mon / three good classes / wee bit tired / news
my dear friend gordon massman asked me to read w/ him in athens, ga on nov 3 & so i'm reading w/ him in athens on nov 3. am stoked. if you don't know gordon, gordon is one helluva writer whom i am blessed to keep acquaintance with; he's magnificent.
gordon just started a blog where the first book he reviewed is kay ryan. here's the ending:
The book’s inside flap copy suggests, “…Ryan is…as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.” As preposterous as this is, were it true, the world does not need another Dickinson or Frost. The world craves originality, not derivativeness. It is all too painfully obvious when a contemporary writer imitates a master. They almost always fail, laughably, in public, and are mercifully forgotten after a brief flirtation with celebrity.
So we have this oblivious Sunday driver ensconced behind her steering wheel creeping 15 mph below the speed limit behind whom drivers fume, excoriate, gesture, squeal, swerve, and weep. A sort of female counterpart to Mr. Magoo who untouched glides through crack-ups, extinctions, hospitalizations, nervous breakdowns, and suicides.
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“Shocking, intense, vulgar and honest” are the words English/Communications Professor Gordon Massman uses to describe his poetry.
The New York Quarterly Foundation will publish a 400-page collection from 3,000 original pages of his poetry this month called “0.174: The Complete Numbers Cycle.” Massman has been composing poetry for 40 years. This will be his fifth book.
“The title comes from the Visible Human Project where the human body was sliced into .174 mm strips,” Massman said. “Theoretically, I sliced my brain in an attempt to make public every male fantasy, desire and motivation.”
gordon just started a blog where the first book he reviewed is kay ryan. here's the ending:
The book’s inside flap copy suggests, “…Ryan is…as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.” As preposterous as this is, were it true, the world does not need another Dickinson or Frost. The world craves originality, not derivativeness. It is all too painfully obvious when a contemporary writer imitates a master. They almost always fail, laughably, in public, and are mercifully forgotten after a brief flirtation with celebrity.
So we have this oblivious Sunday driver ensconced behind her steering wheel creeping 15 mph below the speed limit behind whom drivers fume, excoriate, gesture, squeal, swerve, and weep. A sort of female counterpart to Mr. Magoo who untouched glides through crack-ups, extinctions, hospitalizations, nervous breakdowns, and suicides.
---
“Shocking, intense, vulgar and honest” are the words English/Communications Professor Gordon Massman uses to describe his poetry.
The New York Quarterly Foundation will publish a 400-page collection from 3,000 original pages of his poetry this month called “0.174: The Complete Numbers Cycle.” Massman has been composing poetry for 40 years. This will be his fifth book.
“The title comes from the Visible Human Project where the human body was sliced into .174 mm strips,” Massman said. “Theoretically, I sliced my brain in an attempt to make public every male fantasy, desire and motivation.”
