Last week, I made a snarky comparison of Kent Johnson’s theory about the authorship of a Frank O’Hara poem to Andrew Sullivan’s continual questions about who exactly Trig Palin’s mother is. Johnson responded to Tony Towle’s challenges here, and I have to say that I think my comparison was apt. Johnson’s refutation seems to hinge on the notion that it’s just too large a coincidence for O’Hara to have written that poem in that way with those details, and so there has to be another explanation for it. But we live in a world of coincidence–that’s why we say truth is stranger than fiction, and why people often ascribe actions to the workings of gods–and given the choice between accepting happenstance or an elaborate theory of what might have happened with precious little evidence to even suggest it, I’ll take the former every time.
Remember when issue 2 of We Are Champion and there was a bit of a dust-up over its overwhelming maleness? We Are Champion is talking about it with a couple of people who were critical about the issue, Elisa Gabbert and Amy King. Here’s Gabbert’s interview, and Here’s King’s.
An interview with Montgomery Maxton at Almost Dorothy.
I’m glad to see that more poetry publishers are going ahead into the e-book business, even if the technical issues surrounding the faithfulness of line breaks on different sized screens hasn’t been fully worked out yet. I think the pressure to solve the problem will come from demand for the books in those formats.
Should this be called The Time Traveler’s Book Award?
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