http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2011/06/poetry-in-the-polis-cara-benson.html

http://www.eveningwillcome.com/issue6-politicsroundtable-p1.html

Since it was nice out last Sunday, my boyfriend and I decided to check out Bartram’s Garden. The neighborhood didn’t really creep me out, but my boyfriend (who is from West Philly) kept insisting that it was the hood. Once you’re in the garden, though, it’s hard to remember that you’re in Philadelphia.—Natalie B

I live about six minutes away so I try to stop by the gardens on my days off to relax and sit on one of the benches with a book. It’s a beautiful area kinda funny that it’s next to what could be considered a “shady area” but I love it, it really is sorta like a rose in the concrete. –Zita

(don’t bring armed people, just a good car and your fine)—Bill M

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Map of Bartram’s Garden

Feral cats at Bartram’s Garden, (photo by Isaiah Thompson in Philadelphia Citypaper)

View of Philadelphia from Bartram’s Garden (photo by Teresa Dahlman at www.midatlanticmuseums.org)

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I learned from you to. As a valid form of academia.

Though the objects of her reading are often academic, her reading differs both from understood “critical” forms and from what Warner has described as critical reading’s casual alternatives. As they are implied by the critical/uncritical binary offered by academia, these uncritical practices of reading in “identification, self-forgetfulness, reverie, sentimentality, enthusiasm, literalism, aversion, distraction” and such other “disorganized” modes are considered “by definition neither reflective nor analytic.” As is clear from her poetry and prose, she reads unapologetically in these very attitudes, in a way that is technically uncritical, though with critical, certainly analytic, ends.

A situation arises to feel it as important. To make dinner for four and several hours. I sat reading and several hours on dinner for four people. When Susan Howe says Matthiessen couldn’t love Whitman so he jumped from a hotel window I feel it as important. I don’t know what they ask but they ask. I ask it myself. There there my little critical distance. Enthusiasm’s ethical implications inhere in a definition of useful learning so with reading. The hope that the wig of neutrality will come off when you need your head. What he felt as his lack of utility to the scholarly community. One more thing that said our youngest shape hasn’t taken and not please. My street is finishing.

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Says/does outline, final draft of “The Rejection of Closure” (1985) by Lyn Hejinian*

Paragraph One

Says: Writers are conflicted between being coherent and being open and free

Does: Introduces the author’s proposition

Paragraph Two

Says: Writers are constrained by form and the need to use language

Does: Further introduces the author’s proposition

Paragraph Three

Says: These characteristic problems for writers are not always at odds with each other

Does: Complicates the picture painted by the preceding paragraphs

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The Darcy Satire Criticized

When Harriet, in Rex Bellamy’s memoir-novel The Darcy Satire (2^nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987) asks why Darcy, after an adolescence of parting his hair on the left, suddenly begins parting it on the right, Darcy tells her it is nothing more than an accident that stuck. “I picked up the comb in the other hand, and I liked the results,” he tells her. “A little reversal can be good sometimes. Not everything I do signals some great catastrophe. A change is a change is a change, that’s all.” While Darcy contends the “reversal” is strictly arbitrary, it may be part of a greater system of “reversals” happening in his young life at this moment.

Professor Brooklyn Arbiter, in his famous essay on the novel, “The Darcy Mirror: Reflections, Reversals, and Refraction in Bellamy” (Oedipus Rex: Critical Essays on Bellamy. Ed. R. U. Bellamy. Buena, NJ: Darcy Press, 1994.), argues the climax, Darcy’s simultaneous acceptance into Harvard and the death of Felix, is a sort of reversal of fortune that functions in an economy of good and bad luck. “Nothing comes for free in Bellamy’s work,” Arbiter writes:

Every advance in one direction is a regress in another. Darcy’s sexual discovery comes at the expense of his virginity and all the anxiety of that loss; Nokotomon’s extraordinary state championship win over Buena, the high school’s first football title in its history, incites the student riots that cast a shadow over the middle of the novel, causing the teacher strikes and threatening the near dissolution of the school. For Darcy to be admitted at Harvard, the best friend had to succumb to his illness. Were Felix to go on living, Darcy would remain suspended in his youth. Bellamy’s is a particularly bleak karma (108-109).

Arbiter goes on to argue that the hair-part “reversal” may signal the moment when Darcy becomes aware of the zero-sum luck economy of the novel, and thus the fictional world he inhabits. The change in hair style, an utterly banal thing, may be the only act Darcy can perform without incurring a punishment. Indeed, in a self-reflexive moment for the text, Darcy seems almost to challenge Bellamy, the god of this fiction world, to punish him:

“…A change is a change is a change, that’s all.”

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The question being, what do stories have to do with what they mean? and the answer peering through the windows as I walk home late at night: the shades and paintings and glowing televisions bearing the same relationship to their owners that words do to the ideas they express.

I dredge up each word and look at the dictionary for all its freight. Ideas and pictures are pretty things, but words are fickle. A queer sort of realism seems necessary, with no extravagances, no comparisons, no presumptions. The hardest kind of criticism, the most honest and most deeply rooted in true practice, is pure and direct description. If the words can be tethered perfectly to the swoon or the grass seen in the mind, then something of value has been created.

Still, it is wrong to say, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Better to follow the French who declare c’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron. The blacksmith’s apprentice must make many mistakes before he can make a single perfect nail. Elizabeth Bishop was not wrong to revise endlessly before finally arriving at her own singular, perfect descriptions. Criticism is a mode of autobiography and so the words I choose say more about myself than about the things they describe.

When I want to perform practice-based criticism, which is to say, to describe anything, I ultimately have the same effect on what I have in mind that rain does on the world it permeates: in touching everything, tingeing everything with myself.

Love Practice-based Criticism Day is Wednesday, October 19!!

From growing up to getting braces, popping pimples to catching some ZZZs, this section gives you the basics on changing practice-based criticism from head to toe.

Yes sir
Yes sir
Yes sir
Yes sir

I got new shoes on the ride (yes sir)
Rollin’ down 95 (yes sir)
And you can see in my eyes (yes sir)
That I’m lookin for a cutiepie (yes sir)
And we ain’t gotta make love (yes sir)
And we can just cuddle up (yes sir)
But if she want me to beat it up (yes sir)
Then dammit, I’ll beat it up (yes sir)
My criticism, practice-based criticism (it’s burnin’ up)
My practice, practice-based criticism (it’s burnin’ up)
My criticism, practice-based criticism (it’s burnin’ up)
My practice, practice-based criticism (it’s burnin’ up)

You want love? 
We’ll make it 
Swimming a deep sea 
Practice-based criticism is a wonderland,
Your friend in the anti-ageing fight

One recent morning, I woke up at 6:45, spent about 20 minutes preparing for the day (mainly this involves my persnickety multistep practice-based criticism process), and then: 

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A further note: unfortunately many letters we mean to reply to never get sent, some gifts never properly thanked. Perhaps some practice-based criticism may simply be more art making, but with an effort toward acknowledgement of the conversation that sparked it.

As with most of my letters, this one is already overdue and I feel I should end it now to get it in the post. Take care and write soon.

Dear a.

Yesterday I yelled at the dog for chewing the leather sofa. He chewed a hole so big, the white matted stuff of the sofa made a moon pie of itself. We had to move that section of the sofa to the corner of the room so that when company came over they would not notice what our dog had done, and in turn not think what kind of people were we. 

The stuffing has already collected plenty of lint pills, is webbed and bumpy, and when I touch it my teeth hurt.

I don’t love the dog. Not really. He is cute and everything, but he doesn’t listen.

I mention this because you’re right about punishment.

Maria

Dear Malcolm

A schoolboy exiting the side door is confronted by the upper leaves of trees separating themselves from the sky. In other words, are we not being taught how to be affected?

All the best,

S.

p.s. This rhododendron tried to teach me how the form of the wall affects the reader.

I admit the wall did not necessarily affect me.

However the moment of observation & the act of communication did. 

Dear Marcella –

it is certain that I will never marry.

(things I never knew until now.)

Sincerely, S.