{"id":161475,"date":"2022-09-09T11:00:35","date_gmt":"2022-09-09T15:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=161475"},"modified":"2022-09-09T11:04:47","modified_gmt":"2022-09-09T15:04:47","slug":"lerner-seuss-mlinko-recommend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/09\/09\/lerner-seuss-mlinko-recommend\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Lerner, Diane Seuss, and Ange Mlinko Recommend"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Claude Monet, The Beach at Trouville<\/em>, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

This week, we bring you recommendations from three of our issue no. 241<\/a> poetry contributors.<\/i><\/p>\n

This August I read three great books. In Anahid Nersessian\u2019s <\/span>Keats\u2019s Odes: A Lover\u2019s Discourse<\/span><\/i><\/a> (about to be reprinted by Verso), red life streams again through Keats\u2019s poems. <\/span>It<\/span> is a risky, passionate criticism that\u2014in addition to yielding all sorts of insights into the man and his writing\u2014tests what of her own life the poems might hold (and quicken). This is living in and through and with and against poetry, a brilliant and refreshingly unprofessional book. <\/span>I’ve also been reading and admiring Elisa Tamarkin\u2019s<\/span> Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance<\/span><\/i><\/a>, a beautifully written account of the development of the concept of \u201crelevance\u201d in nineteenth-century Anglo American thought and art. The book says almost nothing about our own century\u2014\u201cthe Internet,\u201d for instance, doesn’t appear in the index\u2014but that just makes its relevance to the present more acutely felt. Tamarkin has all sorts of insightful things to say about attention and \u201cattentional communities,\u201d which leads me to a final recommendation: the big strange wonderful <\/span>In Search of the Third Bird<\/span><\/i><\/a>, which describes itself as \u201cthe real history\u201d\u2014although much of it is quite fake\u2014\u201cof the covey of attention-artists who call themselves \u2018the Birds,\u2019 \u201d an actual group (or \u201cattentional cult\u201d) of scholars and artists who have been conducting experiments in sustained, collective attention. That James Tate line occurs to me: \u201cEverything is relevant. I call it loving.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Ben Lerner, author of \u201cThe Readers<\/a>\u201d\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I read selectively, so as not to flood myself, especially when I am generating my own poems, which is always. Part of me is a cold observer. The other part, an impressionable child. Either way, what I read reconfigures me, as do all things that I take in through the senses. During a recent drive to my hometown of Niles, Michigan, I was transformed by a cream-colored ox, a stone silo, and an assertive stalk of goldenrod reaching from a ditch. The poems in David Baker\u2019s newest collection, <\/span>Whale Fall<\/span><\/i><\/a>,<\/span> move me similarly, and deeply. It strikes me that the purpose of craftedness, of exquisite and intentional madeness, is to create a kind of eternity in a poem. Maybe such a goal, at this point in history, seems unreachable, even Romantic, in the literary sense. But let us aim for eternity anyway. \u201cKeep walking, pilgrim,\u201d Baker writes. \u201cThis is your great tale.\u201d (The poem is called \u201cExtinction.\u201d) A collection of poems can be scattershot; it can reflect the fragmentation of our times. Or it can build something in defiance of chaos: a structure the reader can live within, while taking time to examine its architectural nuance (even as a silo burns on the horizon \u201cwith the half-life of the sun\u201d). The craft of <\/span>Whale Fall <\/span><\/i>defies. It asserts, for me, a definition of poetry: an unbearable gulf of feeling made indelible by form.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Diane Seuss, author of \u201cLegacy<\/a>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

As I say farewell to summer, I look back at a painting I saw at the National Gallery in London in June. It is Monet\u2019s <\/span>The Beach at Trouville<\/span><\/i>, painted in plein air in 1870 on his honeymoon. The placard notes that sand and bits of shell are embedded in its surface, authenticating it with local grit\u2014so different from our own time-stamped, etherized photos!<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Ange Mlinko, author of \u201cArt Tourism<\/a>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThis is living in and through and with and against poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[5007,3263,68525,67827,68523,165],"class_list":["post-161475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-ange-mlinko","tag-ben-lerner","tag-diane-seuss","tag-featured","tag-issue-241","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBen Lerner, Diane Seuss, and Ange Mlinko Recommend by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 9, 2022 \u2013 \u201cThis is living in and through and with and against poetry.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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