Newsflash: Authors Influenced by Personal Experience. Next Major Discovery: Shakespeare Wrote in Iambic Pentameter!

The Independent: “But there are inescapable similarities between the book and Carey’s own life. Its central character, Butcher Bones, is an artist born the same year and in the same town outside Melbourne, Australia. Their careers have taken them to Sydney, Tokyo and New York, but perhaps more crucially both have recently emerged from bitter divorces.”

Poetry’s Clearinghouse?

Ron Silliman takes a recent Poetry Foundation study to task at great length: “As a one-time contributor to Poetry, I know that this doesn’t touch my world in any meaningful way. But here’s my question: does it touch the world of Christian Wiman and the current generation of old/new formalists he represents? If it does, how very sad for him. If it doesn’t, one wonders just how much money the Poetry Foundation sunk into this project. One can imagine the New York trade publishers funding this sort of research, because it really has more to do with their use of poetry as coffee table and Christmas gift-ware, what to give to that sensitive but strange niece, that sort of thing. But as a study of the sociology of poetry, what is most remarkable is just how far it misses the mark.”