the benefits of non-nonstick

Yasha:  "You can just write that Mitka is using a frying pan as a cutting board, and as a frying pan, simultaneously."

Poems and a plug

Yesterday we had an interdepartmental "mixer" with the literature and philosophy departments. The mixer (when I arrived, very late) turned into exactly what it must have been meant to be, to the point of being corny. The literature majors aired opinions about higher topos theory and the mathematicians discussed postmodernism, with lots of beer involved. I got into a friendly argument with someone who studies (quantitatively, since he's at MIT) poetry. The issue was that I've never learned to read modern poetry. I think modern (and later) poets are hard to read, because they put ideas over linguistic aesthetics, and even the ideas are hard to follow because unlike classical poetry, whose form dictates exactly how it should be read and what hyper-textual connections should be made, most modern poets arrange what they write haphazardly, without a map for the reader to follow. The literature student claimed that the goal of poetry, as of math papers, is to make new connections between heretofore unrelated (or undefined) objects, and that while form is sometimes helpful, the only important thing is to get across the chain of associations, using whatever linguistic tools available, be they form, self-reference or anything else. He recommended me to read Ashbery, and here's a poem I found that I liked: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/16013

But I still haven't found any poet who writes in free verse who I like nearly as much as Frost or Shakespeare or Dickinson. If anyone has suggestions, please share.

Also I realized I miss poetry, and decided to try to blog more about it. Here's the result:
http://mvaintrob.wordpress.com/ So far it's in Russian, but if I get around to it there will be other languages involved soon.