Articles

Uses of the useless

Against the division of poetry and scholarship

Hillary Gravendyk
Photo courtesy of Benjamin Burrill.

Contemporary so-called “innovative” or “experimental” poetry’s fascination and engagement with the theoretical and the critical owes a lot to the Language poets, who, though not the first to approach the composition of poetry as an intellectual enterprise, did offer what Marjorie Perloff characterizes as a “rapprochement between poetry and theory” that could serve as an alternative to the increasingly anti-intellectual creative writing classroom of the 1970s.

June 8, 2015

Two roads diverged?

Bridging the roles of scholar and poet

Heather Dubrow

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, and at an institution I won’t name except to say that it isn’t Fordham University (my current affiliation), a former chair was explaining his general policies on raises.

June 8, 2015

The poet-scholar

A list

Julie Carr

As I am a poet-scholar, or, a person who reads and a person who writes, a person who researches and a person who invents — a person who teaches and a person who edits — I can only consider the question of the poet-scholar from the inside — and so, what follows is a subjective and gendered account of the position of the poet-scholar in the form of a list numbered 1–10.

June 8, 2015

'Trouble Songs'

A musicological poetics

Jeff T. Johnson

Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics is an investigation of the appearance of the word trouble in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music. It is a book-length project, comprised of three parts, each broken into modular chapters, or Trouble Songs, which build on one another as a series of albums, but are also intended as remixable and programmable singles. What follows is a compilation that spans those three parts.

May 18, 2015

Finding (the other) Juan Luis Martínez

Scott Weintraub

According to Chilean poet Juan Luis Martínez’s groundbreaking art object La nueva novela (The New Novel, 1977), “The universe is a phantom’s effort to become reality.”[1] In July 2014 I found that phantom. His name is Juan (Luis) Martinez and he is a retired journalist and aid worker for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

April 20, 2015