John Hollander

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

Turn of the century; end of the millennium

A look back at 'Jacket' in 1999

Jacket2

1999 was a great year for Jacket poets, even if it was a bit of a wild year outside. Some sectors speculated that the Y2K bug would spell the end of the Internet — and the end of Jacket by default — but more than that, the last year of the millennium was a time for reflection. It evoked a sense of nostalgia and a near-obligatory need to look back at the figurative footsteps in the sand. Jacket published issues 6–9 that year (January, April, July, and October), so why not take a moment to look back at the poets who were likewise looking back?

Pitch of Poetry

Charles Bernstein

University of Chicago Press, Spring 2016 (352 pages | 6 x 9)

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.

Drew Milne's Marxist Lichens

Stephen Collis

I have been reading Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life — a book which helps to theorize the rise of the Biotariat. Moore writes, “all limits to capital emerge historically, out of the relations of humans with the rest of nature. And in equal measure, so do all projects for the liberation of humanity and our neighbors on planet earth.” The Biotariat rises to that “equal measure” — a relational “project” at once for the “liberation” of the human and the extra-human.