By James MacGuire. REMEMBERING ELLIOTT IT WAS ABOUT THIS time thirty years ago that I belatedly learned of Elliott Coleman’s death. Then, as now, the mere mention of his name floods my mind with images and memories–poignant, poetic, funny, and sad. A fine, pioneering poet, the founder of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, he [...]
Saturday, 28 January 2012
I believe that the excessive individualism concerning the means of expression, to which we were led during the 20th century, this constant and forced hunting of innovation that Ezra Pound called “Make it new!”, all this led contemporary poetry to a dead-end.
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Martin Sorrell: The type is blotchy, made worse by an expiring ribbon and a clutter of corrections hammered over the several typos. This ‘pomenvylope’, and the few others I’ve managed to read, speak to me of the frustration Moore lived with for the decades after brief fame had become neglect. They express the dogged endurance of a poet still possessed of a strong voice and the wish to have it heard.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
I stayed in touch with Logue for a while after our meeting. I received a couple of beautiful hand-written cards and spoke on the phone a few times, but I got the impression he was already bored of me. Then one afternoon a postman knocked at my door with a large brown tube. I opened it and inside was one of Logue’s poster poems from the 1960s, with a note of thanks inside.
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
The voice in “Tears, Idle Tears” on the one hand plays with the sense of the voice as an authentic expression of personal loss, the lyric modality of pain and suffering. And yet, on the other, the poem is supremely secondary, mediated and belated…
Thursday, 24 November 2011
THE BUSINESS OF LIVING early and working late seems like a New England virtue. Certainly, it is one that Ruth Stone, a Yankee poet, mastered perfectly. It’s not surprising that for a poet whose work – and not her celebrity – makes her “major”, it took most of us a lifetime to catch up to [...]
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
At some point I thought about how cool it might be to climb into Neil’s head, to get an idea of what he sees when he looks at his maps. Point to any area or intersection and Neil will seamlessly delve into the history of that block, that neighborhood, that business district, etc. It’s really amazing.
Owen: In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Martin Sorrell: So was Apollinaire the lone innovator? Was there anyone comparable writing in English? As Tim Kendall points out, it took David Jones, who’d served in that war, nearly twenty years to produce work such as “In Parenthesis”. Apollinaire, on the other hand, wrote both spontaneously and experimentally, out of the here and now. Take “Flare”, a poem of erotic charge – even yearning.
I had read the obituary notice which I have been quoting, quite by chance, along with a great many others of the same period. It had excited some little speculation in my mind, but, beyond thinking that, if I ever had an opportunity of examining the local records of the period indicated, I would try to remember Dr. Haynes, I made no effort to pursue his case.
Saturday, 29 October 2011
Edward Dowden: Coleridge broke with tradition in the vulgar sense of the word; he broke with tradition in theology, philosophy, politics; yet he did so in a spirit more truly loyal to the past than was the common orthodoxy in theology or philosophy, or the common Toryism in politics.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
By James Thomson [B.V.]. I COME FROM mountains under other stars Than those reflected in my waters here; Athwart broad realms, beneath large skies, I flow, Between the Libyan and Arabian hills, And merge at last into the great Mid-Sea; And make this land of Egypt.
Anthony Howell: With Quietism, form fits content as water fits a jug: it’s an abstract fusion that appeals to creative people who value the plastic properties of their medium. In poetry, its focus on familiar experiences or tasks that usually go unremarked, such as breaking eggs, is equivalent to a painter’s preoccupation with still-life. Significance is downplayed, but something is ‘brought to life.’
Transtromer’s subjects often feel that they have woken from the dream of life. The constant inversion of dream time and reality, of night and day, of the horizontal and vertical worlds, are abiding themes for this writer, a psychologist by profession who has worked principally with those deemed to be outcasts from society.
Poetry of ‘a detailed curiosity’.
Alan Wall: Although radically different books, both Michelene Wandor’s writing and Myra Sklarew’s exhibit a detailed curiosity regarding the minutiae of existence, whether itemising seventeenth-century trade or arachnid encounters. The threads that tie dissimilarities together, whether gossamer or memories of Lithuania, hold the poems together with an alert gracefulness.