“Roleplay” by Juliana Gray wins the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize
Roleplay by Juliana Gray My rating: 5 of 5 stars Juliana Gray’s Roleplay is the winner of this year’s EugeneContinue Reading
Author: Steven M. Critelli
Against Interpretation.
“The Watch” – Short Fiction
It was on the occasion of his return from the Yucatan, when passing through Duty Free he saw the watch, or rather heard the whisper of the perfect prologue that slips beyond the monogrammed curtain of a discrete French cuff to deliver, sotto voce, a life-sustaining pulse to its audience as it anxiously waited for the grand drama of his life to proceed. This, he thought, was just the dramatis persona he needed.
A Note About Meaning
Meaning is what an audience tries to give art when the medium itself is ineffable. Poems like T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land ” and John Berryman’s “The Dream Songs” are accepted today as having a discernible content and an interpretable discourse. But history tells us that the vast majority of critical readers didn’t know what to make of these poems until many years later when critical opinion eventually coalesced and pronounced their themes and method of discourse.
Notable Books of Poetry in 2013
In no particular order of relevance are my picks for notable poetry books in 2013: Dear Boy by Emily BerryContinue Reading
J.H. Prynne and Cybernetics in “Nibble Song”
Prynne achieves enviable compression of language by a heightened use of linguistic and cultural references that are strategically employed to treat themes of modern life. As his is a poetry of resistance to the new world order, it challenges the hegemony of the hardened shells of political and social structures that attempt to dominate human sentience.
Reading Ange Mlinko’s Marvelous Things Overheard
Ange Mlinko’s new book of poetry, Marvelous Things Overheard, expresses our contemporary experience by way of micronarratives, using poetry’s familiar lens of myth, fable, and anecdote, and overlaying these with the received “truth” of the arts, science and technology as they are filtered through our national experiences and family histories. The psychological perspective, one that Mlinko surely sees as uniting us with ancients, discloses an unsettling arrhythmia at the heart of our existence in the modern world.
“Clearances” by Seamus Heaney
Concluding his essay on Wallace Stevens in Poetry and the Age, Randall Jarrell commented: “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.” If that is so, Seamus Heaney was a lightning rod.
Emily Berry: ‘A Sculpture about a Phone Call’
Originally posted on Peony Moon:
Emily Berry is a poet, freelance writer and editor. She grew up…
Colgate Writers Conference (June 16 – 22, 2013)
I thought readers might like to hear about the Colgate Writers Conference (CWC), my first workshop experience. The CWC isContinue Reading
Fran Lock – Flatrock
Flatrock is a very impressive first book by any standard. Its reeling portraits of lower class life hearken to the rough speech, coarse sentiments and unapologetic sexuality of Emile Zola’s Germinal or Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road by employing neo-romantic realism and social comment to create an exciting visceral experience for the reader. Ms. Lock’s voice, by turns perceptive, witty and tart, and yet still capable of great tenderness, is remarkably consistent throughout, . . .
AGAINST INTERPRETATION 