s response is refreshingly fair.

Carolyn Guinzio discussed the ampersand in an interview with our own Ashley Anna McHugh a few months back, and I’m pretty sure this is a topic that gets people’s poetic hackles up in a twist.

For that matter, so does egregious mixing of metaphor.

A.E. Stallings provides a manifesto on rhyme in the latest issue of Poetry:

English is not rhyme poor. It is only uninflected. On the contrary, English has a richness in rhymes across different parts of speech; whereas in many other languages, rhyme is often merely a coincident jingle of accidence.

There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are not predictable unless lines are. Death and breath, womb and tomb, love and of, moon, June, spoon, all still have great poems ahead of them.

(via New Poetry)

They’re arguing about poetics, narrative, and Christian Wiman over at the New-Poetry mailing list. (See the “poetics is childish” thread.)