Articles - September 2014

Defaced/refaced books

The erasure practices of Jen Bervin and Mary Ruefle

At the 2013 Associated Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Boston, I wandered among rows of bright, strange, and intriguing books piled high on independent poetry press tables. Hand-stamped, letter-pressed, spray-painted, ripped, sewn, and covered in tinfoil; poems shaped like boxes, poems printed on records, poems made into pop-ups or puzzles, or rolled as cigarettes — I even spotted a tiny book hidden inside a plastic egg.

September 18, 2014

Morettian 'abstract models' for poetry analysis

Dylan W. Krieger

By now, whether or not fans of his solution, all literary scholars — and perhaps even all readers — have confronted Franco Moretti’s classic problem: there is simply too much to read.

September 11, 2014

On Harvey Shapiro's 'A Momentary Glory'

Norman Finkelstein

Harvey Shapiro

Harvey Shapiro passed away on January 7, 2013, less than a month short of his eighty-ninth birthday. As his literary executor, I was given the task of looking over his remaining papers. I did not anticipate a big job: in 2009, Harvey moved from an apartment in a brownstone on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights to a high-rise a few blocks away on Montague Street, and before the move he had sold most of his papers (notebooks, manuscripts, and letters of over fifty years) to the Beinecke Library at Yale, his alma mater.

September 2, 2014