paralepsis

for the folks at MyDD Barack Obama did not raise your gas prices. Barack Obama did not ship your job to Mexico. Barack Obama did not write your sermons. Barack Obama did not deny your habeas corpus. Barack Obama did not cast your primary vote and Barack Obama did not dismiss your primary vote. Barack Obama did not raise your interest rates. Barack Obama did not send that letter you wouldn't open for days because you knew what was in it but thought it might go away if you waited long enough only it didn't. Barack Obama did not foreclose on your house. Barack Obama did not protect your perverted priest. Barack Obama did not deny your claim. Barack Obama did not key your car. Barack Obama did not call you sweetie, probably, and if he did, he meant it to be nice. Barack Obama did not beat up your kid. Barack Obama did not deny your choice. Barack Obama did not steal your lunch money. Barack Obama did not cause the Sichuan earthquake or Cyclone Na...

On NPR's Weekend Edition this morning, Scott Simon delivers a commentary about the recent exposure of gang-banger "memoir" Love and Consequences by Margaret Jones (actually Margaret Seltzer). Simon observes that "the book is a fraud, but Ms. Seltzer came within hours of of being on NPR." Wrong . In fact, Jones/Seltzer did make it onto NPR's syndicated show "On Point," and the show followed with an hour-long, hand-wringing examination of how they got punked in the first place. But that minor error is nothing compared to what happens next. Simon quotes Seltzer making up some bullshit about her life and observes (my transcript of the online audio): Now if some Brooklyn or London novelist had written a story set among drug gangs and uttered those words, people might have dismissed them as pretentious nonsense. Put those sentences into a so-called memoir, people call it "gritty and real," or "raw, tender, and tough-minded,...

Courtney Queeney was an undergraduate student of mine in a modern American poetry class at Duke. Later I was her advisor for her creative writing honors thesis. Her first book of poems , Filibuster to Delay a Kiss , is just out , is from a major publisher (Random House!), and looks great. Go read a couple of poems here . Courtney, if you're out there, drop me a line, will you?

Ron Silliman's blog is remarkably good. He just turned me on to the Eclipse archive, and for a lark I clicked on the archive label to see what I'd missed. Through this, I found two sites offering competing versions of UK poetry. Silliman compares as follows: Archive of the Now is, on day one, the most significant new site for poetry I’ve seen in well over a year. It is a perfect complement to the Archive of the Then , Andrew Motion’s slick gathering of so much that is kitsch, the Bathos of Britain into which he & his colleagues have dropped a few token gems to dress the dross, with its megalomaniacal “world's premier online collection” claim on its home page. Let me note that neither site contains anything by Basil Bunting , Austin Clarke , or David Jones . None of these would reasonably be expected to appear in Archive of the Now. But the Poetry Archive (Motion's site) should have all of them. Indefensible. I've long thought that these three poets ha...