David Kaufmann
By David Kaufmann
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Culture The Power of Unpretty Poetry
Bob Perelman’s poetry — 16 books in the past three decades — can be explained by what it does not do. Perelman, who came of age in the late 1960s, has always reacted strongly to what he saw as the reigning aesthetic of the time: a cult of individual voice where the poet was something…
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Culture Beat This
Doing 70 By Hettie Jones Hanging Loose Press, 92 pages, $15. It is hard to talk about Hettie Jones’s poetry without mentioning her biography. Born Hettie Cohen in 1934, brought up in a middle-class section of Queens, she decamped to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in the mid-1950s. There she met and married the young black poet…
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Culture Coolness is Overrated
Let’s face it: Paul Simon, who was awarded the first George and Ira Gershwin Prize for Popular Song and was feted with a gala concert in Washington, D.C., on May 23, was never really hip. He was always just a bit too sincere, a bit too dorky, and that’s probably why his music — which…
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Culture Taking Parnassus by Sheer Force of Wit
Selected Poems (American Poets Project) By Kenneth Koch, edited by Ron Padgett The Library of America, 220 pages, $20. Kenneth Koch has not received his due, in part because his Harvard classmates and close friends, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, have overshadowed him, and in part because he could be rambunctiously funny. Poetry, after all,…
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Culture Not a Nice Jewish Girl
British singer Amy Winehouse is not a nice Jewish girl. And it’s not just a question of the tattoos. Nor is it her positively epic boozing. (Her father, a London cabdriver, claims that she is not an alcoholic, because she does not drink every day. Perhaps. But there was that really embarrassingly drunken television performance,…
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Culture The Unlikely Hipster
Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life & Times of Doc Pomus By Alex Halberstadt Da Capo Press, 264 pages, $26. In 1959, 10 of the songs that Doc Pomus wrote with Mort Schuman — including “Teenager in Love” (which the lead singer thought sounded “faggy”) — made it to the upper reaches of the pop charts….
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Culture A New Book Probes Chagall’s Conflicts and Contradictions
Marc Chagall By Jonathan Wilson Schocken Books, 256 pages, $19.95. What are we supposed to do with Marc Chagall? Picasso admired him as a colorist, but, on the whole, Chagall is not remembered for his painterly technique. People know him for his subjects — for his off-kilter, dreamy takes on life in a Hasidic shtetl,…
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Culture Rattling the Chains Of American Poetry
Girly Man By Charles Bernstein University of Chicago Press, 186 pages, $24. In the late 1970s, when I was studying creative writing at a fancy Eastern college, I spent a good deal of my time worrying about “finding my voice.” Like most of my friends, I dreamed of achieving a sincere and brandable style, one…
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