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Among the Enlighteners.

Tom Phillips: ‘Where we look is a decision, not seeing things entire.’

Bare trees.

Cole Swensen: ‘Shade also quenches thirst, which has to do with a darkness that absorbs regret, running over your skin in thin sheets of crow dissolved in equal parts rain and gusting wind.’

To Kill an Intellectual 4.

David Stromberg: ‘From the reading public’s perspective, Adamic had, by 1935, established himself as an intellectual who’d written about labor, immigration, and foreign policy. With his next book, he turned his sights back onto the United States…’

On the small stuff.

Simon Collings: ‘The texts are ludic, baffling, funny, and thought provoking by turns… In the poem based on ‘itself’, we’re advised ‘remember the line of association controls itself’, and ‘the sentence reads itself as we listen’.

Notes for Spring 2023.

Peter Riley: ‘Those of us constantly torn between “conventional” and “experimental” new poetry could note that there are other ways, such as a constant manipulation of the poetic image in the iambic theatre, to achieve the full-force rhythmic recognition of the ending.’

Six Swedish poets in translation.

Elliot Vale: “The ‘loner’ of Karlfeldt’s poem is suspended between generations, cut off from both future and past, with no progeny, property, or parentage to define him. As he declares: ‘I am no man’s son, I have no home, / no home or son shall I ever own’, a condition as liberating as it is lonely.’

Translating fire into poetry.

Jaime Robles: ‘I remember being just 19 and walking along the beach near the college campus in Goleta, ash from a fire a hundred miles away falling like snow from the dull looking sky.’

Birthing the Minotaur.

Alan Wall: ‘The price of civilization is our emotional crippledom. You want the Taj Mahal, Michaelangelo, aeroplanes? Then go buy yourself a mental walking-stick.’

Reflections on Anonymity 1.

W.D. Jackson: ‘Differing motifs demand different methods. This does not presuppose evolution or progress, but a correspondence or agreement between the idea one wants to express and the means of expression which is inseparable from it”’

Baddiel’s divine desire.

Michelene Wandor: ‘While I am Jewish and a writer, I don’t have a sense that I ‘belong’, that I quite ‘fit’ in the literary world. I will have no part in writing about the Holocaust, as some other Jewish writers do.’

Four poems from ‘La luce immutabile’.

Flavio Ferraro: ‘I know, there is greater glory
than a stalk, and greater
mysteries the forest conceals
than this maiden acorn.’

The Course of Empire: Reloaded.

Kornelia Koepsell: ‘Oppressors, tyrants, butchers on the stair,
ascending thrones and bawling: I am God,
which no one had the courage to declare
before, and everyone proclaims: I’m polyglot.’

Jody Stewart’s momentary world.

Anthony Howell: ‘Stewart’s writing has been compared to that of Elizabeth Bishop, with justification. I am also reminded of the poems of Jean Garrigue…’

Thoughts on constitutional monarchs.

Anthony Howell: ‘From what I hear (I haven’t watched yet) the blessing of all religions and denominations has been expressly emphasised, which is a good idea. I like the idea of the monarch improving on Henry VIII’s title and rebranding himself as the ‘Protector of the Faiths’.’

Shostakovich, Eliot and Sunday Morning.

E.B. Smith, jr.: ‘The poet’s friend
crosses the room
with the limping tread’