January 22

Since I find most contemporary English-language poetry that I read to be somewhat weak, I was interested to encounter the argument at the PoemShape blog that poetry needs to "die" to be reborn again:

http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/let-poetry-die/

What poetry needs, besides talented practitioners, is vigorous criticism of the sort that Joan Houlihan practices here:

http://www.cprw.com/Houlihan/bond.htm

Houlihan's review is genuinely helpful to a common reader like me, especially in being able to talk about the poetry's technical features without losing one not highly trained in them; and when I encounter such help, in literary, music, or art criticism, I am always grateful.

Here is another excellent list of books on Haiti, from Amy Wilentz, who has written one herself:

http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/15/haiti-books-literature-reading-opinions-contributors-amy-wilentz.html

Actor Jon Hamm of Mad Men has good taste in reading:

http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Books-That-Made-a-Difference-to-Jon-Hamm

Among notables born on this date are essayist Francis Bacon, poets Lord Byron and Howard Moss, dramatists Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and August Strindberg, choreographer George Balanchine, French philosophe Pierre Gassendi, sociologist Beatrice Webb, composer Henri Dutilleux, painter Francis Picabia, soprano Rosa Ponselle, conductor Myung-whun Chung, singer Sam Cooke, film directors D.W. Griffith and Jim Jarmusch, Sex Pistols promoter Malcolm McLaren, pulp writer Robert E. Howard, Gujarati novelist Harilal Upadhyay, crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh, and actors Conrad Veidt, Ann Sothern, Balthazar Getty, Seymour Cassel, John Hurt, and Piper Laurie. Quite the array of talent there! I have to pay special tribute to Strindberg, whose plays have profoundly affected me ever since I discovered them in high school. He was a fine novelist and painter, too; no comprehensive history of modernism in the arts could possibly leave him out. I like what Ingmar Bergman said of him, that reading Strindberg can "make your hair stand on end."