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Hearing a long line-up of poets this week. It started Wednesday with the Poetry Bus, where Peter Gizzi and Cole Swensen made my trip into town well worth the baggy eyes on the following morning. Last night I heard Lisa Robertson read from current chart-buster The Men and new work called "Cuff," which she described as an "autobiographical list poem" that will go in the final section of Rousseau's Boat. She added that "Cuff" is composed from "last lines" of found material from "25 years of notebooks." Everything I've heard this week has been filtered through Marcella Durand's discussion of "poetry's positive capability" in her review of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (cf. the new Poetry Project Newsletter). She writes, Poetry--and moreover poetry willing to resort data, figures, acronyms, and language--can question the manipulation [in news media after 9/11] and, unlike Keats, Spahr quite "irritably reaches" after fact and reason in a world that has become full of baffling events. It's difficult for me to reorient my thoughts away from models of poetry based on negativity, but I've been trying to do just that with the help of several recent works (not going to name them here).