Commentaries - December 2017

Poetics of coolitude hauntings

Haunted stories of Elizabeth Jaikaran

'Trauma: A Collection of Short Stories,' Shanti Arts LLC 2017

To think of haunting as abstract and divorced from a present history is to depoliticize the present moment in which brown bodies actively resist oppression — be it from corrupt governments, institutional racism, and/or misogyny sponsored by a patriarchal culture. Yes, there is a past that haunts Caribbean poetic and imaginary landscapes: slavery, indenture, and colonization.

On Elizabeth Willis's 'Address': (queer) space and the chrononormative

Writing puts texts in space. The procedural language of critical synthesis is inherently spatial. Thinking about connections between texts, or the bringing of texts together in an essay, simulates the positioning of objects in space. Often, writing makes texts architectural — it uses them to build, and uses the metaphorics of building. I want to use this essay to write between Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds and Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender, texts seminal to queer temporality and to feminist geography, respectively.

'we have sold our proper heritage for a pot of message’: A note on Morris Croll

Morris Croll (1872–1947)

I am interested in the way Croll’s account of the anti-Ciceronian or Baroque prose can be related to critiques of the “plain style” of expository prose that took force in his time and remains powerful in some ideologies of “composition.” The contrast of “plain style” or tight/correct expository “sentence” is the “loose” period (aka “libertine” thought of Montaigne and Ralais).

Morris Croll (1872–1947)

I am interested in the way Croll’s account of the anti-Ciceronian or Baroque prose can be related to critiques of the “plain style” of expository prose that took force in his time and remains powerful in some ideologies of “composition.” The contrast of “plain style” or tight/correct expository “sentence” is the “loose” period (aka “libertine” thought of Montaigne and Ralais).

Wai-lim Yip, from 'Paris Dialogues': four poems after photos by Jonas Yip

[A commemoration here of two new books in English by Chinese poet Wai-lim Yip: Somewhere Between (National Taiwan University Press), from which this excerpt is taken, and Arrivals and Departures: Poems, Memoir, and Chronology (Musical Stone Publishing, Hong Kong), a selection of his original writings in Eng

Two Trakls

Kraków, the city where Trakl died in 1914.

The poetry of Georg Trakl (1887–1914) has attracted numerous English translators, from Eugene Jolas in 1927 to Robert Firmage, Stephen Tapscott, and James Reidel only within the last decade. In the twentieth century, composers like Anton von Webern and Paul Hindemith set Trakl’s poems to music, producing what Roman Jakobson calls “intersemiotic transpositions.” In addition, in recent years, two poets, Christian Hawkey and Daniele Pantano, subjected Trakl’s work to recreative processes that go beyond the conventional notion of translation.