Contemporary Women Poets – The Ongoing Literary Renaissance
Okay, indulge me. Gather round while I tell you a story about something that has been going on for theContinue Reading
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Reading Rae Armantrout’s Money Shot
Armantrout’s technique is exploratory. She juxtaposes sermingly unrelated ideas and organizes them to evoke surprisingly intellectual and emotional resonances. In contrast to Pound’s imagism, Armantrout’s system of organization dislocates traditional associations in order to expose the fundamental bias of their presumptions.
From “The Long Decline of Reading” by Adrian Hon
As an introduction to my own blog entry on Randall Jarrell and George Steiner, I suggest you read Adrian Hon’sContinue Reading
Stephen Mallarmé’s “Le chevelure vol d’une flame à l’extrême”
In this impressionistic translation of Stephen Mallarmé’s sonnet, “Le chevelure vol d’une flame à l’extrême,” I have attempted to discloseContinue Reading
Reading Michael Robbins – Alien vs. Predator
While he writes as a new age poète maudit, following the example of François Villon, Tristan Corbière, and Claude Baudelaire, one can hardly recall a more confrontational voice that challenges the sanctity of everything, especially poetry, which Robbins cannibalizes with evil delight. The fading glory of the natural world and the Keatsian ideal, “truth is beauty, beauty truth,” hold nothing for him, except as sullied palimpsest upon which to write his inspired graffiti. In the Bizarro world of the irrational, profligate and amoral that Robbins apprehends, “The truth makes me hurl; the truth is a mistake.”
Randall Jarrell and George Steiner – Contemporary Reading and Writing
In 1950, Harvard hosted a conference called “The Defense of Poetry” where Randall Jarrell delivered his famous lecture on “The Obscurity of the Poet.” To Jarrell the obscurity of contemporary poetic expression was less an absolute value and more the result of the decline of readers who relied on literary texts as a primary means of cultural edification. Twenty-eight years later, George Steiner (in “Text and Context,” the first essay in his renowned treatise, On Difficulty) came to the same conclusion, albeit with a different treatment of the subject matter, and offered a more draconian solution to the problem of the evaporating degrees of literacy among English readers.
Golf Whore
Since that time part of my internal life has been absorbed by this convergence of senses: the smell of freshly cut grass, the bounce of the turf under foot, the hazard wind on my cheek, the weight of a bag of clubs over my shoulder, the sunlight on a white-hot golf ball flung against an intense blue sky and falling to an absinthe-green fairway, where it bounces and rolls to a breathless stop, and the faintest of sounds that is heard when a ball is finally struck along a tightly mowed and sinuously undulating surface of grass toward the inevitable, unsuspecting hole.
Alexander Pope – Peri Bathous
[Revised March 8, 2018] In my despair for the state of the art of contemporary poetry, especially in light ofContinue Reading
Poetry Criticism – What Is It For?
Interesting panel discussion by Marjorie Perloff, Helen Vendler, Susan Wheeler, a young Stephen Burt and others. http://www.jacketmagazine.com/12/psa-panel.html Also read StephenContinue Reading
Prose style – Christopher Ricks on William Empson
Ricks sees Empson’s perception grounded in his “magnanimity,” i.e., his complete grasp of the sensibility bearing upon literary expression and the real-world circumstances to which it is addressed. So, when Empson examines the select authors in Using Biography, noticing that critical appreciation had focused on their misplaced link to Christianity, Empson finds fertile ground by attacking the question from another side, showing that this lens was in fact a way to misapprehend their work.
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