Skip to content

Index: Poetry & Fiction

Screeds, Part 1.

Tuesday, 16 August 2011

Stephen Wiest: I wish it, without evocation, or appeal, this desire;
Sans a mutable sign turning this bright zodiac
miming obsession’s coiling serpent; only the simple question,
Will you listen, just listen?

Also filed in The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged | Comments (0)

• Teresa Calder’s DNA in history, culture, and language.

Monday, 8 August 2011

I grew up with history as a personal companion, not an abstract idea. I won’t recount the losses and horrors. It was a complicated history, too. We became Protestants, my brother later converted to Judaism. When his cantor greets me, it’s in Polish with an admonition—“Why aren’t you speaking Polish to me?!”

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices | | Comments (0)

• Charles Bernstein’s ‘official verse culture’ enemies list.

Thursday, 4 August 2011

[The New York Times’] Tillinghast’s comments merely celebrated the “middle class, middle brow lifestyle” represented in so much of contemporary poetry as opposed to a “continuation of those literary and humanist traditions that have something more at stake,” in short, writing and thinking like Williams’s. Speaking out against what he perceived as a dominance of this “official verse culture,” Bernstein drew a line in the sand that put him in strong opposition to many of the most revered publishers and advocates of poetry.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices | | Comments (0)

John Ashbery’s illumination of a mercurial adolescent.

Saturday, 30 July 2011

Martin Sorrell: The translations made by an American octogenarian of a mercurial French adolescent bring us as close as we are likely to get in English to the wellspring of his genius. The distance in age and place between poet and translator is a happy irony. Ashbery’s Illuminations are set to become classic.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Principal Articles, The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged | Comments (0)

• Verlaine, in praise of Saturn’s modern melancholy.

Saturday, 30 July 2011

We learn that anyone born under the sign of Saturn shares “a large part of misfortune and bile”.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices | | Comments (0)

≡ Prêt à poetry in the Surgeons’ Hall.

Sunday, 24 July 2011

Michelene Wandor: This has been a rare moment of public protest among atomised artists, as all writers are.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices | Tagged | Comments (0)

Summer Serial 2011: ‘Golden-beak’.

Sunday, 17 July 2011

The New York Times: ‘Golden-beak’ tells of a feather-headed American woman, Mrs. Yosinde [sic] Potwin, who has a Japanese boy as man-of-all-work. Temechici [sic] falls in love with this mistress. He is the last of the Shoguns, a Prince in disguise. Temechici has, with other heroic traits, a talent for the improvising of sandwiches. But he is of a jealous disposition. One night he enters Mrs. Potwin’s room…
– The New York Times.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Excerpts & Passages, The Serial | Tagged , | Comments (0)

· Spinning-off Harry Potter: the ‘cultural dark matter’ created by fans of fan-fiction.

Friday, 8 July 2011

Nobody makes money from fan fiction, but whether anybody loses money on fan fiction is a separate question. The people who create the works that fan fiction borrows from are sharply divided on it. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer have given Harry Potter and Twilight fan fiction their blessing; if anything, fan fiction has acted as a viral marketing agent for their work.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

The New Libertine.

Friday, 1 July 2011

Anthony Howell: Management constitutes the contemporary aristocracy. It has laid down a whole regimen dictating what can be said and what can’t, avowedly in the name of social hygiene, but in actuality it reinforces the status quo.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices, Psychology, Philosophy & Education | Tagged | Comments (1)

· A part-stanza: from ‘Lives of the Obscure’.

Wednesday, 29 June 2011

1919. Then nothing for twenty years
Until her first profession of religious vows
When she changed her name to Sister Joan Frances
Of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· Going to hell for writing poetry for fish.

Wednesday, 29 June 2011

“Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” possibly Cowper’s best-known poem, delivers tremendous force, rooted, for me, in the self-contradiction of its energetic hopelessness: If the narrator’s predicament is so absolute and unrelievable, how can he describe it with such explosive intellectual strength?

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

Elliott Coleman: the American poet from Augustland.

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

This portfolio of work by and about Elliott Coleman contains two of Coleman’s poems, an appreciative essay by poet and essayist Myra Sklarew, and comments from others who studied in the Writing Seminars before the days of the MFA.

Also filed in Portfolios, Principal Articles, The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

· To hell with the blessed in heaven, says a deranged Dante.

Friday, 10 June 2011

For these medieval poets, whom I used to teach at Oxford, the central concerns of life were sex in general and girls in particular; they were likewise obsessed with God. Another preoccupation was a political one: wondering whether anyone would ever devise a decent method of organising human society.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· The anxieties of attending the 2011 E-Poetry Festival.

Monday, 6 June 2011

I anticipated attending E-Poetry might bring apprehension, a type of crisis to my research — that a new slew of dynamics might be unleashed, deviating beyond contexts I consider for the genre. They did not.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices, Dance & Performance, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· What happened to the ‘man of letters’? Ask George Steiner.

Tuesday, 24 May 2011

The man of letters — and what was George Orwell, if he was not a man of letters, what was Edmund Wilson, whom I succeeded on The New Yorker twenty-seven years ago? — the man of letters has become very suspect.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)
The Fortnightly Review