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Index: Commentary on Art and Literature

On the Spirit of Poetry in a Time of Plague.

Berengarten: ‘Curiously, far from separating us, COVID emphasises our community and, perhaps, even creates our communality, which is inevitably universal, since nobody (human), even if inoculated, can be entirely excluded from the risk of catching this plague.’

More trouble with genre.

Simon Collings: ‘The texts in “Why are you here?” comprise a spectrum of short prose forms, many of them deliberately pushing against accepted rules about genre.’

Plum Pudding Books.

Anthony Howell: ‘…ponder the garden of forking paths that a library may conjure up in the mind of a writer such as Borges.’

The Hills and the Desert.

Anthony Rudolf: ‘Jabès left Egypt for Paris after Suez. Vigée, after almost a year in the Jewish Resistance based in Toulouse (he was the last survivor), left for the USA where, as a French poet, he was an exile.’

Why I am not a philosopher.

Alan Wall: ‘I do have a fondness for the philosophical miscreants, the delinquents of the humanities block. Kierkegaard is at his best when he is destroying the philosophical pretensions of Hegel.’

Disinterest and Aesthetics.

Tronn Overend: ‘The Biennale is to celebrate art’s ‘capacity to create alternative cosmologies and new conditions of existence’. In this way, art emancipates us from fear.’

The wheel in the tree.

Ian Seed: ‘I walked into a square behind Corso Garibaldi, one of the few quiet spots in that area of Milan. I looked up at a tree’s bare branches against the night sky, and suddenly remembered the front cover of Penguin Modern Poets 12. I knew I’d made the right decision, even though I had little idea of what I was going to do next.’

On ‘Wood Circle’.

Rupsa Banerjee: ‘The poems, taken as isolated instances, do not generate specific images, but the collection as a whole evokes a fragility of reference which alternatively hinges on poetic language’s own resistant folds and the multiple surfaces of the object-world.’

Martyrdom.

Anthony Howell: ‘With manipulation, the fault-lines can be re-opened, just as they were re-opened in Yugoslavia, where NATO capitalised on Croatia’s Ustasha (pro-Nazi) back-story and sponsored Muslim fanaticism.’

‘The Ringstead Poems’.

Tom Phillips: ‘Robinson, his wife Ornella, and their friends the engaged artist Jenny Polak and economist Martha Prevezer – to whom poems in the sequence are dedicated – stayed with other family members at the Mill for several days during the summer of 2015 and initially perhaps ‘The Ringstead Poems’ might appear made up of a series of discrete moments and specific experiences from that stay, much in the manner of a poetic diary.’

Midrash.

Alan Wall: ‘When Christians decided to impose their figural readings on the Hebrew Bible, and to employ typology, they deemed the text before them to be allegorical, or at least to have allegorical potential.’

Pastmodern art.

David Rosenberg: ‘We’re not seeing through or onto the surface: we are resisted.  By what?  By the plant, a species we know doesn’t need us and lived long before us—as inviolate in its existence as bigger species than ours, like trees.  True, we move around, but they too spread their species, and they are necessarily aware of the smaller ones that live on, in, and by them. ‘

What Is Truth?

Alan Macfarlane: ‘I found that more than three-quarters of the world lives outside the modern Western world view and does not accept our divisions. People  have different concepts of truth and reality.’

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.’

The Loves of Marina Tsvetaeva.

CDC Reeve: ‘In her autobiographical story, “My Pushkin,” Tsvetaeva tells of her reaction to a scene from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, which her mother thinks she is too young to understand: “Like a little fool—six years old—she’s fallen in love with Onegin!”’