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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta
@lattaj.bsky.social
740 followers 540 following 670 posts
Poet, birder. Used to bloviate at Isola di Rifiuti.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 5h
I'd never heard of Bobbi Humphrey, but just listened to Harlem River Drive on YouTube. Terrific! Thanks!
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 7h
Fuller's an awkward poet (to put it nicely), but that's a lovely edition, like most of Jonathan Williams's work.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8h
“In a few instances, where my memory has flagged, or where poetic license seemed to proffer—in spirit of Picasso’s famous maxim about art, lies, and truth—a deepening of the genuine, I have in the venerable traditions of that non-existing genre called “non-fiction,” not-so-secretly embellished.”
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8h
Out of Kent Johnson’s _I Once Met: A Partial Memoir of the Poetry Field_ (Longhouse, 2015).
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Reposted by John Latta
kimdorman.bsky.social
kimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 19h
to steadfastly, delicately “pare
any given utterance
down to the laryngeal bone.”
(Sobin)
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8h
“History advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one’s ears . . . A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.”

Susan Howe quoting the narrator of Chris Marker’s _San Soleil_ (1983). Out of the essay “Sorting Facts” (1996).
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 1d
Now I recall Kent's immense pleasure in both freshwater fly-fishing and morel gathering—solitary, soul-boosting, wood-tramping activities. How he once reported with a kind of holy wonder & contentment seeing two indigo buntings ("small dark blue") near Big Spring Creek, "two males jousting."
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 1d
I find that oddly moving, Kim. I never met him, & am sorry not to've done so. We had numerous exchanges by email, were comrades in some (probably overblown) "poetry wars"; he could be impatient and demanding, too. I once called him a "nervous Nellie" & he agreed. Due: a memoir, & a reassessment.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 1d
The inimitable and late-lamented Kent Johnson remembered by Jeffrey Side.
Kent Johnson: In Praise of Mischief and Literary Disruption
Beyond the surface: Delve into poetry, literature, and culture with insightful analysis and unexpected connections.
jeffrey-side.blogspot.com
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 1d
No Lowell expert (nor much of a fan, honestly), but "a savage servility / slides by on grease" is hard-nosed and apt, I think.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 2d
“By late 14 c. _rageman_ was the name of a game involving a long roll of verses, each descriptive of personal character or appearance.” (A Middle Ages version of the dozens?) Later sense of “foolish activity or commotion” generally by 1939. Poetry loves to flirt with nonsense, harangue, incoherence.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 2d
Out of “Personal Narrative” (2007), Susan Howe at Yale’s Sterling Library “surrounded by raw material paper afterlife”: “One approach to indeterminism might be to risk crossing into rigmarole as fully stated _ars poetica_.” Rigmarole, out of _ragman roll_ “long list, roster, or catalogue” (c. 1500).
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 2d
If I was being irascible, I'd say it was a Marketing Plan.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 3d
Love it. Something startling & uncanny in the ratio: field, pelvis, brick. Or ducks, viscera, forest.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 3d
Wow! I love Burchfield.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 4d
I’d probably tend to agree. Any proposed prosody (or any “integrity of precision”) is always only a kind of sign of intent or ambition, not an infallible blueprint, nor directive. It seems to me.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 4d
to push poetic language, and poem-making itself, out of its habitual ruts. Hence, Projective Verse, with its “COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line.” I think, too, of: “What does not change / is the will to change” and later, “not accumulation but change”—out of “The Kingfishers.” 2/2
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 4d
Prosody, like grammar, is nothing but a set of conventions pinned down by histories of use; there’s nothing natural (or eternal) about it. Olson may not have known more traditional prosody than any other mid-20th c. educated American; I simply don’t know. What he sought, I think, was new ways 1/2
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 4d
I find Howe’s remarks of interest (and use) mostly as I look myself for “‘hints toward composition’ . . . ways of managing the language, new ways” (WCW) and languorously (or composedly) splay out pages of syntax-disregardant (or -disjunct) word combos, for fun (or bridge-work dynamics).
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 4d
I’m only partly convinced. Of course, Olson’d begun his Melville study _Call Me Ishmael_ with the (rather painterly) declaration: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America.”
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 4d
Susan Howe, in “Where Should the Commander Be,” a 1987 essay found in _The Quarry_ (New Directions, 2015), on Charles Olson’s “acute visual sensitivity.” (“This is strange, because Olson built his idea of Projective Verse on the length of a line, and the poet’s breath. _Maximus_ is for viewing.”)
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 7d
And, out of a little anthology of translated lines North calls “First (French) Licks,” a slyly offhand version of Verlaine’s “Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou! / Tu feras bien, en train d’énergie, / De rendre un peu la Rime assagie. / Si l’on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où?” (“Art Poétique”).
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 7d
A lovely new poem out of Charles North’s _News, Poetry and Poplars: Poems / Selected Prose_ (Black Square Editions, 2024). Oh for an “impulse as palpable as a hawk”—its push of tenable music.
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lattaj.bsky.social
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 7d
If you click on "draught" (in the upper left), you'll get a page reading

draught
(finally, a citation)

If you scroll down from there, you'll see a number of photographs beginning to pile up. Each photograph links to an essay. I agree, hard to navigate.
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Reposted by John Latta
draughtjournal.bsky.social
Draught @draughtjournal.bsky.social · 7d
Draught is now live!
www.draughtjournal.com
Issue 1.1.1 with contributions by Glenn Adamson, Jen Calleja, Don Mee Choi, Mark Cousins, Daisy Lafarge, Mark Manders, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lisa Robertson, Christina Tudor-Sideri and Francesca Wade
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