All posts tagged: Tod Marshall

Hello Goodbye Hello

Kevin Craft (Editor 2010 – 2016) Signs Off   Most poetry readers I know chuckle wearily at the steady stream of “poetry is dead” articles that have appeared with astonishing tenacity in various venues, including The New York Times, these past few years. The authors of these articles agonize in some way or another over poetry’s irrelevance to modern culture: poetry is too abstract and obscure, they argue, too much an insider’s game, divorced from the real wants and needs (to borrow a phrase from Whitman’s early review of Keats’s poems) of actual bodies in the 21st century. But why should poetry worry over its relationship to popular culture? Must it be popular (or topical) in order to be vital, in order to sustain a reader, or fortify a readership? What happens to those who win (or live by) popularity contests in the contemporary cultural grind? We know all too well that the speed of the attention-getting news cycle is debilitating. Presidential primaries come and go, talk radio blathers on, discourse hardens, partisans lob grenades …

Rich Smith: “Ordering A Skinny, Sugar-free Vanilla Latte on the Cusp of Natural Catastrophe – Tod Marshall’s Bugle”

Bugle Tod Marshall Canarium, 2014 All of our friends are dying or dead and the world is melting, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on jokes and poetry and a general sense of wonder, right? In Bugle, Tod Marshall answers that question by saying: “Well, it’s complicated.” Marshall looks on our urban world of skinny lattes, naked meth freaks and plastic bag fees and sees in it the human impulse for (self-)destruction. He sees how we express that destructive impulse in the way we interact with the natural world and with each other, and he does not like what he sees. So he does what any concerned, motivated-but-slightly-disheartened citizen might do: he puts his lips to the mouthpiece and sounds out this admonition: Let’s just watch a rerun on Nature: “The Funkiest Monkeys.” What mother spewed us out? Vagina slime then tubes, semen from a spout. The speaker who emerges from Marshall’s horn is bleak-funny, obsessed with the past, powerless against the encroaching natural apocalypse, partially to blame for that apocalypse, and …