Tim Griffin
-
Since emerging some thirty years ago as a protagonist and central thinker of Language poetry, Charles Bernstein has been many poets to many people—or so he would have us believe. As he proclaims in the 1999 poem “Solidarity is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold”: -
For each of her books, Cole Swensen has typically chosen one subject—often from the world of art—around which the poems revolve, tracing the epistemology of the subject’s historical period all the while. In Such Rich Hour (2001), for instance, she contemplated at length the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches du Duc de Berry, a fifteenth-century book of hours, which was in her broken syntax placed against the tenuous philosophical backdrop of the first Western systemizations of time. For The Glass Age (2007), the poet turned to Bonnard’s painterly depictions of windows, interweaving faintly expository prose regarding his canvases with subtle intimations -
Rae Armantrout is the most philosophical sort of poet, continually seeking in her collections to summon and surmise the contemporary character of subjective experience and, further, to test the limits of knowledge. Yet these meditations are often counterintuitive and sometimes downright absurd in their complexion, referencing cartoon characters (Wile E. Coyote and Rainbow Frog), miming the standardized phrases of tabloid headlines and business transactions (“These temporary credits / will no longer be reflected / in your next billing period”), and rehearsing bits of dialogue rooted only in the vapid grammars of cultural cliché (“I think our incentives / are sexy
