Vyvyan Holland: ‘Alec Waugh tells me that when he starts on a new book he sees it as a long and rather pleasant walk to a charming castle on a distant hill. The castle itself is quite clear and well-defined and he even knows how it is decorated inside. And, which is more, he knows whom he is going to meet there, usually some irresponsible and exotic female. ‘
Saturday, 22 February 2014
Daniel Bosch: ‘Writers who are truly honest about art and pedagogy admit that most of the time both end in failure. At the Bauhaus this fact was bedrock, not pillow-talk: the curriculum was designed around honest play with materials.
‘I believe a Bauhaus-type approach might help lead to needed reform in the teaching of creative writing. So in a cover letter…
Harry Guest: ‘The important thing is that silent conversations is a gloriously entertaining and a most rewarding publication. To share the reading experiences of such a poet-scholar-translator-editor-critic is a rare privilege and this book is worthy to be spoken of in company with Montaigne’s Essays, Evelyn’s Diary and Stendhal’s Vie de Henry Brulard.’
Anthony Howell: ‘What makes a poet readable? There cannot be a formulaic answer. This is the problem with the standard model so lauded by our Oxbridge elite – as anally compressed as Ian Hamilton, with a closed form, forever ruled by the dictates of significance and economy, and very tightly organised on the page. ‘
1. MELODIA SULLA FINE DEL VENTO L’onda precede il vento, nella sua fine. Stupiti guardiamo rincorrersi meraviglie impossibili. Crudo il cuore, s’illimpidisce ogni pietra di un amaro ultramarino senza fine o speranza. Terribile cosa, e mirabile, il cielo che consuma la terra. 2. RELIQUIARIO A filo di luce, il muro assetato sorveglia il salmo della […]
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Daniel Bosch: ‘Hecht’s attraction to certain kinds and formulations of words is too common to be insignificant, yet not frequent enough to constitute some sort of radical aesthetic challenge to institutional norms. Something bigger is going on when Hecht pulls out a doozy, or three doozies, something bigger than his urge to describe well or to tell a good story. These outbursts are about him, psychologically, and ultimately, such self-referentiality weakens not only each work individually but…Hecht’s work as a whole.’
Thursday, 14 February 2013
Michael Blackburn: ‘Of course, I may be suffering the same illusion as everyone else in the poetry ghetto, that there’s a way out, that we’re not just muttering to ourselves. I’m not bothered any more if that is the case but I still like the idea that someone, somewhere is taking a look at the poems and enjoying what they see. If the only way to make that happen is to use the latest technology and expect no payment, then why not? As Rimbaud said more than a century ago, “Il faut être absolument moderne”, so let us be absolutely modern.’
‘It is high time that someone once again took a stand to say that “translations do not make a literary culture,” and that they cannot and should not be substituted for freely undertaken original production in the language of this country and in the name of an ethos, which is ours alone.’
Thursday, 15 November 2012
Alan Macfarlane: “It was this pugnacious, self-confident, independent character which many thought was the secret of English success in the nineteenth century. Tocqueville wrote ‘seeing the Englishman, certain of the support of his laws, relying on himself and unaware of any obstacle except the limit of his own powers, acting without constraint; seeing him inspired by the sense that he can do anything, look restlessly at what now is, always in search of the best, seeing him like that, I am in no hurry to inquire whether nature has scooped out ports for him, and given him coal and iron. The reason for his commercial prosperity is not there at all: it is in himself.'”
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Peter Riley: ‘There was a sense of a rather shaky solidarity of the innovative, the only major flaw in which was an evident lack of interest on the part of these and other foreigners in the innovative British poetry with which we surrounded them. None of us ever got a reciprocal invitation. Ten to twenty years later it all feels rather different. If I now think there are problems with a lot of this poetry, am I betraying a trust or exhibiting my own faltering instability?’
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Anthony Howell: ‘My initial take, leafing through the large Norton publication which is the anthology, is that Americans go on too long. Endless, separated, hardly ever rhyming couplets, for instance, or very long lines indeed, and plenty of them. Some of the poems here get to be as expansive as a Morris Lewis! And these Norton anthologies never skimp on pages, so, inevitably, there is lots of stuff I like, some using narrative, others more abstract. I appreciate the breezy chatty poems of Albert Goldbarth, and a poem called ‘Impossible Blue’ by Ann Lauterbach, whom I associate with the London art scene and New York.’
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Anthony Howell: “Prince was a Catholic, but his commitment as a writer was primarily to literature. Having been invited to chair the English department of Kingston University in Jamaica, he grew exasperated when students handed him manuscripts avowing their religious zeal. He said to me once, ‘Literature allows one to become emancipated from oneself.’”
Tuesday, 18 September 2012
Keith Johnson: ‘“Tutti Designers” (“Everyone is a Designer”) is a conceptual wall lamp/neon sculpture with a stenciled metallic suitcase, complete with the obligatory Arte Povera exposed wires and raw metal wall-fasteners. Is the suitcase merely a container for the necessary neon transformer, or a briefcase full of ideas?’
Monday, 17 September 2012
Alana Shilling: ‘Digitization only multiplies possibilities and begs questions that have yet to fully emerge from dusky uncertainty. Before predicting that technology would create a “global village,” Marshall McLuhan wondered how medium determined content. When the physical presence of a book is replaced with a digital version, how does that impact our thought processes, our understanding of what we read and how we read it?’
Monday, 10 September 2012
Alan Wall: ‘The self-subverting book says this: you are surrounded by the products of dullness and meretricious self-applause, but here is a book which has mocked itself before you could even read it, and understands entirely the terms that will be provided for its own destruction.’
Anthony Rudolf’s literary Wunderkammer.
Harry Guest: ‘The important thing is that silent conversations is a gloriously entertaining and a most rewarding publication. To share the reading experiences of such a poet-scholar-translator-editor-critic is a rare privilege and this book is worthy to be spoken of in company with Montaigne’s Essays, Evelyn’s Diary and Stendhal’s Vie de Henry Brulard.’