The two traveling salesmen look superb…. My immediate superior Moreira, the embodiment of monotony and routine, looks much more human than I do! The Book of Disquiet is an unforgettable reminder that representations of the real are as real as the real—assuming the representations, being more durable, are not more so. It is a book to be read slowly. Long entries are four pages, which make it easy to pick up and put down. So effectively does Pessoa become Soares that this reader at least was prompted to take new soundings of his own depths.
One wonders how we will regard Pessoa once all his work is translated into English, a project New Directions is undertaking. What will it mean to have all of the work of a person who never wanted to live up to his name? Reviewed by Annabel Haynes. A few years ago I was shown around the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh by a friend, an object conservator there, who pointed to an elaborately carved Maori waka taua , a war canoe, hanging from the ceiling.
The waka was made before in Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. When it first arrived at the museum, it was badly damaged and was kept behind the scenes, for years deemed too difficult for the public to interpret in its fragmented state. But recently the museum enlisted the help of Maori artist George Nuku, as well as a team of conservators, who rebuilt parts of the boat, most strikingly refashioning the missing stern using clear and colorless acrylic, carved to match the rest of the highly ornate patterning, to complete the object—make it interpretable, visible, as a canoe.
The point of the project, as of much modern-day conservation, was to preserve the object and enable people to see it in its full glory. Rather than attempting to hide the marks of repair, and restore the object to an approximation of its former guise, these additions announce themselves as additions and present the history of the making, the breaking, and the remaking of the object.
The repairs are also reversible, bearing in mind that future generations of conservators might adopt a different view on restoration and intervention. The resulting object was magnificent, beautiful, a little ghostly, and perhaps even greater than the sum of its parts. Bunting spoke about his work infrequently, wrote slight, often mischievous or deliberately abstruse notes, and famously requested that his correspondents burn his letters, especially those that might reveal something more about his poems, or himself, than was there on the published page.
Similarly, Bunting spoke out against particular kinds of exegesis and had a strong antipathy toward academic scholarship and its shelf-heavy institutions though he taught in several universities. Do not let the people who set examinations kid you that you are any nearer understanding a poem when you have parsed and analysed every sentence, scanned every line, looked up the words in the Oxford Dictionary and the allusions in a library of reference books. That sort of knowledge will make it harder for you to understand the poem because, when you listen to it, you will be distracted by a multitude of irrelevant scraps of knowledge.
You will not hear the meaning, which is in the sound. So what is a scholar and editor of his work supposed to do? Share navigates these difficulties sensitively, but assertively: Heeding him, Share anticipates difficulties any reader—whether seasoned or new—might encounter reading the poems, but he also anticipates an independent, inquiring, and intelligent reader: Furthermore, the poems appear on the pages unblemished by footnotes, endnotes, or asterisks.
Share has thoughtfully added line numbers and students of Bunting thank him for it , as annotations and appendices are placed at the back of the volume for the inquisitive to explore as an adjunct to the primary material of the book: A reader might not realize what a feat it is that, at last, an authoritative, scholarly edition of the poems has been put into print. Share presents this material at the back of the book rather than alongside the poems, offering it to but not forcing it upon the reader.
Publishing such a comprehensive glossary and reference guide to the poem runs the risk that some of the fun of misunderstanding, or digging around, or guessing, will be lost. But what these notes bring to the reading community far outweighs these small gripes, and produces a modernist masterpiece in technicolor, opening it up to new readers and readings.
This is the kind of modernist magic that Bunting, Pound, and Eliot were seeking to make. I dont like formal logic. But there are still obscurities. Under sacks on the stone two children lie, hear the horse stale, the mason whistle, harness mutter to shaft, felloe to axle squeak, rut thud the rim, crushed grit. Woodings suggests that he and the press had something of a checkered history. Share provides quotations from scholarship on Bunting, too, which is part of what makes the volume so generous.
Share preempts our questions, usefully deterring researchers from walking up tempting but blind alleys. These appeared posthumously in Sharp Study and Long Toil. Share has done the groundwork, filled gaps, and anticipated the sorts of scholarship that might be required or desired in the future. Good conservation is an art, entails craft, and has a philosophy and ethics behind its practice. Editing a volume is an act of conservation, in which the editor must think not only about the value of the poems to future generations, but the meaning, resonances, and implications of the method which they adopt.
What is included and what is left out? How much help should the reader be given? What sort of interventions, even in the form of repairs or corrections, ought to be made, and how do you signal that they are interventions? What effect do interventions have on the story of how the poem came to be the way it is? At what point is a poem complete? What is an original, and does the original matter? Share has evidently carefully considered these concerns.
The speaker of such a sentence, it can be easily assumed, could safely plug such an evocation of banishment and assault, without any extraneous clues, into countless injustices. Into the isolation of a refugee camp, for instance. What if you know what the context is, but have no notion of placing it? Caite Dolan-Leach writes in a blurb at the back of the book: We meet Nadia and Ange, both respectable schoolteachers, at a moment in their lives when everyone around them has seemed to turn on them.
But of course they do. Nadia and Ange have done this to themselves, their world seems to argue. It is as if Nadia and Ange have gone to bed in a perfectly normal world and woken up the next day in a fascist, dystopic Bordeaux that has stripped them of their dignity and made them outcasts where once they were welcomed.
Their neighbors, save one, have disappeared. They are no longer wanted at their school, even urged to never come again. That is unquestionably what is happening to Nadia—and by association, we learn, to Ange—but it is not the only thing. Nadia cannot bring herself to speak her predicament, but it is precisely the nature of a game she is relearning that drives the plot forward.
Reviews I have read of My Heart Hemmed In speak of the mystery-that-must-not-be-named as something that the reviewers gradually learned—something that was perhaps even revealed at the very end. And yet we eventually come to understand that Nadia is probably North African. This seems, perhaps, a little obvious and also beside the point. Through the narrative, Nadia gradually descends into a sort of purgatorial state of paranoia, but the devil is not in the details of her ethnicity, for those are never in question.
It tells us, perhaps, too much for comfort. For Nadia, who committed the crime of aspiring to the cultured, to the elite, there must come a reckoning. And the reckoning comes with ordeals often too brutal to read.
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Her paranoia is accompanied by a progressive weight gain that repulses everyone, for which she is constantly chided. The punishment for her ignorance is swift and unrelenting. Indeed, My Heart Hemmed In , through its unpretentious translation, comes off as a triumph of introspection so profound and yet so brutal that the reading of the protagonist as an unlikable female character with whom one cannot empathize rankles. What have you done with your life?
Could NDiaye be telling us that, after all that we do, we must ultimately return home? That sanctimony, NDiaye spares us. This review will be published in issue Reviewed by Cassandra Cleghorn. In every poem of Landscape with Sex and Violence , Lynn Melnick just about eats the mic, pressing it against her lips as she sings so as to boost the bass and rasp of each lyric.
Yes, Melnick tells all with a frankness that recalls the tradition: Having read generations of forthright, personal poetry, we are used to seeing poets in positions and scenarios we cannot easily unsee e. Why am I here on the sidewalk? In such a context, reading becomes an act of muted listening, building in the reader a rising sense of powerlessness to do anything other than stand by. We may not have asked for it, and yet we must take it. At the end of the book, the poet returns to the idea of confession, simultaneously fulfilling and refusing the promise she herself had broached: The cumulative experience harrows and dizzies.
Numbed by thousands of tweets and testimonials, I approached the book warily. As victims, allies, assailants, and bystanders, we are with this landscape—not simply in it or on it—and each of us has a hand in its destruction and its rebuilding. In her singular, sly way, Melnick names and tends to her own pain and anger so as to bring us as readers into the slow poem-by-poem regeneration of our common culture.
Holding us to the act of witnessing her subversive repair—as we hold her book now in hand—Melnick makes us party to her radical intervention. Reviewed by Jasper Bernes. Flarf was and is many things—a movement, a method, a friend group, an in-joke, an email list. But mostly Flarf was a product of a keenly-felt transitional moment, when the various institutions that glued American poetry together were soaked in the solvent fluids of emergent social media. Poetry, and discourse about it, was no longer beholden to the moderating temporality of the print journal, the gatekeeping of the university MFA program, or the fierce tribalism of the city-based avant-garde scene.
I remember finding it remarkable that my new online friend of the time, Anne Boyer, could win so many readers, admirers, and friends merely by the strength of her blog. For someone like me, stuck in a remote town and fresh out of an MFA program determined to insulate me from everything interesting in the world of poetry, these blogs and email lists were an essential part of my education. This was, in other words, a Golden Age of amateurism, before blogs and bloggers were gobbled up by Facebook and Twitter or domesticated by professional websites and institutions.
Frequently composed from content found on the user-driven sites of the early internet, Flarf channels these amateur energies, but not in a simply celebratory way. The Flarf creation story that Gary Sullivan tells involves his bad feelings upon discovering that his grandfather had been hustled by the scam site Poetry. In response Sullivan writes the worst and most offensive poem possible and submits it to the site, in order to test if there is any lower bound to their aesthetic judgment.
Flarf is born when Sullivan convinces others on the subpoetics email list to submit their terrible and offensive poems to the site. But one of the few disappointing aspects of the anthology that Edge has released is that it provides no context for understanding the work of the twenty-four poets included therein. I do not think Flarf is so self-evident and so well-understood a phenomenon that an anthology can dispense with a contextualizing introduction or some sort of prose supplement.
While it will surprise no one if the editors dread a return to such debates, few contemporary readers are battle-scarred in this way, and they would benefit from some historical and political contextualization. The age of amateurism was also a period when the US government was in the process of killing hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fifteen years on, the power of these poems resides in their ability to capture the goofy enthusiasm of early Web 2. This was also an age of relative political powerlessness, at least by comparison with what comes after the economic crisis of The anti-war movement was massive but also massively weak, and more or less evaporated after the invasion of Iraq. The ironic politics of Flarf shares something with these contemporary expressions. Seminal Flarf poems like K. Flarf satire can be used to powerful effect, but in other instances it goes astray.
One of the problems is that Flarf often displays a simplistic red state vs. Without putting too fine of a point on it, many of the dramatic monologues from language found on the internet express, through ventriloquized irony, middle-class contempt for poor or rural or uneducated whites. Mixed in with that contempt is an unmistakable enjoyment in saying the unsayable, experimenting with language and viewpoints deemed off-limits by middle-class liberal standards. Sullivan is explicit about this as well. Eventually, Sullivan and others created the derepressive space of the Flarflist, where they could share their own experiments with socially toxic materials without fear of censure.
We have here, in miniature, an allegory of internet discourse. On the one hand, the politically correct discursive norms of a certain social media space; on the other hand, the troll who would violate them. This scene has played out in countless ways in the decade and a half since Flarf emerged. The troll will tell you that they have no avowed commitment to the content of their challenges. In the Trump era, however, when the trolls show up with knives and guns, such claims have little ground to stand on. Flarf is not merely a troll poetics. There are other tendencies, as a reading of the anthology will make clear.
In some hands, Flarf seems a variant of documentary poetics, an attempt to sound the depths of nascent digital cultures, providing a cross-sectional study of worlds heretofore understood as separate. In the best Flarf, there is an infectious, lexicographic joy at the weird wondrousness of contemporary English.
Jordan Davis captures it nicely: One cannot read K. Stronger, perhaps, than the documentary impulse though often intermixed with it is a tendency for the Flarf poem to become dramatic monologue. Not all Flarfologues are animated by the same urges, however, and in the hands of a writer such as Katie Degentesh, the dramatic monologue becomes a powerful tool for documentary exploration.
Many of the poems included in the anthology derive from her excellent book The Anger Scale , which used the questions from a personality test the MMPI as search strings, and then created monologues from the results. The effect is compelling, and strikingly different from other Flarf poems, in part because Degentesh works hard to make these poems and their speakers internally coherent.
The seams and fissures in the poems therefore stand out all the more clearly. We are able to see how the poems originate in contradictory social materials and processes. Just as the questions of the MMPI call into being certain speakers and dramatic monologues, so too do the algorithms that drive the content we see online, personalized for us through crude though effective forms of typecasting not so different from the MMPI.
One of the most welcome aspects of this anthology is that it includes newer work by Degentesh from two separate sequences—one concerned with the sex lives of adolescents, and another with the viral properties of the hashtag—that continue the method begun with The Anger Scale. I started wearing bras when my mom told me that I could have sex. Recently she has asked me repeatedly not to wear a bra, telling me I am going to watch my loved ones suffer when I die. Everything gets twisted, but in a way that makes a strange sort of sense: Sometimes I get jealous when this young girl calls and asks Bobby to be the guy that everyone barely remembered when the mostly white community met at the mall for caroling.
Flarf is adolescent, then, in the worst and best ways. It can be annoyingly puerile and sarcastic, or touchingly pimply and embarrassed. But adolescents grow up and there are, today, a number of writers who owe a great deal to Flarf. Flarf and its spirit lives on everywhere, and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in meme culture.
Kitty Goes Postal— wants pizza. Observe kitty eating a slice of pizza. Meme culture is a politically polarized space, and as much as memes can be innocuous diversions emptied of all content, they are also vehicles for the politics of irony that Flarf and kindred forms explore. Memes emerge from same digital spaces as the troll, from message boards like 4chan that offer up a smorgasbord of ironized racism and sexism. Flarf emerged in a moment when a person might reasonably believe that satire could expose the absurdity of the powerful and organize outrage.
Trump effectively puts an end to that. His actions and language outstrip even the most imaginative parody. He neutralizes all outrage and scandal by purposely courting it in advance. He is his own satire, the king of the trolls, and effectively puts an end to a left troll politics, not to mention a troll poetics. Reviewed by Eric Powell.
Poetry has been a consistent, and often humorous, element in the films of Jim Jarmusch. Or Only Lovers Left Alive , in which John Hurt somehow convincingly plays Christopher Marlowe as a vampire who has been alive for hundreds of years. Paterson is pro forma Jarmusch in that almost nothing happens in the film. In place of a plot there is a diurnal filmic sequence that is repeated with minor variations: This sequence is repeated for a full week, Monday through Sunday, with little development.
It is emphatically quotidian, which is where Jarmusch started with his great early films Permanent Vacation and Stranger Than Paradise His films are, in this sense, anti-filmic—or at least anti-Hollywood—eschewing narrative and the eye candy of constant action and special effects. I was surprised on learning at the end of the film that the poems—uninspired plums-in-the-icebox-style Williams stuff—were written by a professional poet, Ron Padgett.
I was grimacing throughout the film each time a poem was read, both because of the poetry itself, which I assumed must have been written by Jarmusch—or perhaps even Adam Driver—and also at the Hallmark-card-kitschy way in which the poems were presented on the screen. This, I thought with a pang, is exactly the kind of innocuous bullshit that people think that poetry is.
A friend justly pointed out the problematic class assumptions lurking beneath the poems, which are either sappy love poems or poems about objects directly in front of Paterson. No doubt Jarmusch and Padgett were going for Williams, but this is denatured Williams: Not so, the boring object poems in Paterson. No doubt unintended, the effect of the poems in the film is to suggest that this lowly bus driver is completely incapable of ideas or extended thought or reflection, despite shots meant to convey thought and reflection. The best parts of Paterson are the scenes in which Paterson is driving his bus route through the city, the conversations between passengers that he overhears, the unadorned poetry of daily life that emerges through the liminal space of transit.
This is what Jarmusch shares with Williams: Each of his films is a kind of paean to a place and its unique life, colors, textures, and rhythms. His poetry lies elsewhere, in the painterly eye he brings to composing single frames; in the development of short sequences and their repetitions; in his ability to work within while ultimately transgressing the boundaries of genre; and in his ability to capture the soul of the place where he shoots. If you named Natalie Shapero the funniest newish poet in America, you might not be wrong, but you would be doing her a disservice.
Humor is only one of her tools, but it happens to be her most versatile—a fifty-function Swiss Army knife supplying her with tweezers, toothpicks, corkscrews, necessities for survival. The funny poets before her would recognize her non sequiturs, mishearings, toppling-over lists, the sort of brusque Plath-grade oversharing that elicits nervous, what-was-that laughter.
Elsewhere, Shapero sounds like the closest American poetry has come in decades to stand-up, though what kind of comedian is she—a whittler of one-liners? Charged with attention always, who could not drift. Keeping all this together depends on a honed sense of comic timing and a sustained performance, sentence by sentence, of raising one expectation while unsettling two more. I have been outside less , I have taken to saying, in the days since my daughter was born — passive, as though it were somebody. And bore her , I also have taken to saying, as though she were a hole.
The poem never drops its chatty, swaggering composure, even when Shapero talks her way into dead ends: Parenting and its cultish entourage give Shapero—a poet nauseated by dogma, officialese, conventional wisdom—a gallery full of targets. Shapero does not wait longer than the opening poem to report: The second list was longer. Mother, it turns out, is as much of a prop as her child, dependent on propping up and changing, treacherously ticking with life: Both poets write from within passivity and powerlessness, prey to everyone, even themselves.
Up on the scaffolding of her crystallized forms, keeping a wary comic distance, there may be a way out. This review was published in issue Reviewed by Alexander Billet. The Story of the Russian Revolution: The centenary of the Bolshevik seizure of power has of course brought out countless commentaries and dissections of the still-controversial event. Others are disgraceful hatchet jobs. Does there need to be another volume written on what took place in Russia one hundred years ago?
What does this curator of the strange and uncanny have to tell us about it? As it turns out, a great deal. And this is connected to the necessity of revisiting and retelling the story of the seizure of power that took place during the October Revolution. His best work reminds us of the power that exists in alterity: The potential of the crowd is a prescient discussion, as ever-present as it is contentious.
He is a Marxist, and an unabashed one. As such, October is resolutely partisan in its sympathy for the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, the ragged soldiers, sailors, and workers who stormed the Winter Palace on October 26, As he writes in the introduction: Because here it is precisely as a story that I have tried to tell it. The year was an epic, a concatenation of adventures, hopes, betrayals, unlikely coincidences, war and intrigue; of bravery and cowardice and foolishness, farce, derring-do, tragedy; of epochal ambitions and change, of glaring lights, steel, shadows; of tracks and trains.
In other words, it is the creative intellect rather than the analytical that leads us here. Russian workers and peasants lived through both abject deprivation and violent flux. World War I was a depraved bloodbath that threw millions into a meat grinder. No matter how they feel about the Revolution, all but the most dishonest historian would accept these as hard truths. But how does the truth evolve? How does one reality become another? Not in the sense of creating fiction, but rather in knowing that the dramatic also holds within it the stuff of social conflict and change.
Petersburg later Petrograd , the primary setting for October , was founded. In , Peter the Great himself supposedly thrust his bayonet into the earth and yawped for there to be a city built on Zayachy Island. In such narratives, the city is a contradictory place: In October , however, St. Petersburg is more than setting; it is its own character, with different versions of itself emerging and taking over depending on which historic force seizes its streets and the form in which it does so. The breadth and diversity of these forces—some of which emerged during or after the toppling of the tsar in February, others radically transformed and rearranged—are often dizzying.
This is no Manichean tale of two sides grappling for a clean victory. Hard-line military men step in and attempt to wrench control of the nation back into authoritarian hands, impatient with the dithering of compromisers. On the other side is a restless subaltern that also straddles the divide between futurity and anachronism: These were further composed of several variants of radical and socialist parties—Bolshevik, Menshevik Left and Right as time progresses , Mezhraiontsy, Socialist Revolutionary again parsed into Left and Right wings , and so on—whose ways forward conflicted as often as they dovetailed.
When these classes instituted their own method of democratic decision making in the form of soviets, the parties became stages for competing visions and philosophies as conditions grow more and more dire. To him, this is not fundamentally where the story exists. It is impossible to talk about the Russian Revolution without him, and both proponents and detractors have granted him a central place in its events. While October does not deny for a second that he was crucial to shaping the path to working-class power, it also has no truck with images of either genius or master manipulator.
He is also, along with the Bolsheviks, outpaced by events through dint of misjudgment or outright absence several times. Such debates and arguments are a constant feature throughout the book, particularly within the Soviets councils of workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants. Here is the scene that played out in April when Lenin arrived in Petrograd after months in exile, greeting a Soviet whose elected representatives were urging caution, arguing against the seizure of power and for the continuation of war: When Lenin at last replied, it was not to the Soviet chair, nor to anyone from its delegation.
The imperialist war, he roared, was the start of European civil war. The longed-for international revolution was imminent…. Ever the internationalist, he concluded with a stirring call to build from this first step: They could only watch numbly as the crowds demanded a further speech. It is the crowds that drive this scene, not Lenin.
This is, after all, the story of a revolution struggling to make itself permanent. Boosters of the revolution might shy from mentioning the violent and senseless crime that streamed into Petrograd life in the weeks leading up to the October Revolution. This is not, as one would expect were the author a detractor, a play at painting the revolution wholly as an act of depravity.
Rather it is to drive home the fact that there was no going back to the old order. It could not hold, and the morbid symptoms as Gramsci famously called them were bound to appear. Much like the revolutionaries themselves, the author must find the hints of utopia in an increasingly dystopian sequence.
Seeing these differing realities, these different visions for the future balancing and pulling on each other, hits home the depth of the rupture taking place within Russian society and the possibility for that shift to go in any direction. It is a markedly different kind of historical event, a different kind of crowd, than the one that lifts the demagogy of right-wing populism on its shoulders. In the midst of overwhelming chaos, there is also the potential for something new to be conceived and invented. Reviewed by Angela Sorby.
Duhamel asks her readers to picture these now-dead women. Labels are too easy. When I type my name,. Reviewed by Andrew Osborn. Bill Knott made himself out to be a sad sack who compensated for his burlap psyche by donning intriguingly tailored hairshirts. As long as change is your life it will shun you. No shot will shut your target torso. Almost everyone who supported him emotionally or artistically—say, by publishing his poems—got burned.
Essays on an American Poet Tiger Bark Press, , relieve me of any incentive to let critical focus founder among such stories here. She died in childbirth when Bill, according to Lux, was seven; three years later Mr. Knott, a butcher, drank poison.
Around that time he lost track, forever, of his younger sister. Editor Jonathan Galassi singles out the elegy as a motivating factor in his signing the small-press poet with Random House two decades before he again reached out to Knott, this time from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be. Their Range is enlarged by loss…. Whether range-enlargement or growth reliably follow from it is doubtful. He is not an unsubscriber because he has let his subscriptions lapse or refused to belong to any club that would admit him; he is unwilling to under-write, to make too little of anything.
Having initially made a name for himself—or for his pseudonym, Saint Geraud—on the strength of aphoristic poems as brief as a single line, Knott never really mastered long-form momentum. Frye and the Pencilsharpener. With Gertrude Stein he wants the lack of such punctuation to innervate our engagement, so that we feel those voids and gaps, that hardening hug. Insofar as the thwarting of grammar registers initially as negative, it ends up only securing the idea that salient negativity—including the space that remains between embracing lovers—represents what their love overcomes: We stood there fused more ways than lovers know Before the sculptor tore us away Forced us to look at what had made us so whole.
This pajama-and-polymer-glop poetics may be appreciated fully only by engaging a full poem. Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars Through a narrow straw while the Coke in my lap went Waterier and waterier. For days on end or. Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in My case no fours to worship you: Both epithets pair the small with the great.
And certainly some low-budget, compensatory form of telescopy is underway with that straw, but to what end? Made my thighs icy. Knott seems to have recognized the potential for an apt analogy: The poet-speaker intuits that he need not foreground the prosaic play-by-play. His yearnings are erotic, not melodic. But even as language fails to convey certain nuances of intent, its sounds avail a sensuous surplus. He may make gardens of depressions. Even so, by comparing out-of-print books, vanity editions, and the hundreds of PDF collections freely available at billknottarchive.
If wishing is already a secular dilution of prayer, then a guess is that much more so, and yet the mathematical sublime resurrects transcendental considerations.
The poem concludes in interrogative paradox even as it introduces the promise of a new exchange: And even if it reaches that far, plummeting through the rich rings of its sinking to reach a bottomlessness whose core. The wooden horses are tired of their courses. The smoke would not blind them. Beyond our cruel commands. If writing poetry is like sculpting, then writing poetry as Knott does is like nagging neighs from knotty wood.
Here, the mostly perfect rhymes secure couplets that close a bit earlier or later than one expects because the erratic rhythm conveys the muscular leaping and lunging and snapping of chains. May they never go up in smoke. Reviewed by Ingrid Becker. The re-appropriation of found language is at once a method and a subject for the poems, which explore the circulation of meaning through military chains of command, mass cultural channels, family histories, and who-knows-where as it comes to us, the readers. Like Look , the book falls in with contemporary trends in poetries of citation, documentation, and witness, in which the political and ethical stakes of using found language are often heightened by a focus on representing those deprived of the right to—or the instruments necessary for—their own self-representation.
Attempting at once to acknowledge the historical violence embedded in its archive and to avoid its reproduction, the members of Blunt Research Group enforce a constraint: Instead, these images are marked by the racialized, criminalizing conventions of the mug shot—brown and black skin, numbered plates bridging the lapels of jackets, profile shots peeking from strategically placed mirrors. The photographs, even more so than the case notes, highlight the historical fact of the silence imposed on their subjects. Sewn dresses and doodled curves are scrawled over with what might be handwriting exercises, or diary entries.
Often barely legible, graphite impressions softened by time, the words are hard to make out. The most attentive and tender gestures of recognition manifest in such moments of strained or distanced receiving. Take the words that seem to give voice to an inmate called Jules, over which we may stumble, and dwell, in the realized incongruity between the seen and the heard: Ive lost tutch with mye selph Ide bee blyged iff yoo cood spair a pockit hanker cheer for Jools. Yet it is difficult not to sense the skilled hand of the assemblers in this moment of brief catharsis.
Is this reconstructed scene as real as the names of inmates? How much room for invention does an anonymous listening gesture permit? This of course raises the issue of anonymity as a privilege. It also brings me to a subtle but crucial insight offered in Look: Heroes make appearances, too: There are no photographs in Look, no possibility for ogling; figuring the un-pictured, the poems enact a kind of ekphrasis.
Reviewed by Paul Jaussen. For over three decades, Nathaniel Mackey has been composing a serial fiction that measures the resonance between music and language. Simultaneously quotidian and meditative, N. He has authored two books of criticism, edited the journal Hambone , and hosted the long-running jazz and global music radio program Tanganyika Strut. Black music articulates black life as history itself, conceived of as a series of ruptures, displacements, uncertainties, and accidents, to which one can respond only by way of improvisatory composition.
By continually rearticulating these elements into an accumulative whole, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate has become a major work of experimental and philosophical fiction, propelled not by plot but by the movement of sound-concepts. For Mackey, black music as cry or wail articulates lost sociality, while black music as repetition or improvisation presses toward alternative futures.
Repetition is always a revision, a restatement of earlier work that acknowledges the past yet casts it in a different key. Late Arcade revises the concerns of the previous novels—sound, performativity, the political ontology of music—to bring out an expanded sense of time as loss, whether personal, cultural, or ecological. Time as both loss and repetition is signaled from the outset: Messianic promises, such as they are, emerge fitfully through musical and epistolary repetition, in those folds of time that the novel enacts.
A similar ontological crossing occurs in a series of dateless letters by Dredj, an alter ego who appears when N. We might consider the ocean itself to be one of those refugees, a castaway fractured by the pollution of modernity, a global reality that will undoubtedly lead to even more human suffering on the part of the poor and vulnerable.
While the ocean as the ambivalent geography of diaspora has been a recurring theme for Mackey, Late Arcade extends these concerns in new ecological directions. Shortly after his cowrie shell attack, N. The spill is an ambivalent return of the repressed, proof that, ecologically and socially speaking, the past is not entirely past.
This muddling of past and present usefully illustrates the productive lag between compositional and narrative time that Mackey often exploits. For such fossil flows may strike our ears more paradoxically and apocalyptically now, in , than they did in We are overhearing N. In another passage, N. The text is not quite an oil spill, but certainly a geology, as time becomes a palimpsest, uniting musician and audience, author and reader. While palimpsestic time can be an occasion for mourning, it can also afford hope. In both his poetry and prose, Mackey insistently opens resonant spaces between tragedy and transcendence, forcing us to think them simultaneously.
As Jeanne Heuving has argued in The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics , Mackey is a contemporary poet for whom love offers an experiential extension of the self, an ekstasis into the world. Lovers are metamorphic in his work; they change names, couple with dream selves, and, muse-like, occasion new compositions. In the longest letter of the book, N. That subject is always belated, if not actually late, an embodied testimony against modernity and its misplaced promises.
Beauty testifies to and affirms the inadequacy of the material world, emerging from the world in its appearing but always eluding final grasp. Through beauty, we thus learn a surprising lesson about history as struggle, as dislocated, enslaved, or segregated being: Which is not to say, exactly, that it is nowhere or never. The band and audience together strain for the unseen, looking hard after a leave-taking that could just as easily be an advent. As a balloon floating into absence, No-Show Sunday is a fragile thing, a thread of hope that makes a tiny opening into time.
We could, following N. In the future perfect, departure is also an initiation, no matter how belated. Sound and sense are inescapably in time, no matter how little of that time may seem to remain. But, as Late Arcade demonstrates, the lesson bears repeating. Reviewed by Kristin Gecan. The civil war died down but there were still his patients with pains from their phantom limbs. There was still the occasional unrest. Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition helpfully starts the record on Occupy and its influence. With Strike Art , McKee has begun to make the case, if nothing else, that Occupy was, indeed, a great strike—one much larger than the original events surrounding OccupyWallStreet.
Strike Art will serve as a valuable primary text for future historians. Because McKee himself participated in Occupy, current readers and future writers benefit from his own involvement in, and his own perspectives on, the movement. Having been removed from Occupy central—as I was, and as future historians will be—has its benefits.
For Occupy, there is no equivalent F. Marinetti or Amiri Baraka, no one founder, no charismatic poet-artist-leader, no genius movement architect, no communications mastermind—at least not as identified in the pages of Strike Art. But then who called everyone to Zuccotti Park? And who wrote those memorable words: But he shows instead of tells. Chronicling the makings of the Occupy movement, McKee shows how nonprofits like Creative Time, artist networks like Art and Revolution, magazines like Tidal , and exhibitions like Democracy in America made Occupy possible. Participation in the creative process changes traditional artist-viewer roles.
Experiencing art is no longer top-down—an artist makes art, another regards it. Instead, increasingly, viewers become part of the art or the art experience, bringing their own backgrounds and interpretations. Works are incomplete without audience participation. In the case of Occupy, no one at the top instilled rules and regulations for how the Occupy brand was used. McKee uses passive construction to either avoid naming the source of the Occupy identity negating hierarchies, and avoiding naming that charismatic leader I seek , or to suggest that common practices were developed on a group level.
With Occupy, another mode of collective life was not only imagined, it was practiced. Structures that were being redeveloped during and leading up to this time made it possible for the entire movement to happen in such a way—for people who otherwise would have been passive bystanders to become participants in the movement, for the existing structures, particularly of the art world, to be subverted, and to bring that subversion to bear within the structure of the movement so that it might influence the structures of society at large.
Some movement organizers, however, such as Judith Butler, are named. Because if the Occupy movement was successful, insofar as we all now remember it, understanding how it was made memorable would teach us a lesson in the art of movement-making. This, at least in part, is why the Occupy campaign was so memorable. When we see Occupy as a brand, rather than as a collectivist utopia, we can see it as a movement whose success was due to its inclusiveness. This rhetoric is why we remember Occupy: This is part of the genius of the movement: It thus defies easy summary, a clear sequence of events.
My own approach to Occupy in this book, however, finds a closer affinity with those thinkers who have approached it not in terms of a predetermined metric of success relative to which Occupy would be found lacking, but rather in terms of the unknown possibilities and impassioned energies it unleashed for the present. The important thing is to go as far as we can for as long as we can, and to try as hard as we can.
Because that means the next time someone else is going to try harder. And then, someone else will try harder than that. Until, eventually, we win. Winning, of course—that would mean success. But then that same sentiment—the one that shrugs off success in any measurable terms—was struck, yet again, when I traced the father of the Occupy brand according to the New York Times. Though he went unnamed in Strike Art , in the press Kalle Lasn was often referred to as the founder of the movement, the source of its brand. Lasn is the editor of Adbusters , a magazine published in Canada and widely distributed in the U.
A ballerina stands atop the sculpture [Charging Bull, a mascot for the finance industry] in an arabesque pose, her lithe, linear figure playing off against the lumbering bronze corpus of the bull. In the background, hordes of gas-masked militants surge forward toward the viewer through clouds of teargas. One where creatively, together, we get the Union back into shape—one where democracy wins?
Let Whitman have both the first and last word: Reviewed by Joshua Weiner. He keeps close company with the Ancients. His was a stunner, a book comprised of sixty-five ghazals that, by turns, adhere to some basics of the classical Persian form and utterly thwart any expectation of pedantically fulfilling it. The ghazal is a leaping kind of poem just as the sonnet likes to make arguments: A poet can take great delight in repurposing them, but they also provide a tradition of voicings to adapt, bend, distort, and play around with.
What would he do next? Madrid only ever takes what he needs from a tradition. Moon at half mast. Dawn horse, horse, blanket and mule. Both feet in the boat. Decorum is spontaneous order. Gone north of the Border. Magic in motion and magic at rest. Only divest, no need to announce it. Locked in from the outset. With so much happening at the level of pure form, the technical aspects would be tedious to parse.
Additionally, with the set repetition of the opening phrase in each tercet, and the division of the first and second line into two grammatical parts by way of caesura, Madrid maxes out his opportunities for different kinds of conjunction and disjunction: What holds it together? Two essential elements of poetry that, when in balanced interplay, generate much of the pleasure that we take in the art: Rule, in his poems, comes from rhyme and measure, but rhyme is not only a quality of rule; it also generates something like cognitive energy by holding ideationally unrelated things in suspended acoustic relation.
The poems move like tight syllogisms, but they speak in rapid tongues. The rhymes of these poems, and their rhythms—common to light verse, satire, and some balladry—would be cloying were they running under sentimentalities, received notions, automatic feelings, or other notional comforts. But Madrid uses such elements to formally stage something fresh, a poetic intelligence making new moves and new shapes while keeping audible the verbal history of these deeper sounds.
But the key to Madrid is his obsession with rhyme, its sounds and its logic. Much more than a technical matter, much more than the correspondence between like and unlike sounds, rhyme is its own circuit in the pleasure center of the brain, and Madrid feels how the poetry mind is wired to it. And they want to do more than just swing. Prop open the book. Now and forever, you nip it in the bud. I allow the heart does not make the blood, Nor the human being the book. Que no quiero ver that talked-up perfection. The Better Book says that good behavior Is the privilege, not the duty, of the good.
The effect is brightly comical, as the third line, in verse , runs into the prose of line four; the cross-stanza end rhyme steadies it with a kind of acoustic ballast. Madrid appears to have brought together two kinds of poetry that could never have been combined without him no one before him has been insane enough to try: I cannot think of anything weirder. It puts him squarely in the cultural moment of recombinant originality. Key final lines of stanzas in one poem float over to perform the same role in another poem. This works in the same way as what stand-up comics call a tagline: Audiences love it because it disrupts the assumption that each joke is its own isolated discrete form, and helps create a highly artificial world that also feels natural—after all, aspects of our lives bleed into each other.
Last thing in the book. I trembled and shook. A half hour down and a half hour do. Try this is the end. And whether or not we want to hold him to it— never again! The top of the tree is the end of the climb. This last poem, self-reflective and self-reflexive, is like a grand finale, where all the prosodic pyrotechnics on display in the book come to a heady climax; your brain feels a little bit like what happens to it when you watch the final scene of Spamalot or Blazing Saddles. But just as it makes its ultimate moves, which are very big, the poem brings the voice down to a whisper.
Reviewed by Daniel Eltringham. Modernism is back, sort of. What, then, does it mean for that double movement—going back to go forward—to be also a legacy? The book sets out, therefore, to address some of the power imbalances at work within experimental circles, which remain overwhelmingly well-educated and white, if arguably less male-dominated than in previous generations. In this sense it is in line with current critical tendencies: The argument that an anticolonial politics of dialect and accent is especially pertinent and localized within the British Isles, where class and the politics of voice are hopelessly striated and inextricable, is an important one, made obliquely or explicitly by several essays in this collection.
Graham, and David Jones and the poets of the s and 70s whose brief stints in charge of the mainstream organs that govern taste—the Poetry Society and Poetry Review —ended in a messy coup and decades of subsequent obsolescence. Allen Fisher and Robert Hampson return to the transatlantic connection that catalyzed much experimental poetic practice in Britain from the early s.
Prynne, Andrew Crozier, Tom Raworth, and Barry MacSweeney, have been published in collected formats by larger presses, and the academy—as this book and the conference that generated it attest—has been catching up. This is a powerful intersectional move that brings together the exclusions of class, geography, and race where they meet, in accent and the voice. Why should this recourse be open to some forms of commitment as redress for some exclusions and not others?
Modernist Legacies does not confront this vexed question head-on in terms of contemporary debates. But it does offer compelling historical accounts of the development of politicized lyric in British poetry. Samuel Solomon and Luke Roberts both examine the strained political commitments of the s and 80s in the poetry of Wendy Mulford and Barry MacSweeney, respectively.
Russian poetry and politics were useful to MacSweeney, Roberts notes insightfully, as a counterweight to the Olsonian, transatlantic lode of The English Intelligencer — , a poetry worksheet in which much of the groundwork of the British late modernist poetics covered by this volume was done. There is so much land in Northumberland. When it rains it rains glue. The outside, living as well as inanimate, gentle and violent, enters language. Indeed, the nonhuman is the last of the exclusions Modernist Legacies redresses, and the one that receives the least critical attention.
Another version of this book might read many of the poets discussed in these terms, with less focus on the social geography of urban centers and more on the signifying practices of world-making. Would that still be modernist? Reviewed by Jose-Luis Moctezuma. In astrology the concept of personhood is a curious thing. In the poetry of Joseph Gordon Macleod, personhood and astrology align at just the right degree of compositional value, producing a system of the self that is equally nebulous, equally predetermined.
So, too, the ethnic factions that compose the local population present clashing symptomatologies. Few had read the seminal works of their political forefathers. Indeed, the nonhuman is the last of the exclusions Modernist Legacies redresses, and the one that receives the least critical attention. Until, eventually, we win. Or maybe New Englanders in the s just talked that way? Its homage to Williams is even more explicit: Kleinzahler seeks a similarly capacious, realistic rendering of contemporary American life, but he is more doubtful about its transformative potential.
Despite these associations, the poem is oddly anachronistic. He takes the astrological signs as dramatis personae, constructing a range of personhoods beginning in Aries and ending in Pisces. A powerful hermeneutic for personhood in The Ecliptic , astrology also leads Macleod into the obscurantism of horoscope riddles. Spring is anticipated honourable and fresh. The frosts are gone. But impulsive purple and yellow Yet are slaves to the ground.
When time folds over again, Dire in the midst of lilies adored the disciplinary lily Hangs its head fulfilling the legal balances, Not balances that embrace all, being all-comprehending; But balances that exclude, being but compromise. Macleod tends to be highly alliterative in his verse, using sound patterns to evoke significant connections. Macleod is ratcheting up his evocative powers: Allahabadis have to be constantly reminded that their city is not the centre of the universe.
They feel upset when you say this. Yet it is this town that has shaped the poet. Born in Lahore in , he spent a part of his childhood in Allahabad. After his dentist father moved to Bhilai, then in Madhya Pradesh, he returned to the city for his college education—he retired as an English literature professor from the university two years ago. Today, the poet appears to be winding up his life in this town.
The couple has lived in this cramped flat for 25 years. On the spur of the moment, the Mehrotras decide to head out in their yellow Tata Nano to the Indian Coffee House for lunch. The couple orders the usual: A waiter brings the Hindi daily Prayagraj Times. Apparently, it is given free to every customer. Daylight enters the dark hall through prison-like window bars. I am little noticed in Allahabad, or too much noticed, and for the wrong reason.
They all taught in universities but for Mehrotra, college teaching was not a demanding and exciting pursuit that shaped his aesthetic ideas. His long years at Allahabad University were completely incidental. Which is not the case in other parts of the world, where your teaching and writing, at least academic writing, are closely linked.
You try out ideas in class first, with your students, or with your colleagues. An old mansion near the university. A local daily reported that of the 23 candidates, 15 have criminal cases against them at various police stations. Most of my students come from these adjoining areas and many are the first generation in their families to learn English. It is difficult to teach them Shakespeare or Shelley when they are barely familiar with the alphabet. Basically, they bring a textbook to class and you tell them a few things in Hindi.
The miracle is that even after 43 years of teaching, I did not end up brain dead, not by teaching Macbeth in Hindi but doing the same thing over and over again, as though I was working in a car assembly line. Teaching, at least in Allahabad, always felt like a grossly overpaid and overrated profession. In the late s I was at the University of Hyderabad, and though the students and faculty there were both excellent, in Hyderabad I felt even more like I was living in a foreign country than I did in the US.
Emerging from the coffee house, the couple peers into the office of an insurance company, housed in what must once have been an old bungalow. Uncle Kelly, married to an Englishwoman, was an English literature professor at the university. His expansive house was set amid a cluster of fruit trees. There is a sense of that status in the old offices, mansions and bungalows lining roadsides. Neglect has chipped away at most of them but they are still imposing. Speeding down Thornhill Road, Mehrotra gestures towards a half-standing structure.
Allahabad has an astounding number of absolutely stunning British-era bungalows. Some of them have been transformed into government offices and schools; vines and grasses colonize others. The car enters Hastings Road. The younger generation knows it as Nyaya Marg. Mehrotra parks his car at a turn and walks to a pink bungalow. He had sketched an evocative portrait of this house in Partial Recall , the short memoir he wrote for his Allahabad anthology. Its owners say the plaster is peeling and water drips from the roof.
They plan to rebuild it into something more livable. The people associated with it are no longer there. Penguin Books, pages, Rs. Her sister and brother died within the space of a few months. Vandana, whose father was a Hindi novelist, first met Mehrotra during their postgraduation at Bombay University.