The Union offered a successful poetry appreciation seminar last summer, and is putting together several more for this year. Details about the first went out in today's Union mailer, and I'm pleased to duplicate the announcement here: "A Brief & Incomplete Introduction to Spanish and Latin American Literature." The moderator, Michael Healy, writes:

I do my best to formulate difficult and intriguing questions about texts that readers have deemed the best works produced in these various national traditions. Why has history been kinder to Quevedo than to Góngora? How do their respective writings represent very old breeds of impulse that we’re still struggling with? What made Machado return to the fields of Castilla? What did Lorca, Neruda and other poets of the Spanish language learn from Whitman? What makes Neruda so universal and yet innovative? How and why has Borges haunted so many who have come after him? To what degree is the “magical realism” of García Márquez, inaugurated by Alejo Carpentier, actually magical at all? What is most strange, mystical, and/or Mexican about Octavio Paz? Or rather, what is most Pazian about Mexico?

I intend the format of these seminars to be informative but informal; part lecture, and part discussion where digressions are welcome. We may even laugh quite a bit. At these seminars, you ought to feel among equals or else with some who are just a few steps ahead, beckoning you forward. ¡Que nos veamos pronto!

More information -- dates, reading topics, and registration information -- can be found at the seminar homepage.

A light and pleasant piece by Jay Parini appears in the Chronicle this week, concerning relationships among poets, with special reference to Christopher Ricks' new book, True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound.

Good of Parini to note that Ricks' attention to Hecht is valuable especially because that poet has been overlooked, critically, disproportionately to the quality of his verse. I understand that a volume of essays in appreciation of AH is in the works; Ernest Hilbert, of E-Verse Radio and Contemporary Poetry Review, is a contributor and would have more details.

Ricks will be discussing his book at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, at 3 PM on April 23, 2010. A list of "erratum & addenda" for True Friendship appears at The Vaulted Fool blog. Ex gratia:

93: Reading in a new context the first paragraph of ‘A Game of Chess’, which Ricks quotes in connection with Hecht, I was impressed by its plausibility as a precedent for ‘fattens on vines’ in ‘September Song’, given the concomitance in one anfractuous sentence of ‘fattening’ and ‘fruited vines’. Pursuing this, I noticed that almost every keyword from the fourth stanza of Hill’s poem occurs in this paragraph too: ‘rose to meet it’ (at a stretch), ‘upon the walls’, ‘Flung their smoke’, ‘Under the firelight’ and ‘fiery points’, ‘hid his eyes’. Even for ‘harmless’, we have ‘Dry bones harm no one’, in ‘What the Thunder Said’. Does this complement Ricks’s essay or subvert his method?

The Daily Free Press at Boston University this week published an article about the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, which has its office on BU’s campus in Kenmore Square. The Association’s goal, as decided on at its founding in 1994, is to combat political trends in literary criticism that focus too much on abstract theory, which they do simply by adhering to the texts in question. Former president and BU Creative Writing faculty member Rosanna Warren explains, “We are advocating and helping to create a broad, vital literary culture. We are trying to connect lovers of literature inside the academy and outside the academy.” The group includes professors, students, scholars, booksellers, writers, readers, and lovers of all kinds of literature.

Some of the perks of membership include the opportunity to attend an annual conference, and the receipt of their seasonal newsletter called Literary Matters and a magazine called Literary Imagination. The newsletter includes not only announcements about the accomplishments of its members, but short essay-like articles about literature, and news about upcoming opportunities like grants or scholarships that might be of interest to its members. The magazine, published three times a year, has been praised in The Chronicle of Higher Education and the London Times Literary Supplement. (Many of the members, including past president Sir Professor Christopher Ricks, are English or Canadian scholars.) Contributors to the current issue include a BU MFA candidate, an editor of AGNI, and a bundle of new extracts from The Greek Anthology, Book XVII by Greg Delanty. In the Fall 2009 edition, author R. H. Winnick laid out his case for the identity of the “Fair Friend” addressed in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

The ALSCW also publishes Forum, where arguments about current literary trends and issues are laid out by contributing members. In the Spring 2009 issue, “The Latest Illiteracy,” Jim McClue and Brian Gardner examine “many instances of, as well as some reflections on, how different—largely, how much worse—things are these days, both in print and in speech. The underlying questions are the enduring ones. Really worse, not just different? What is the evidence?” The authors, one Brit and one Americans, explain how simple things like poorly learned grammar can have enormous impacts on the way we understand things. The upcoming 2010 issue features a study by Council member Sandra Stotsky, “Literary and Non-Literary Works and Approaches Used in American High School English Classes.”

If members cannot attend the conference in any of its various locations (Philadelphia and Denver were the two latest host cities), members are invited to attend local events and discussions. The ALSCW’s website features announcements of upcoming events and podcasts of past ones. It also has a link where enthusiasts can join the organization: student membership, for graduates and undergraduates, is $32, and a new membership for anyone is $37. Membership includes the opportunity to participate in any and all events, and of course the receipt of the ALSCW’s noteworthy publications. - EM

Arts & Letters Daily, published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, is a blog now popular as a homepage. Each morning, it delivers three new links: one directing traffic to whatever single article seemed to editor Denis Dutton to be the most crucial reading of the day; one to news or review of some new book of cultural significance; and the third to a single essay or opinion piece drawn from the pages of all those learned journals which even the well-educated reader hardly has time to read these days.

These three daily recommendations are unfailingly excellent reading, but they are only three and three in view of all the texts published each day is a small number indeed. This is why the appearance of a link to The Critical Flame this morning is especially pleasing news. Congratulations to editor Daniel Pritchard. Every issue of his "journal of literature and culture" so far has featured essays and reviews that would not have seemed unusual at the top of A&LDaily's linkrolls. Congratulations as well to Jacob A. Bennett, whose review of Joan Houlihan’s The Us is what caught the eye of Denis Dutton.

Also in the new same issue, Jonathan Wooding reviews Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey -- an excerpt of which was published in the fall 2009 issue of The Charles River Journal, and online here. Also: Katherine A. Evans on Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: the Return of Sexism, Henry Gould on the poetry of Gabriel Gudding, and James Stotts reviewing Jim Harrison’s In Search of Small Gods. - ZB

A hitherto unknown episode from the story of Odysseus' wanderings, as imagined by author Zachary Mason, appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of The Charles River Journal. In recent weeks, the book from which this extract was taken, The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel, has been widely and deservedly lauded in the critical press.

The Lost Books consists of a series of pseudoepigraphal episodes which for whatever reasons didn't make it into Homer's account when he recited the story of Odysseus’ travels after the Trojan War for his audience of ancient Greeks. First published by Starcherone Books after being awarded the 2007 Starcherone Fiction Prize, the collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010. Favorable reviews of the new edition have appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Dallas Times, the LA Times, and at Tomorrow Museum and Open Letters Monthly.

Congratulations to Mason, and to the editors at Starcherone who recognized the quality of Mason's prose and imagination. - ZB

Poet Melissa Green prefaces her blog, Vesper Sparrow’s Nest, with lines from one of her masters, Henry James, describing the imagination as “the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky windows.” Green’s own imagination touches all she writes with a wingbrush that is both delicate and profoundly moving, and her blog reveals the twists and turns of her magpie mind, from meditations on her own life, art and writing, to poems, new and old (read the astonishing, heartbreaking poem “Leda, Later”).

Reading Green’s blog is like reading personal correspondence from a very dear friend, a glimpse into the white rooms of the writer’s mind. Green describes her process, working in a solitude that “is both profound in its silence and long in its duration, a kind of somnolent reverie where the heart can hike its mountains undisturbed and the mind can listen for the first faint soughing of the pines at the tree line.” Excerpts from Green's manuscript in progress, Akeldama, appeared in the September 2009 issue of The Charles River Journal. Her new collection of poetry, Daphne in Mourning, will be published by The Pen & Anvil Press in April 2010. - ND

The editors of Decameron -- Pen & Anvil's anthology of quite short stories -- would like to alert all scribblers of flash fiction, short short fiction, and other brief forms that they’re still looking for the finest tales told in less than a thousand words. Decameron expects to publish, in the vein of its Boccaccio namesake, one hundred such stories. Stories that are recognizably in the tradition of science fiction, fantasy, western, and other genre, are more than welcome but will be expected to display literary innovation and skill that breaks out of the familiar formulae. We’re looking for efficient, lucid and specific writing. Authors may email their stories as attachments or in the body of the email. Deadlines for the first annual anthology will be announced in Spring 2010. - SC

In the new issue of The Critical Flame, BPU founder Daniel Pritchard reviews John Ashbery's 2009 collection Planisphere:

There is something ethereal about Ashbery’s project, this language-as-material expressionism and continuous deployment of irony. Outside the context of postmodernism’s boiling-point, Ashbery’s work can seem at times purposefully evasive and self-concerned, without the radical allure his conceptual project once possessed. At times, his poetry elicits little more than frustration; in fact, the critic Adam Kirsch charged that it were “as though, after him, there were nowhere fruitful for poetry to turn.” The insights one gains after much reading and re-reading of Ashbery are personal, aesthetic, almost incommunicable. Readers who seek poets that try to communicate lyrically, in recognizable scenes and metaphors, in some formulation of didactic language, will never find much to appreciate in Ashbery’s poetry. His work evades or undermines these tropes. One must accept the premises of his writing in order to engage with and enjoy it.

Readers familiar with Pritchard's literary blog, The Wooden Spoon, will know that his earlier consideration of Ashbery's work provoked a kettleful of clamor. (Evidence to support the claim that difficult strong verse is oft surrounded noisy pot-banging, some intelligent, some indignant, and quite a bit not illuminating.) Ted Burke took up the same topic at the Fray, Slate's online discussion forum. - ZB