Against National Poetry Month
Charles Bernstein is one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. So why does he have a beef with National Poetry Month? A nationwide celebration of his craft during the entire month of April—what's not to like? Plenty, says Bernstein. In an essay titled "Against National Poetry Month As Such" he writes:
National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally "positive." The message is: Poetry is good for you. But, unfortunately, promoting poetry as if it were an "easy listening" station just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant and has done a disservice not only to poetry deemed too controversial or difficult to promote but also to the poetry it puts forward in this way. "Accessibility" has become a kind of Moral Imperative based on the condescending notion that readers are intellectually challenged, and mustn't be presented with anything but Safe Poetry. As if poetry will turn people off to poetry.
Read the rest of "Against National Poetry Month As Such."
Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He is the author of My Way: Speeches and Poems and With Strings. Sometimes comic, sometimes dark, Bernstein's writing is irreverent but always relevant, "not structurally challenged, but structurally challenging."
Visit Charles Bernstein's Web site.
On March 9, Chicago Public Radio's "Eight Forty-Eight" program aired a nice tribute to Wayne Booth (1921-2005). David Thompson, Associate Dean for Planning and Programs at the University of Chicago, shared memories of Booth and discussed the impact of Booth's 1961 classic 
Malcom Gladwell, 
"First, the statistical analyses tell us that the majority of the Paleolithic artists who left these handprint stencils in caves were young people. But they also show a great diversity of ages. As noted by other researchers, some prints were made by very young children (younger even than those in my baseline sample). Two hand images are so small that the toddler/baby had to have been carried back into the cave. These occur in Gargas Cave in southern France, which is unusual in having passageways that are easy to traverse and an easy entrance which remained open during much of the past. That is shown by the protohistoric, Gallo-Roman, and medieval graffiti carved in the cave wall. But this is not typical for Paleolithic caves; there are few deep caves one would try to visit with a babe-in-arms.
As cultural evidence, photographs document certain things, yet are wholly silent about others. In looking at this photograph taken around 1915, we see two men doing something we rarely observe nowadays. I refer not simply to their pose, but to the fact that they had their portrait taken together in a photographer's studio, a ritual once widespread among American men but extremely rare today. Many observers may confidently think they see evidence of romance and a likely sexual relationship in this photograph, but that judgment reveals something only about the observer, not the subjects. Without an inscription, we can actually discern nothing from this image regarding a matter that has come to obsess us about relationships: whether the parties are having sex with each other.