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New Notley reviewed at Brooklyn Rail. And here's the collected at Rob McLellan's Blog. He quotes the entirety of her poem "The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books," which reminded me of her comment from Georgetown last spring. Christian Bök was discussing his use of sounds from video games, and she replied, "Oh, I could never get that Zelda song out of my head!" // Yesterday the WaPo editors juxtaposed the front-page headline "New Law Cripples On-line Gambling" with a story about arrests at Gallaudet University. Did no one see an issue with the word cripples? // Before you see The Departed, check out the Hong Kong original, Internal Affairs. I hope someone will write a review about how Scorcese remakes the best parts of the film shot for shot but then succumbs on two key points: sex and law. In the original, there are two love interests, not just a single prize woman, and there is no saftey net in form of Mark Wahlberg's character who corrects the institutional (i.e. police) shortcomings. // Speaking of video games, this was my intro to Sandra Miller last night: In Sandra Miller’s 2005 book Oriflamme the words and stanzas and word clusters and word fragments slide up and down and left and right and every which way on the page. This kind of technique is sometimes called projective verse and it's sometimes called using the page like a canvas. But take it from me the motion in Oriflamme is much closer to what Mallarmé was thinking when he said that dance is the space of ideal writing. Sandra has taught dance in the past, so it’s not a stretch to connect her writing with Mallarmé. Mallarmé says that dance is an ecriture of the body, and he basically means that we should get jiggy with poems. In Sandra's carefully choreographed poems, your start position might be “thippy with it” in one corner, then back left to “here we least poppy,” then you might miss a step like me and stumble over “in league with / not hops,” but then you’d turn more slowly with “pilt / the seraph,” and finish with a splash on “pools.” Mallarmé’s inspiration was ballet, but the truth is I don’t know much about ballet or about dancing in general. What I do know that he was going for a “revolution in poetic language” (viz. Kristeva), and if it sounds like I am describing the video game Dance Dance Revolution, well that’s one way to capture the energy that I get from Oriflamme. We're lucky that Sandra’s in the area for a few months and that she’s able to read here tonight, and I am looking forward to what she has in store. Let’s welcome Sandra Miller.