Marie Buck

The best of all possible Audens

A review of 'Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul'

David Pritchard

Poetry makes nothing happen. Since 2008, it’s been pretty common for contemporary poetry and the discourse about it to swirl anxiously around this line from W. H. Auden. Nobody likes it; everybody quotes it.

Poetry makes nothing happen. Since 2008, it’s been pretty common for contemporary poetry and the discourse about it to swirl anxiously around this line from W. H. Auden. Nobody likes it; everybody quotes it. But in quoting it, nobody tries to argue for some distance between poetry and politics. It’s more like the question of whether poetry (and art more broadly) is or is not political has been answered by the movement of history ­— it is.

Marie Buck and Caleb Beckwith in conversation

Caleb Beckwith
Marie Buck
Images above courtesy of the authors.

Note: In her recent post for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet site, “Pleasure & Political Despondence,” Marie Buck explores the tension between leftist utopian ideals and the apparent hopelessness of post-Occupy American politics.

Note: In her recent post for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet site, “Pleasure & Political Despondence,” Marie Buck explores the tension between leftist utopian ideals and the apparent hopelessness of post-Occupy American po

June 25, 2018

'The Liberty of Horrors'

On Marie Buck's 'Portrait of Doom'

Aaron Winslow

In a year when the politics of contemporary experimental poetry have come under renewed scrutiny (to put it mildly), Marie Buck’s new book, Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya, 2015), is timely. It’s a meditation on our contemporary political economic situation that refuses the temptation of leftist sigils, Invisible-Committee-light jargon, and ironized hysterics. Instead Buck roots her poems in a more elusive and spectral discourse that better captures the alienation, strangeness, and complexity of actual life within the folds of a collapsing neoliberal world order.

Bright arrogance #5

'Extraordinary experience will not be locatable'

Joe Milutis
Detail of Clark Lunberry's "Bodies of Water: Somebody—Nobody"

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is perhaps the closest thing canonical American literature has to a “sacred language.” In Robert Duncan’s lectures on Dickinson, we could say that he posits her as the ultimate untranslatable poet, even within her own language. In her poems she “bring[s] us to the line where everything is so fraught with meaning that we can’t find the meaning.”  

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