In light, I presume, of both my own delays & the online appearance of Stephen Burt’s article, I’ve been receiving queries as to the state of affairs at The Cultural Society. The most recent projected update was to have been posted about a month ago but other forces have intervened, not least among them is my new job which has taken more time & energy than I’d anticipated.
Nevertheless, the CultSoc is more or less in full swing: in addition to the usual preparations for the next update (likely to appear in July & including 3 PDF chapbooks — one by James Robinson, a collaboration by Erika Howsare & Kate Schapira, & Joseph Massey’s Eureka Slough), I’ve sought outside assistance to create a friendlier, more effective database for the website. Basically, it will be archived by contributor as well as chronologically. So if you want to read all of Peter O’Leary’s contributions, they’ll be at your fingertip(s). Likewise, if you want to see what was happening in CultSoc land back in 2002, it will be more accesible than the current endless-scrolldown of my News page.
So everything’s cool. It’s just going to take a little while.
I think that most third-generation Americana music (the first being, say, Graham Parsons/Townes Van Zandt/et al.; the second being Steve Earle/Lucinda Williams/et al.) is basically the same, depending on the tradition from which the artist derives his/her identity (country, western, rock, folk, etc.). The relevant outcome of this state of affairs is that we pick our favorites based on criteria that might be more personal than critical.
For my money then, this tune covers all the necessary ground: a story of living with alcoholism, domestic violence, broken hearts & promises; all told from a relatively privileged position. It’s as good a song as Chris Mills has written & transcends the rest of his catalogue as soon as Deanna Varagona chimes in. She ’s sort of his secret weapon.
Devin Johnston’s Sources has been reviewed at Boston Review. It’s a wonderful book from one of my favorite poets.If you’re not familiar with his work, you should be & this book is a fine place to start. If you are familiar with his work, then you already know you should have this.
The Cultural Society & I received notice from Stephen Burt in the new number of Boston Review. In the article, Burt outlines a contemporary school of poetry dubbed The New Thing, some of whose whose members will be familiar to readers of my website.
Here’s Burt on the CultSoc:
If the most important independent press for the New Thing is Flood, the most important magazine is Zach Barocas’ Web-based Cultural Society. Barocas entitled his own first book (itself surely a part of the New Thing) Among Other Things. Barocas’ poem “Things to Do Today” makes a list of “things I’ve counted on,” among them “cigarettes, history, trucks, & trash,” “lapses / flares & lusty resolve”; disarmingly stark lines elsewhere in that same book promise to “abandon / elliptical things.” Among the first poets Barocas’ journal published, in 2001-02, were Peter O’Leary, Norman Finkelstein, and Michael Heller, prominent scholars of Objectivist writing, and Mark Scroggins, then at work on Zukofsky’s biography. Barocas has also published [Devin] Johnston, [Joseph] Massey, [Justin] Marks, and [Graham] Foust; the Flood writers Philip Jenks, John Tipton, and Pam Rehm (who dedicated “A Sequence” to Massey)…
Poet/critic/CultSoc contributor & booster Robert Archambeau describes The New Thing piece is a sort of follow-up to Burt’s 1998 article in which he identifies Elliptical Poetry. It’s interesting to see how Burt establishes these schools as a means of approaching poetry whose mode(s) might otherwise seem opaque, if not unrelated.
Thanks, in any case, to both Burt & the relevant poets & publishers: the former for giving us his time & attention; & the latter for the poetry.
