Poetry makes things happen

For Jim Leftwich the boundary between poetry and criticism or more accurately between poetry and writing about poetry is extremely porous. This book shouldmake that very clear; in fact here it is sometimes hard to tell whether a text is original poetry or his writing about poetry. Which suggests that the distinction may not be all that important. (Another such book is one he wrote focused on my own work or using my work as a springboard Containers Projecting Multitudes: Expositions on the Poetry of John M. Bennett 2019.) This is perhaps an outgrowth of his practice of making hacks of others' poetry and texts which is in itself a means of entering into and remaking aspects of another's work using a wide variety of processes ranging from the arbitrary and deliberate to the improvisational and purely intuitive.What this does is to turn the process of writing about poetry on its head. Instead of applying a preordained critical method or theory to a text Leftwich presents as it were in real time an account of what it was like of what happened when he read the text. We thus have a narration of a real experience of reading. For me and for many of us in this new literary avant garde this is vastly more interesting and useful than the use of a text to support or illustrate a particular literary (or other) ideology. Leftwich's work in this regard is unique exciting and represents real progress in the problem of how to read poetry and of how to write it as well. -¬ John M. Bennett