RonSlate.com

on Night of the Republic, poems by Alan Shapiro (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Ron Slate — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:26:41 -0700

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.

on Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan, translated by Fady Joudah (Yale University Press)

Ron Slate — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:16:21 -0700

“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.

The Death of Erik Satie

Ron Slate — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:02:47 -0700

The Death of Erik Satie

The arches aspire to points
in the church of childhood,
a single note here and here and here.
Drafty gothic undertones, the grandiose
obscurity of the modern mind.

Cirrhosis, then pleurisy.
Hours waiting in stillness,
as in an empty cabaret.

A bell tinkles in the corridor, the viaticum
drifts toward the dying man next door.

on The Patagonian Hare, a memoir by Claude Lanzmann (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

Ron Slate — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:13:19 -0700

Born in 1925 in Paris, Claude Lanzmann is mainly known in America for his production of the nine-and-a-half hour film Shoah (1985). It took him eleven years to make – six years to shoot or record interviews with witnesses of the Jewish Holocaust, and five more years to cut 350 hours of footage and sound into the final version.

on Divorce Islamic Style, a novel by Amara Lakhous (Europa Editions)

Ron Slate — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:04:08 -0700

In his only essay, Guy de Maupassant stated that the role of the realistic novelist “is not to tell a story, to amuse us or to appeal to our feelings, but to compel us to reflect, and to understand the darker and deeper meaning of events.” The arrival of history written as entertaining literature was spun out of German Romanticism – in coincidence with the emergence of the novel and its fi

Twelve Writers on New and Recent Fiction

Ron Slate — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 06:25:00 -0700

I asked a dozen prose fiction writers to comment briefly on new and recent titles. The Seawall has been hosting similar multi-poet features in the spring and fall since 2008, but this is the first such post focused on fiction (and also, this time, on a memoir).

Seventeen Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles

Ron Slate — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:27:39 -0700

Welcome to the Seawall’s annual spring poetry feature. This season, seventeen poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent collections. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here in April and December. The commentary includes:

Lisa Russ Spaar on Nitro Nights by W.S. Di Piero (Copper Canyon)

on The Guardians, a memoir by Sarah Manguso (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

Ron Slate — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:40:36 -0700

Mimi Alford’s JFK memoir, Once Upon A Secret, is now a New York Times bestseller. The author says, “Talking about it is really helping me. It’s making me feel whole.” Feeling whole, she has written. The memory of soaking in a post-coital bathtub with the president is now a cooled-off, discrete object she can describe with equanimity.

on Varamo, a novel by César Aira ((New Directions)

Ron Slate — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:30:34 -0700

The Argentinean novelist César Aira claims that each morning he ambles down to a local café, takes his usual seat, savors a cup of coffee, and then writes a single page of prose for a novel-in-progress. With that, his work is done for the day, or so he has said in several interviews. In this manner he has produced around 60 short novels at a rate of two per year.

on The Straw Sandals: Selected Prose and Poetry, by Pierre-Albert Jourdan, tr. by John Taylor (Chelsea Editions)

Ron Slate — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:16:06 -0800

The writer Pierre-Albert Jourdan (1924-1981) is unknown outside of France and barely recognized at home.

on The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories by Ivan Vladislavić (Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press)

Ron Slate — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:35:21 -0800

One day in 1992, Ivan Vladislavić looked at a photograph of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow. The picture was taken on Christmas day in 1956; Walser was 78. The image suggested a story to Vladislavić: “The writer on his last walk, a solitary Spaziergang through a winter landscape.

on Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam, by Lewis Sorley (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Ron Slate — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 06:34:46 -0800

Lewis Sorley’s histories of the Vietnam War are routinely described as “revisionary.” He firmly asserts that the war was won in 1970. Why should that matter now, especially if you believe that the United States should not have gone to war in Indochina in the first place?

on Walther Rathenau, a biography by Shulamit Volkov (Yale)

Ron Slate — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:43:42 -0800

Walther Rathenau, the only Jew to serve as foreign minister of Germany, is most famous for having been assassinated in his open car by anti-Weimar extremists in 1922.

Short Stories: Power Ballads by Will Boast (University of Iowa Press) and Round Mountain by Castle Freeman (Concord EPress)

Ron Slate — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:19:55 -0800

Lately I’ve been listening to my Paul Desmond LPs. “In his music, as in his life, the absurd cohabited with the familiar,” wrote Nat Hentoff. “His was the realm of an urbane dreamer all too aware of how close yearning is to feeling ridiculous.” One hears a longing grown sophisticated to challenge a blunt awareness that in turn casts shadows on the desire.

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole (Nextbook/Schocken)

Ron Slate — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:16:00 -0800

On January 23, 2012, Reuters reported that 150 ancient Jewish scrolls and documents had been discovered in Afghanistan “and most likely smuggled” to private dealers in London. Dating from the 11th century, the cache’s commercial records appear to be written in a Judeo-Persian language associated with merchants who worked the Silk Road trade.

on poetry by Rusty Morrison, Leonardo Sinisgalli, and Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Ron Slate — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:01:01 -0800

Book of the Given, poems by Rusty Morrison (Noemi Press)

on Coma by Pierre Guyotat, translated from the French by Noura Wedell (Semiotext[e]/MIT Press)

Ron Slate — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:09:09 -0800

Although Pierre Guyotat’s Coma comes packaged between two fiery anti-memoir statements -- by Gary Indiana in his introduction and by translator Noura Wedell in an afterword – it is nevertheless a personal narrative. But conscience compels it to question and reemploy the genre’s conventions.

on Dante In Love by A. N. Wilson (Farrar Straus Giroux)

Ron Slate — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:59:11 -0800

Summing up why Dante’s Commedia was neglected between the Renaissance and the Romantics, Robert Lowell said that changes in literary styles had eclipsed Dante’s status as a forerunner. “Something too in his character must have awed and scared men off by its arrogance,” he wrote.

Twenty Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles

Ron Slate — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:06:20 -0800

Welcome to the Seawall’s annual fall poetry feature. Below, twenty poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent collections. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here annually in April and December.

The commentary includes:

David Rivard on Helsinki by Peter Richards (Action Books)
Hank Lazer on Yingelishi by Jonathan Stalling (Counterpath Press)

on Bento’s Sketchbook by John Berger (Pantheon)

Ron Slate — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:17:39 -0800

Starting with Ways of Seeing in 1972, John Berger has written out of wonderment about art making and expression. While most art historians and critics make discoveries and then engrave them into books, Berger’s creative essays give the sense of discovering as they proceed.