Barrett Watten News Today

Larry Eigner’s work has been foundational for contemporary American poetry. What was missing was the biography, which now, thanks to the storied Modern and Contemporary Poetics series of the University of Alabama Press, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, we have. Jennifer Bartlett’s Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, is a terrific book. I, as they say, couldn’t put it down, finishing it in a day, and wishing for more.

DETROIT—Nearly seven years ago, Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom famously challenged the notion of “safe spaces.” His frustration was focused solely on college campuses that supposedly promoted safe spaces, which allegedly allows for “uncomfortable” comments by people of color but...

At the end of last year, in the wake of the police murder of Porter Burks, Detroit City Councillor Gabriela Santiago-Romero announced that the city, along with Detroit Police Chief James White, would be working toward a non-police response program.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—As another Midwest winter finally began to give up the ghost and another term was coming to an end for students on campus, graduate students at the University of Michigan decided to take uncertainty into their own hands.

“The demands of poetry and painting, of expressivity and formalism, collided in his work and would come to no easy resolution,” wrote Barrett Watten of Frank O’Hara in Artforum’s March 2008 issue. O’Hara’s legacy is defined by dichotomies—of “high” and “low,” privacy and disclosure, contrivance and sincerity, celebration and elegy. Watten finds cause to let these contradictions lie in Lytle Shaw’s 2006 book, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of the Coterie. “The disparity of ...