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Index: Poetry & Fiction

· The Classics, please, straight up and hold the art.

Thursday, 19 May 2011

“The time appears to have gone by,” reported an Oxford classicist in 1861, “when men of great original gifts could find satisfaction in reproducing the thoughts and words of others, and the work, if done at all, must now be done by writers of inferior pretension.”

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Anthony Trollope: ‘Not so exceedingly benighted after all.’

Saturday, 14 May 2011

Wilfrid L. Randell: Gifted with the facility in the spinning of paragraphs, with skill in the devising of plots, with a deft and pretty touch in the delineation of men and women, and with extraordinary method and perseverance, what could he not have accomplished with the lovelier gift of inspiration – the power to regard his art as a thing of wonder, mysteriously vital, creative, permanent!

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· Alasdair Paterson’s grand poetry of Byzantine governance.

Friday, 13 May 2011

Edgar Mason: While the book is unlikely to aid young emperors in their attempts to maintain power, Mr. Paterson has created something very useful for the rest of us: A way of viewing history as a thing cross-pollinated by itself – and an excellent treatise on the governing of our own, personal empires.

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· Hera’s beguiling girdle, worn for Zeus, found in Verlaine.

Tuesday, 19 April 2011

Yesterday I was studying Annibale Carracci’s stupendous ceiling frescoes on mythological subjects. There was Zeus, inching Hera toward bed: and bound firmly below Hera’s breasts was the oaristys!

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· Dostoevsky’s truth vs the Tsar’s fiction.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Were I to choose any one single episode in the life of a modern writer to fit the “truth is stranger than fiction” bill, it would be a central incident in the life of Dostoevsky that took place in December 1849.

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· The life of a poet: Madras, 1931.

Sunday, 20 March 2011

So unlike John Morley or W. E. Henley, I thought, and so unobtrusive. I had seen ‘Triveni’ but today I was meeting its Editor, and it seemed a moment on which somebody’s destiny depended.

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A cure for poets facing the ‘disabling embarrassment of being alive’.

Saturday, 12 March 2011

The true glory is that after death there is an absolute division, an unbridgeable gulf, between the man who grunts and snivels and prevaricates and procrastinates, and the writer who prophesies.

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For Marvell, think Bernie Sanders with a growing ‘vegetable love’.

Sunday, 6 March 2011

Imagine if the most cunning and cosmopolitan poet of our era—John Ashbery, say—were a progressive US senator from a small state far from Los Angeles, New York, or Washington, along the lines of Bernie Sanders. Envision, too, that this poet/politician hides out in the margins of his poems, such that his angle on any subject, philosophical, religious, or political, atomizes into irreconcilable fragments—except that he also writes fierce, polemical pamphlets, though often without signing his name to them, and maneuvers under threat of exposure and censure.

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Bly in prose: the song of the body, the memory of rhythm.

Thursday, 3 March 2011

Myra Sklarew: The Bly of Reaching Out to the World is a presence, a powerful force, all hints and subtleties gathered up into an enormous bouquet that he and his speaker offer to the world.

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Poetry from a rock-hard place.

Monday, 28 February 2011

Edgar Mason: This is a valiant first round by Hobblebush Books. The packaging of both titles is quite fine, and great care has been exercised in the selection of both poets and the poems on display.

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· Filers of briefs, writers of haiku, and those felonious anthropomorphizers.

Tuesday, 22 February 2011

I’m both a lawyer and a poetry critic, so asking me to discuss this book would seem to present an especially harmonious pairing of subject and analyst—like handing an animal cracker recipe to a zoologist-pastry chef.

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The Old Man.

Wednesday, 16 February 2011

Robert Coover: as for the children they wished him dead they wished the birds dead the old man dead
the bread dead all that was easy what was dead they swung in the swings had fights ran

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The Last Performance. Plus: How to see yellows, and other lessons from Goat Island.

Wednesday, 16 February 2011

We are already participating in a Goat Island workshop. Collaborating through words, sounds, touch, texture, viewing, thinking. The material is there to be received, processed, transformed.

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Meet Dean Moriarty, the ‘Natty Light-slugging hero of the Southwest’.

Sunday, 13 February 2011

My first impression of Dean was of a young The Situation—ripped, funny as shit, with spiked hair—a Natty Light-slugging hero of the Southwest.

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William Carlos Williams’ biographer turns his attention to a poet named ‘R’.

Friday, 11 February 2011

For Whittemore, selecting Williams as a biographical subject, set a tone for his own memoir. With biographical subjects, issues of transference can be crucial, especially if the life of the subject resonates with aspects of one’s own personal life.

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