Since the end of the eighteenth century, and perhaps long before, visiting Napoli has been a feature item in Western Europe’s bucket list. In a letter from Naples written on March 2, 1787, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe commented, “Of the situation of the city, and of its glories, which have been so often . . .
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Double Portrait by Brittany Perham (Norton, 2017) So What So That by Marjorie Welish (Coffee House, 2016) As Robert Lowell saw it, the big division in American poetry after the Second World War was, that between “Cooked” poetry (traditional forms in polished perfection) and “Raw” poetry (open and organic forms, line lengths determined not . . .
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A review of Orion on the Dunes: A Biography of Henry Beston by Daniel G. Payne (David R. Godine, 2016) Within the protected lands of the Cape Cod National Seashore, in the small salt-box cottage we rent each summer, you step outside into a place that is simply itself. Chickadees cross above you, wind . . .
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Responding to the shocking reality of the recent US election, Aleksandar Hemon wrote in the Village Voice, “For me, the symptom of that experience is a constant traumatic alertness, a terrible, exhausting need to pay attention to everything and everybody and not succumb to the temptation of comforting interpretation . . .Trauma makes everything . . .
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Among the many pleasures of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is what it gets right about poetry. The film follows its title character, a bus driver in the eponymous New Jersey city, through a week that seems at once typical and catastrophic. Calling man and city by the same name, Jarmusch obviously cites William Carlos Williams, . . .
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Soupault, Philippe. Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism. Translated by Alan Bernheimer. City Lights. xiv + 99 pp. ISBN: 978-0-87286-727-7. Paper. $13.95. Daive, Jean. White Decimal. Translated by Norma Cole. Omnidawn. 144 pp. ISBN: 978-1-63243-028-1. Paper. $11.95. Collage, agglomeration, accumulation and declamation, les memes as no more than memes. As the late twentieth-century poet Pete . . .
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The Age of Jihad By Patrick Cockburn(Verso Books, 2016) Journalism as a Tool of War The Age of Jihad is an abridged but unedited collection of twenty years worth of conflict journalism from Patrick Cockburn, beginning with his coverage of the UN-US imposed sanctions on Iraq, then the invasions and occupations of Iraq and . . .
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A review of House A., by Jennifer S. Cheng (Omnidawn Publishing, 2016) Longing for home recurs as a theme in Asian American literature. Works by both immigrant and US-born writers, especially older ones, often focus on links to a distant Asian homeland or the desire to feel at home in America. Separation from . . .
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Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards! (Dalkey Archive Press, 1992) was first published by the author, in the author’s magazine newspaper (no caps, and the italics are mine), in 1962. The text was written on a typewriter (again, no caps, very little in the way of punctuation, extra spaces between sentences) mimeographed, and stapled. It’s hard . . .
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A review of The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground by Collier Nogues (Drunken Boat Media, 2015) While the conventional approach to poetic production is additive, involving the careful placement of words on the void of the blank page, erasure poetry is subtractive, starting with an existing text and deleting material until . . .
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