For all who are interested, my piece "All Kinds of Favors Fall From It: Some Thoughts on Becoming a Blogger," has recently appeared on the National Book Critics Circle's Critical Mass blog. The piece, which traces my accidental and somewhat circuitous path into blogging, and some of my experiences being in but not of the poetry blogosphere, can be found here.
No, I'm not ashamed to blow my own horn. If not me, who? If not now, when? The squeaky wheel gets the grease. And other such platitudes.
I will now try to get some sleep. More will follow on my AWP panel on Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics. But not right now.
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3 comments:
Thanks for this, Reginald.
Hey Reginald,
Thought you'd be interested in reading this briefest of kudos to your critical attentions in his Feb. 13th post:
http://fmsbwtozau.blogspot.com/
Here's the excerpt:
"I don't see how a resumption of the trope of fragmentation by a cushy libertarianism that triumphs the tinkerer and the rhizome can ultimately be distinguished from "mainstream" poetics except by the antinomy in their notions of "progress." Such tumpeting of entrepreneurialism and innovation is very mainstream, just use a chance proceedure to flip open to a random page in the nearest business mag. I question the very intentions behind such a limp recuperation of the avant-garde banner.
We must give credit to Reginald Shepherd and to many other "new lyric" poets who seem to have avoided the trap that springs at the assumption that the avant-garde constitutes some ontological category. It is a political category in the weak sense, that is, it names the predetermined space of a limited social effect of novel practices--practices based on certain technological novelties that allowed for a sort of black market for the arts: cheap travel and printing, new developments in sociology, psychology, ethnography. The avant-garde might exist only as the least profitable of artistic practices in an increasingly privatized art economy--Ball's religious sincerity, Tzara's ethnographic poetry, Grosz's caricature-like depiction of Germany's finest generation, Duchamp's toilet, Hoch's collage, Bunuel's films, etc."
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