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Index: Books & Publishing

On the Difficulty of Reading Susan Howe’s

Articulation of Sound Forms in Time ◊ By Peter Middleton.   hat is the “fate of difficulty in the poetry of our time”? Charles Altieri and Nicholas Nace gather the thoughts of twenty-six leading poetry critics on this question, each of them discussing the issue in relation to a single recent poem. It’s a fascinating […]

Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up Behind the Encyclopædia Britannica

By G. KIM BLANK. The only book, except the Bible, which has followed the Anglo-Saxon around the world. —ad for Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911 The New Encyclopædia Britannica is a complete and modern exposition of thought, learning and achievement to 1910, a vivid representation of the world’s activities, so arranged and classified as to afford a […]

Master Singer.

Chronicler, Novelist, Storyteller By CONOR ROBIN MADIGAN.   N EXHAUSTIVE PUBLISHING of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s children’s stories during his lifetime and well after — beginning with Zletah The Goat in 1966 and ending in 2015 with The Parakeet Named Dreidel — has made the novels and work preceding the juvenilia more interesting and powerful. But […]

Six haibun.

By Sheila E. Murphy.  ◊ Shoofly Pie ndow the cow toward matrilineal détente. Align, arraign, detain, refrain. Compos mentis, manu-fixtured decibels to drown out priest speak. Diction of addiction, pressure test, the breast. The side effects of context. Blame game face two-ply, like most discarded flings. Shoofly pie spawns attractive crumbs wedged between repeat signs. […]

John Matthias’s ‘Some Words on Those Wars’

A Fortnightly Review. Some Words on Those Wars by John Matthias Dos Madres Press  2021  | 320 pp. | $33.00 By Garin Cycholl. ◊ e kill at a distance, complicit both in the act and its reach. Take the distance of Homer’s warriors versus medieval archers, artillery gunners, bombardiers, or contemporary drone pilots with their […]

‘King of infinite space’.

The Virtue of Uncertainty. By ALAN WALL. ◊ t is a curious fact, a vivid historical coincidence, that the great French scientist Laplace was formulating his notions at precisely the same moment that John Keats was writing his letters about Shakespeare. Laplace was an eloquent spokesman for classical causality: we can summarise this crudely by […]

Three short fictions.

By MEG POKRASS.   Clouds, the Day After You Were Born he day you were born, clouds flirted with each other. They had nice hair, ideas that led to better formations. Easily they blended into pleasant shapes. But the day after you were born, clouds argued about some misunderstanding. In the middle of the night, they collided in the cold kitchen. The one, slouched over martini breath, said, Why do I frighten you? The […]

A clutch of ingenious authors.

A Fortnightly Review Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories by Michelene Wandor. Odd Volumes | 978-0999136591 | £15.95 ◊ Florilegia by Annabel Dover. MOIST Books | 978-1913430047 | £9.45 ◊ Abécédaire by Sharon Kivland. MOIST Books | 978-1-913430-10-8 | £11.95   By ANTHONY HOWELL. aving “found my stride” in the seventies, I am always interested in […]

Models.

Anthony Rudolf: ‘Posing for months on end for one statuette, with great pride and high hopes that it would be completed and cast and displayed in a glass case, Pauline watched the artist desperately try to improve and complete it. No such luck.’

Volume Five.

Rev. Andrew Louth: ‘The completion of the project of translating the Philokalia is an end that is also a beginning. Now we have in English a complete translation of the Philokalia.’

The Workshop.

Michelene Wandor: ‘In academic terms, the workshop is another word for the seminar: small-group teaching which aims to maximise and democratise student participation. The sources of this form of  learning come from both ends of the educational class and age spectrums.’

The wages for reading is rage.

Christopher Landrum: ‘It must be admitted that the recent sentence-by-sentence inspections of some books from some of our school libraries may mean–because the inspections occur under sunlight, accompanied by the use of magnifying glasses–some volumes run the risk of spontaneous combustion. But such incidents should be considered statistical outliers.’

Considering ‘The Young American Writers’ anthology, fifty-five years later.

Richard Kostelanetz: ‘Both Carroll and myself resisted attributing to our writers a common esthetic stance and, in this respect, we differed from, say, Ezra Pound’s Des Imagists (1914). Or even a common background, such as a geographical residence or university writing programs.’

Modern Artiques.

Robert Almon: ‘T.S.Eliot, who before he was twenty one, had written as fine poetry as this generation has produced, is a victim of the culture via ideas regime, more insistently the autocrat of the English mind than it is of the American.’

Literary politics in America.

Richard Kostelanetz; ‘This essay repeats criticisms made by me in periodicals and conversations over the past decade, when they were heard or read by an angry but ineffectual few. Only in 1970 did I realize that if my complete critique were written and then published in permanent form, we could have more leverage in dealing with adversity.’