This is the third volume of the First of the Year annual series.
Contributors such as Armond White, Philip Levine, Charles O'Brien,
Uri Avnery, Donna Gaines, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer, and Amiri
Baraka are back (and fractious as ever). And First's family of
writers keeps growing. This volume includes vital new voices such
as A. B. Spellman, Bernard Avishai, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Diane di
Prima.
First never shies away from hot button issues--Fredric Smoler,
for example, offers a definitive consideration of America's recent
history with torture. But First's approach to current political
firestorms is often marked by a cool sense of the past. History is
always in the mix when First writers examine the roots of Glenn
Beck and Sarah Palin and contemporary right-wing pundits who
falsely claim the mantle of Whittaker Chambers. First's refusal to
toe "correct" lines is apparent in Benj DeMott's reconsideration of
Chambers' work.
The new volume is also marked by its cultivation of radical
imaginations. The ideas of the Situationists and Cornelius
Castoriadis are revived. A young historian, David Waldstreicher,
recovers the radical, useable past in the 60s work of Staughton
Lynd. Amiri Baraka evokes the felt quality of Jesse Jackson's 1988
campaign and another poet remembers (in verse) long-forgotten,
extreme political acts of American Renaissance poets.
A recent review of First of the Year: 2009 used a phrase of
Kenneth Burke's--"perspective by incongruity"--to make sense of the
method that shaped it. First is committed to thought-provoking
incongruities. Faith that wonder is our best teacher informs this
volume. First's music writing provides a high-low soundtrack of
surprise. Beyond the section on Michael Jackson, there are serious
responses to John Coltrane and Bach, World Saxophone Quartet and
Mariah Carey, Sonny Rollins and Willie Mitchell. First's message is
in the music.
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