Blogs
May 16th, 2012
on Night of the Republic, poems by Alan Shapiro (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The poet’s dread – or one of the dreads – is that life may escape words. It’s a useful anxiety, a spur to productivity. But we may be better off abandoning the worry when the writing begins. Here are some reasons why. First, life does elude words; it is a fugitive from the frontier justice of our phrasing.
May 7th, 2012
on Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan, translated by Fady Joudah (Yale University Press)
“The need to explain a personal and collective biography of the Palestinian poet and his/her poetry, while a necessity not particular to a Palestinian, is itself a quandary,” writes Fady Joudah in the introduction to his translations of selected poems by Ghassan Zaqtan.
