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Abstract: When Sir Karl Popper (1902–94) was twenty years old, he became an apprentice to Adalbert Pösch, an old master cabinetmaker in Vienna. A university student at the time, Popper claims that he learned more about the theory of knowledge from this "omniscient master" than from any of his teachers. "For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew," wrote Popper in Unending Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976), "but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance."Popper worked with this omniscient cabinetmaker for two years, after which he decided that he was "too ignorant and too fallible" to make mahogany writing desks ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On first glance, it seems easy enough to define the "campus novel" (which is as often called the academic novel). In many, maybe most cases, it's a comic, maybe satirical text that follows an alienated protagonist (who has, historically, been white and male) mired in and/or bounced around by any number of campus absurdities: department infighting, institutional rituals, budget agonies, bureaucratic nonsense, and so on. More often than not, this life at the college or university is complicated by petty antagonisms and/or romantic entanglements between colleagues, challenges offered by difficult campus characters (who are as likely to be students as professors), and, typically, confusingly shifting campus cultures ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The campus novel has changed as campuses and their denizens have changed. Critics often treat the genre as a continuous one, harking back to Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe (1952) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), and they sometimes still invoke David Lodge's Small World (1985) as a send-up of contemporary academic life. But anyone coming through university gates since the late 1980s has encountered a very different world from Small World, and fiction has likewise changed. As I've described in "The Rise of the Academic Novel" (2012) and elsewhere, we have seen a new age of campus fiction since then, one that responds to the ubiquity of higher education in American life. Rather than an ivory tower ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Near the end of the second year of my PhD program, my peers and I spent a good chunk of time assembling our plans of study. The process was shrouded in mystery, mostly because the plan-of-study form required us to outline what courses we would take for the remainder of our years in graduate school, despite the fact that course offerings were only visible to students about a half-semester in advance. We turned in our plans of study with wild guesses and speculation.None of us knew how long approval from the graduate college would take, only that approval was needed to take our comprehensive exams. Months passed, the pandemic struck. About a year later, during a university holiday, I received a notification that my ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: It's not like Ji-Yoon Kim was pining her entire career to be a department chair—and then finally became one. Rather, like many who end up as chairs, when the department calls your number to serve, you oblige. Ready or not, it often appears to be an offer too good to refuse.The Chair (2021) is a Netflix series that follows the fictive life of a newly appointed English department chair of Pembroke College. Professor Kim is played by Sandra Oh, who is well known for her roles as Cristina Yang on the medical drama series Grey's Anatomy and as Eve Polastri in the spy thriller series Killing Eve. Here she is cast as the first Asian American woman chair of her Ivy League English department. Given Oh's star power, it is a ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Lan Samantha Chang, director of the MFA program at the University of Iowa, situates her novel All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost at a prestigious writing program in 1986, during the era in which graduate creative writing classes took place at night, with cigarettes, angst, and paper cups of cheap wine. Graduates of programs during that time will remember urban legends—or incidents—involving dead fish slapped on the table in the form of opinions, and students leaving the classroom in tears.All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is, unlike most academic novels, creative-writing-specific; it speaks to current conversations about the teaching of poetry, fiction, essay, and drama, and to critiques of the "workshop model" in ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Vicarious pleasure can be derived from reading Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys (1995), but over the years I kept wondering: Who and where are the wonder girls' Where are American campus and academic novels about indocile, out-of-control women who are writers based in academia, unlucky in life and love yet always landing on both feet, eccentric and wildly charming' There is a tendency to cast as protagonists unhappy women, tormented victims rather than fierce and empowered individuals with agency, resilience, and a sense of humor, so it seems that a female counterpart of Grady Tripp, a happy-go-lucky writer protagonist who gets away with everything, is missing in American literature. But perhaps what defines a wonder ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Alex Kudera's Fight for Your Long Day criticizes an under-discussed issue in the literary conversation surrounding higher education—adjunct labor. The book's main character, Cyrus Duffleman, is a man of few lauded traits; he lacks confidence, is overweight, struggles economically, and is often distracted by the stress and expectations of his overworked life. Although this novel successfully forces the reader to analyze the adjunctification and abuse of faculty across higher education, it does so by what feels like an intentional exaggeration of reality as Duffleman works through his "long day." This intentional over-exaggeration skews the reality of adjunct labor in such a way that the reader questions not only the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Tabish Khair's How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position imposes itself on the genre of the academic novel—insofar as there is agreement that there is such a genre—in an idiosyncratic way. Eschewing easy parody and satire, it thematizes some of the most pressing challenges and conditions that confront higher education in the second decade of the twenty first century and especially in the humanities and liberal arts. Though the novel is set in Århus, Denmark, circa 2005, the themes, tropes, and sources of conflict it engages resemble the professional and institutional conversations that characterize US higher education. This suggests that there is some international dimension to the "crisis of the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Daniel Olivas is a real modern-day superhero. Land use and conservation attorney by day and poet, playwright, fiction author, editor, and essayist by night, Olivas works relentlessly to transform our world for the better. In his fiction (short and long form and kid's picture book), poetry, and plays he dances between genre, tone, voice—as well as Spanish and English, myth and everyday gritty reality. Reading Olivas, I think of authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Nelida Piñon, and Sergio Pitol who masterfully reframe everyday interpersonal relations and interactions in new and often uncanny ways that reverberate across our imagination and soul. And, when Olivas leans into storytelling modes like the fantastic or magical ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As one gets older, memory looks for somewhere to sit or perhaps just a wall to lean against. I felt the cold breeze of age when I attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference in Philadelphia in March 2022. I was wandering around the bookfair when I ran into Indran Amirthanayagam. This is what poets do when they are not writing—they wander. Wasn't it Langston Hughes who wrote the autobiographical book I Wonder as I Wander many years ago' Indran and I met in 1993 at a bookstore in Washington, DC. The man is a poetry man, not the one Phoebe Snow sang about but a Pablo Neruda type of guy. A poet and a diplomat. While at the AWP conference we had a chance to sit at a small table and ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Robert L. Shuster's To Zenzi, a war ends, a society crumbles, teenagers die or come of age, and the hunt for a good Nazi continues. To Zenzi is a sometimes picaresque, other times nightmarish, and always momentous romp through the smoldering ruins of the Third Reich, although the narrative will lurch across time and continents. Whether Shuster prevails in a quest that has already been attempted in books and Hollywood movies may be more of a matter of taste than literary merit for some. The search for any good Nazi has been complicated in recent days by the damage Nazi-inspired groups and politicians are intent on exacting here and abroad in self-aggrandizing campaigns to accumulate power. The redemption of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: World War II has not ended. Not quite, not yet, and it probably never will. At least that is the strong impression we are left with if we pay attention to the underlying tensions in R. Sebastian Bennett's novel The Final Yen. It is a story told through the perspective of an American who learns, down to the most minute detail, what it takes to be successful in the Japanese business world of the late 1980s. This is a time when the economic competition (tempered by collaboration) between the two world powers has reached a peak, especially by means of the car industry. The Final Yen reflects precisely on this period through the eyes of the American narrator, leading us through a labyrinth of intrigue, connections, and ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: See the red planet in my eyes, Kitten' Dad said, teeth stacked up like snow cones."Only vertical trip worth taking."Sometimes it feels as if he's still sitting around, waiting for the milky world to line up and trust him.People will fall for anything.Some dangle the promise of a ride to Mars. Others dangle the promise of home.Where does a man go when he leaves' Whether a father, a husband, a lover. Does he die or disappear into the night, an evanescent spirit spinning vertically to Mars' What of the women, the wives and daughters left behind' Do they perform their own vanishing acts physically, emotionally, metaphysically' How do they cope' Where do they find solace' How do they replace the missing man-shaped hole ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Lynda Schor's debut novel, Dearth, published by New Meridian Arts, encapsulates the innate horrors, both personal and social, of national borders. What begins as a seemingly innocuous friends' trip south of the US–Mexico border to Juárez for a bullfight is quickly transformed into a muddled, life-or-death survival between two worlds. As the plot weaves back and forth between Mexico and the United States, and simultaneously between the personal and the social, Schor unravels a narrative that blends the two at every turn, mirroring the harried lives experienced in such a space as borders.Ray, the novel's central figure, a geology professor and widower who reluctantly agrees to join his married friends Felix and ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Since the 1920s, scholars and writers have tracked the progress of the six million African Americans over sixty years who left the segregated South and headed north in what is known as the Great Migration, one of the largest movements of people in history. With notable exceptions—James Baldwin, for instance; and the women of Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)—the oral histories, sociological studies, poetry, and novels have been dominated by a heteronormative authority. In her new novel about the back-and-forth flow of people and their stories between the South and the nominal North, M Shelly Conner tries to correct this deficit, with arresting results. Conner's everyman—the name is just one of many of the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me, the story collections of Jen Fawkes, demonstrate the breadth and depth of the author's imagination to be, like her fabulist fictions, nothing short of remarkable. Fawkes is such a master of sustaining our enchantment, I could not resist reading the stories—and both of the books—one right after the other and then looking forward to more. Delays resulting from COVID-19 caused Tales the Devil Told Me to be released shortly after Mannequin and Wife, and their coincidence only displays Fawkes's rare gift for developing narrative momentum, novelty, and richness across a substantial repertoire—Mannequin numbers twenty stories, Tales eleven—of short fiction. The stories share ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Christine Hume published Saturation Project, a lyric memoir, at the beginning of 2021 with Solid Objects. It feels like an appropriate book for a press called Solid Objects. The design of the Saturation Project and the structure of the work inside have qualities of tangibility—it feels holdable, turn-overable, in your hands, an artifact.The work asks the reader to reread as well as read. In and of itself the book functions through rereading. We, the readers, may know that "Solid Objects" is also the title of a short story by Virginia Woolf.The illustration on the cover of Saturation Project is reminiscent of the cover of Woolf's The Waves, and Hume's book feels equally saturated and saturating. Poetic and lyric ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Imagine a terrace above a city of antiquity, a view of a glittering bay, a Campari in hand, and across the table an engaging fellow regaling you with savvy cultural observations, tasty reminiscences, and eye-opening wartime tales. If that sounds appealing but you can't swing the airfare, fix the drink yourself and crack open a copy of The Archeology of a Good Ragù, wherein the affable jack-of-all-trades John Domini (novelist, critic, poet, journalist, translator) will tell you about Naples. Author of three novels set in this complex, melting pot of a city—famous for pizza, postcard views, and Vesuvius; notorious for crime and grit—Domini now delivers a freewheeling memoir to explain how and why the place has come ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, McKenzie Wark's new book on the late author, appears to break with the telegraphic intimacy of their published email correspondence, I'm Very into You (2015). In the first part of Philosophy for Spiders, Wark visits Acker in San Francisco, where they eat, ride a motorcycle, and fuck. Yet the book is not a literary biography like Chris Kraus's After Kathy Acker (2017). Wark instead aims for "a writing-and-reading between bodies rather than subjects." Philosophy for Spiders shows how bodies create concepts; or as Wark later explains: "the critical theory here is bottom theory." When Acker fucks Wark with one of her dildos, static gendered pronouns become ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This is a book I spent a hundred dollars on, back in the days when I did not have a hundred dollars.What happened was, I found it in a used bookstore in Chicago, one where you have to go down four steps, then four more—and watch your head. There, in a dusty corner, I found myself blowing cat fluff off the top of a handsome copy of Finnish Folk Poetry: Epic (1977)—which doesn't actually have a colon on the cover, so it looked like the title was Finnish Folk Poetry Epic. I opened to a random page, and read this complete poem:Elk and SnakeAn elk ran from Hiisi's landkicked a cowberry on the heathit gnawed a twig as it randrank a lake when it thirsted.It ran into a new houseinto a splendid chamber:it saw a ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Letters Written and Not Sent is posthumous collected poetry written by a man who was a successful executive and financier. One of the duties of anyone who achieves a worthy, but perhaps prosaic, professional career is to honor the impulse to engage in reflection—through, for example, poetry—to make sense of the past, as well as to create something new, surprising. By thinking, feeling, and probing for words and images, the writer uncovers meaning couched in nuance, discovers relationships between impressions that were unforeseen. Louis-Dreyfus speaks for everyone in that stage of life. Readers of this book will meet a man who used language to further an attitude of inquiry about his own relationship to events he ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Poets, arguably more so than other writers, inherit a great challenge in the responsibility of titling their work. It can be difficult enough to meaningfully encapsulate the breadth of personal experience and translate emotional themes into verse, let alone come to terms with such weighty subjects in a single word or phrase. When a title must bear not only the weight of expression but that of a sociopolitical statement as well, that challenge only increases.After reading Destiny O. Birdsong's debut poetry collection, Negotiations, some will be left wondering when and how that title was settled upon. Was it an emotional state within which she began, a word plucked from work (the collection's first and title poem), a ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: A much respected and familiar figure in the American poetry community for decades, especially in New York, Grace Schulman served as poetry editor of The Nation from 1972 to 2006 as well as the director of Manhattan's iconic 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center from 1973 to 1985. While at the Unterberg Center, she oversaw and introduced readings by such esteemed poets as Ted Hughes, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds, and Octavio Paz, as well as initiating the annual "Discovery Poetry Contest" for poets who have yet to publish full-length collections. A distinguished professor of CUNY's Baruch College, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Frost Medalist for Distinguished ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The labyrinthine journeys toward becoming a mother are often shrouded in darkness: the pain of miscarriage, the strangeness of one's changing body, the complicated emotions of new motherhood, let alone the knotty relationships we might have with our own mothers as adults—these are not often the subject of casual conversation, let alone sanctified in the language of poetry. Though the past two decades have seen a proliferation of poetry that deals directly with the complex experiences of mothers—Tender Hooks (2004) by Beth Ann Fennelly, Instant Winner (2014) by Carrie Fountain, and Landscape with Headless Mama (2016) by Jennifer Givhan, to name just a few—there is still a sense that poetry on motherhood exists in ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Meg Kearney gives much credit to Diana Wells, whose book 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2002, guided her toward many of the poems in this wonderful book. There are two kinds of poems in her book—poems about birds, and poems about birds that lead her to a confession of a hidden wound of her own.An example of her great skill and imagination is "Oriole," a perfect elegy written as a description of an oriole's nest:To build their nest they stole my mother's cigarettes.Next they snagged her booze. They took her heatingpads and measuring cups. Plucked her blood-soakedtissues, bright as carnations, from the waste basket;they took her shopping list, zip-up ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1630, one hundred enslaved Africans (one-third of the population) lived in New Amsterdam, soon to be New York City. By 1712 New York was an epicenter of the slave trade, and a cemetery was created for Negroes, enslaved or free, as well as Native Americans and indentured whites. About fifteen thousand bodies were unceremoniously buried there, and it was not until October 1991 that an excavation crew for a new federal building discovered the remains of 419 human skeletons. Thus was the African Burial Ground, the oldest and largest slave cemetery in America, unearthed. "See: all of us / now mothered by mother earth / and murder's milk."With a powerful trifecta of history, lyricism, and empathy, David Mills creates ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Of Greg Fraser's third collection, Designed for Flight, published in 2014, poet Richard Howard wrote, "What astonishes the reader is that the poems are not confident or even hopeful, but correct, obviously true." Now, with his most recent book, Little Armageddon, Fraser continues his clear-eyed gazing into the tiny and tremendous abysses of modern American life. This collection is a significant achievement that portrays the poetic speaker's experience of the comedy and the burden of midlife, sandwiched between generations. What makes Little Armageddon singular is Fraser's mastery of poetic form and his incorporation of both complex thought and nuanced feeling into his poetic meditations.The contemporary poetry ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Kit Robinson's Thought Balloon is a complex work in which apparently isolated particulars, observations, insights and idioms have a surprising way of turning up as overtones within others. And I appreciate the way the book presents both ends of a continuum—on the one hand, the gentle, almost delicate registration of specificities:There are sentences sound doesn't mess withSo silent they are written into the bodyand on the other, generalized jeremiads, such as we find in "Resistance is Joy":When thieves rule the worldOnly the outcast is trustworthyBut what's significant is that each particular in this book resonates with all the others. And the overtones bounce between the near and the far, bringing ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Lucas Farrell, whose the blue-collar sun won the 2020 Sundog Poetry Book Award, is a Vermont farmer. The combination of farming, poetry, and Vermont may conjure up an image of Robert Frost, but a century clearly separates Farrell's generation from Frost's. Big Picture Farm, which Farrell owns with his wife, the artist Louisa Conrad, includes a B&B and a confectionery as well as a flock of forty goats. Farrell's poetry is similarly twenty-first century, inclined to experiments in form and structure that extend considerably beyond playing tennis without a net. Like all good poetry, however, it is based on nuanced observation of the world. The prose poem "Sugaring," for instance, begins with a wittily apt description ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Native New Yorker Ilka Scobie is not infatuated with the city of her birth. Her regard for the urban puzzle known as New York City is a mature love recognizing its flaws with unapologetic nostalgia. She pulls this off with aplomb, as in "2B": "Brooklyn, where I'm from, boasts mad Bs / Bedford Stuyvesant, Bed-Stuy, do or die / Brownsville, or the Ville / Bay Ridge of sweeping bridge." In "Taxi" she mourns the direction the economy of New York City has taken, as evidenced by the extinction of the iconic Checker cab: "Soon you will be a nostalgic footnote, like Gem Spa, egg creams, / The Village Voice, and subway tokens. / We are left with Uber, Via, Lyft; acronyms for anonymity."In "What to Wear to the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: "It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets and of no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament that fully responds to them," said John Burroughs in the opening line of his Birds and Poets (1877). As proof, the world abounds with poems about and inspired by birds. Although Edward Morin's new book often strays from that feathered subject, The Bold News of Birdcalls is filled with a variety of songs as well as the "news" of stories. The collection is divided into four sections of fairly equal size, each with a varied tone suggested by its title: "Noise of Blue Jays," "Melody of Wrens," "Endurance of Robins," and "Passage of Swans."With boisterous, troublesome jays ("sinister as ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Reading Brianna Noll's second collection, The Era of Discontent, is akin to taking an elemental bath in water essenced by the natural, spiritual, and astral realms. There is a hint of something, a sense that at any moment in your reading of the collection, perhaps by the next page, by another poem, or even line, there might be that sought-after mysterious ingredient the author requires for a sudden Philosopher's Stone epiphany. There is a controlled yet almost desperate search in these poems for meaning in the larger world, what we see of it right in our faces and what we cannot (but suspect might exist) see out in the universal—something of poetry leveraging Raymond Williams's affect theory to knowingly lead us to ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: For someone who lived most of her life trapped in the hustle and bustle of filthy streets and subways, surrounded by noise and air pollution, and devalued by toxic work conditions that added to her generational karma, reading Scudder H. Parker's Safe as Lightning would have been daunting. However, it wasn't. In fact, it was spiritually enlightening. Having been through the COVID-19 lockdown for most of 2020, I shifted from political anger to being grounded—more open to oneness with nature and humanity, learning to forgive myself and others, putting the past on the shelf, and experiencing life in a haiku moment.Parker's approach is no-frills. His poetry has a forgotten wholesomeness seen in children's books or in ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Those who gave their lives that we might live free include some poets, it seems. And this book shows that Larry Fagin was one of them. The bio in the intro shows that this was not based on sacrifice so much as on totally giving of himself to the arts. It reads like an impossible picaresque and Quixotic saga, as we hear about him interacting with figures and scenes we now think of as essential to his times. The half-century from 1966 to 2016 offered many places to give of oneself, and Larry seems to have shown up in nearly all of them—finding himself in the impossible dream. He was made of these things. He was that giving; it was not a giving up.What he gives us in these poems (selected by Miles Champion) is the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Harold Jaffe's latest volume, Strange Fruit & Other Plays, is a compelling exploration of Art and History. The work comprises a selection of dramatic texts, a new literary form for Jaffe, author of more than thirty books. The title of the book derives from Billie Holiday's anthemic song, "Strange Fruit," about the horror of a lynching in the South. The song was written by a Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx, who was also a writer and activist. He handed it to Billie Holiday after a gig in a Greenwich Village club. The song immediately moved her.Jaffe's dramas, which themselves expose racial issues and endorse humanistic cooperation, explore sociocultural and political themes and trends through a combination ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Radu Oreian is an emerging artist from Romania who currently works in Marseilles, France. Finding inspiration from Renaissance masters, medieval manuscripts, and philosophical figures, his works create connections across time and space by folding the history of art and ideas into his pieces. His works use a variety of mediums and consistently challenge the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and drawing. Using the Braille alphabet in recent pieces, he has added another dimension to his work, addressing the physicality of communication. Most importantly, his work is communal—it is a radical attempt to bring disparate pieces together in harmony in a time when that is greatly needed.Radu Oreian's work has ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Julia Frey, biographer of Toulouse-Latrec, has written a biography of Édouard Vuillard that begins with her explanation of her own amazement at his work:I was around twenty when I first saw art by Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940). … I felt summoned, magnetized by their (the art works') subtly constructed beauty. They seemed nearly abstract, composed with conflicting proportions and perspectives and using wildly contrasting patterns: flowered wallpaper; striped upholstery; draperies; tapestries; tile work. … As I came close, I realized that these canvases nearly always included figures who blended so seamlessly into the background as to be nearly invisible. Most often they were women, dressed in marvellous ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Ed Sanders has now added another dimension to his colorful oeuvre and the practice of what he calls "investigative poetry." Beyond history and poetry, song and performance, Sanders now gives us a biography of ideas in the work and life of one of his poet-heroes: Charles Olson. Olson's place in poetry is significant for many. He serves both as a positive model and as an object around which critical ideas have been focused. Olson is not universally adulated. In recent years, the poet and scholar Heriberto Yépez has centered some sharply critical thinking on the life and times of Olson (The Empire of Neomemory; 2007, trans. 2013). This thinking aims to deconstruct and expose sexism, racism, and bellicosity in the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Why would a poet, good with words, good with words in the world, good with worlds in the words, filled with things to say, imagining ways to say them, and simply loving the way poems, as one enters them, lead the poet to write them—why would a poet want to learn to work with type, layout, paper, print, pages, editing, distribution, etc.' Why would a poet want to make books' Why would a poet want to begin a literary press'I can speak for myself, and will, but that is through a long lens of memory, as I was a poet who began to learn to print and make books almost forty-three years ago. Memory plays tricks, though, so I also spoke to students between two weeks and ten days ago in the printshop at Naropa University in ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Founded in 1994 by Sara Hunt—a UK publishing professional then living in Norwalk, Connecticut—in the early years Saraband created and produced nonfiction books in nature, history, and arts subjects, working with larger publishers to whom we licensed the books. Several of our titles from the 1990s have remained continuously in print—for example, Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier, by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, available for almost three decades now from the University of Oklahoma Press. Our raison d'être was to identify and develop writing by (and often about) women and underrepresented groups that were at the time often overlooked.We relocated to Glasgow, Scotland, in 2000. In 2011, with the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: John Winthrop's vision of a "city on a hill" has been a byword for the utopian promise of American democracy. Yet, as Charles Olson's Maximus Poems laments, Winthrop's imagination "that men / cared / for what kind of … world / they chose to/live in" was broken within a few years: "you cld carry cinders in yr hand / for what the country was worth." We might now again be carrying cinders in our hands for what the country is worth. Perhaps the breakdown is only a cyclical inevitability; perhaps it has become a permanent dysfunction. What resources do we have for facing a possible permanence' One resource—fusing a politics and poetics of the future—might be discoverable in some of D. H. Lawrence's neglected novels.They ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: When I first started directing musical theatre, twenty years ago, I decided that directing Into the Woods would be a fun challenge. I was working on my PhD and wanted local actors to have the same passion for Sondheim and literature that I did. They did not, but they were talented, and we learned a lot from each other, about life and about Sondheim. On instinct, my "Little Red," a very talented and very innocent young actor, decided to carry the knife given after she killed the wolf, in her corseted top, between her breasts. The Freudian imagery was lost on her and most of the cast. It was so very Sondheim though. His work does many things, but what it does best is teach us to trust our instincts, our deep-seated ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-29T00:00:00-05:00
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