John Hollander

Gleam and darkness

A review of John Hollander's 'The Substance of Shadow'

Right: Ferdinand Olivier and Heinrich Olivier, 'The Invention of the Art of Drawing (the daughter of Butades of Sicyon and her Lover),' 1804, pen and ink, watercolor. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In Pliny’s Natural History,the original act of aesthetic representation is said to be the tracing of a lover’s shadow on a wall, an outline that would remain after that body takes its sorrowful leave.

Stevens: Conserves our cardinal nobilities, thank goodness

Al Filreis

Not long ago I reread John Hollander’s short piece on Wallace Stevens for the magazine of the Academy of American Poets. Hollander’s Stevens is culturally conservative — a conservator of “our cardinal nobilities,” etc. In essayistically surveying the uses of Stevens after 1975 about a year ago, I wrote a few paragraphs in protest against such a view. I won’t quote or summarize that protest here, but I will provide a link to a PDF of the Hollander piece.

Recently in Jacket2

Inverting helplessness

An interview between Christy Davids and Nikki Wallschlaeger

Christy Davids

Nikki Wallschlaeger

Note: Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of two full-length books of poetry: Houses (Horse Less Press, 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017). Wallschlaeger lives in Wisconsin where she collects and propagates violets. She is a mother; she is a poet; she is at once tender, at once piercing. This interview took place in September 2017 shortly before Wallschlaeger arrived in Philadelphia to read at Philalalia, a small press and book arts festival hosted by Temple University.

August 21, 2018

Boring in a different way (PoemTalk 127)

John Ashbery, 'The Short Answer'

PoemTalk

Left to right: Susan McCabe, Marjorie Perloff, Robert von Hallberg at Marjorie Perloff's home in Los Angeles

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Al Filreis and Zach Carduner traveled to Los Angeles to the home of Marjorie Perloff where they made a sound recording and film of a convesation about a poem by John Ashbery with Susan McCabe, Robert von Hallberg, and Marjorie herself. The poem is “The Short Answer” from a late book, Quick Question (2013). There are, abounding, the usual marooned pronouns, and the typically high “daftness quotient.” Marjorie and Al chose this poem with the goal of exploring of what it means to read closely and talk in detail about a seemingly “minor” poem from a “major” poet — a poem that might strike readers as an effect of Ashbery’s incessant and seemingly easeful poetic fermentation.

August 20, 2018

Mark Weiss: Suite of Dances XXIV

Song of a Leaping Girl

Jerome Rothenberg

NOTE. A writer of remarkable skills and insights, Weiss has written of the present venture: “I’ve joked before that my work isn’t so much composition by field as composition of field. A Suite of Dances might be composition by notebook.”

Unfolds herself from the chair.

Each line a decision.

“Already the years will pass without me.”

This time of year no nights are green,

Maid Marian.

Lost thoughts