Commentary |
on The Believers, a novel by Zoë Heller
Philosophers have long troubled themselves over the nature and purposes of irony. It was the subject of Kierkegaard’s doctoral thesis which reached back to Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon for its grist. Analyses of irony seem to imply its defense, since irony so often entails saying something instead of actually doing something, an act of…
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on ]Open Interval[, poems by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
The first “contemporary” poet I read with avidity was Denise Levertov. In 1966 she wrote, “There is a poetry that in thought and in feeling and in perception seeks the forms peculiar to these experiences,” a definition I inscribed on the inside cover of my undergraduate notebook in 1969. LOSING TRACK Long after you…
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Twenty-Four Poets Name Some Favorites to Celebrate National Poetry Month
Recommended by Robert Wrigley One Big Self: An Investigation by C. D. Wright (Copper Canyon, 2007, $15.00 paperback) One might argue that C.D. Wright’s One Big Self: An Investigation is hardly a book of poetry at all. Then again, that was precisely the argument made in opposition to Leaves of Grass, lo, these 154 years…
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on Intruder, poems by Jill Bialosky – and an interview with the poet
“The source of poetry is always some mystery, an inspiration, a sense of unknowing in the presence of the irrational – strange territories,” wrote Cesare Pavese in his essay “Poetry is Freedom.” “But the act of poetry … is an absolute willfulness to see clearly, to reduce to reason, to know. Mythos and Logos.” Although…
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on Odyssey, photographs by Linda Connor
Linda Connor is known for trekking around the world in search of places and people that either represent -- or could be made to represent – the spiritual and mysterious. The lamas and gurus say our souls are transcendent but our minds and bodies traffick in a world of illusions. Similarly, the camera seems to…
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on Body Clock, poems by Eleni Sikelianos
“For poets, the obliquity of a bewildered poetry is its own theme,” wrote Fanny Howe in her signature essay “Bewilderment.” Essential to the experiment, obliquity is nevertheless rarely the only or even the central theme of a poem. The truancy of language alone isn’t usually the main attraction for the poet who sets it loose.…
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on My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, by Adina Hoffman
On the night of July 15, 1948, the 5,023 residents of Saffurriya fled their village. Among them were 17-year old Taha Muhammad Ali, his parents, siblings, extended family and friends, and the girl intended to become his wife. According to popular Israeli accounts, Arab leaders exhorted the people to abandon their homeland, just then designated…
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on Orphan Fire, poems by Alissa Valles
Orphan Fire is a book of protean virtuosity, a young poet’s display of the vectors radiating from her sense of where her talents lie. She begins with the twenty-part title poem, an evocation of force and indeterminacy in the world – not human force, but a consummation that tempts yet barely comforts or even serves…
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on The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, by Fanny Howe (Graywolf Press)
Fanny Howe has always seemed keenly aware that her life -- either wantonly or doggedly absorbing the age’s most tense political, social and metaphysical issues -- is a metaphor for something. In her seventies Howe has turned to notebook entry-style prose to suggest these convergences. The Winter Sun follows closely on The Wedding Dress: Meditations…
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on An Accidental Light, a novel by Elizabeth Diamond
“The thing which is so bad about the average third person novel is that the matter, the interpretation, is absolutely without life-view, it’s written the way everyone else sees it,” Norman Mailer wrote to William Styron in a 1953 letter published in the February 26, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books. “I…
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on Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object, a memoir by Kathleen Rooney
In Metamorphoses, Ovid retells the story of Actaeon, a hunter who leads his men on a successful quest for game. After the nets and traps have been hauled in, Actaeon takes a solitary walk in the woods. He enters a grove where the goddess Diana is being bathed by her handmaidens (they struggle to pour…
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on Salvinia Molesta, poems by Victoria Chang
Some poets write as if their personae are inseparable from a condition, within a swoon of perception. The severity of their judgments is aimed at the qualities of experience itself. The sounds of their lyricism claim a mysterious otherness as their source. Their orphic gestures imply a rejection of moralistic perspectives that would deny the…
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on November 22, 1963, a novel by Adam Braver
James Ellroy remarked at the time his novel American Tabloid was published in 1995 that the assassination of President Kennedy “was just another glamour killing.” I took this to mean that popular culture had converted the event’s imagery and reportage into something like the slow-motion cinematic killings of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in “Bonnie…
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on Pluriverse, new and selected poems by Ernesto Cardenal, edited by Jonathan Cohen
The decision by Josef Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, to lift the excommunication (part of the papal bail-out program) of Richard Williamson, a bishop who denies that the Holocaust occurred, brings to mind Ernesto Cardenal’s run-in with Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Pope John Paul II in Managua on March 4, 1983. Ratzinger has embraced Williamson…