Liz Berry – The Patron Saint of School Girls
Liz Berry is the Emerging Poet in Residence at Kingston University and already the owner of a distinguished publishing andContinue Reading
Tag: poetry
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
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.
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.
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
The Casual Perfect by Lavinia Greenlaw
Science has also shown that our sense of being “in love” is the product of the hormonal activities of phenylethylamine, norepinephrine and dopamine. In The Casual Perfect, Ms. Greenlaw has found a way to tap these hormones so that receptive readers experience a sense of love’s intoxication, its joy and pain, as if “jacked-in” to its Matrix. Indeed, this may be the greatest book of poetry about being in love since Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, for like that great work Ms. Greenlaw has made the trajectory of a personal love story the heartbeat of this volume.
Mark Levine’s “Unemployment” Poems
The July/August ’12 issue of POETRY features three new poems by Mark Levine, each entitled “Unemployment.” These poems are essentiallyContinue Reading
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