Rene Magritte

A swirling life dance

A review of Mark Young, 'Songs to Come for the Salamander'

Mark Young is a poet drawn to prodigious production as much as he is to the idiosyncrasies of living creatures. Songs to Come for the Salamander: Poems 2013–2021 represents a near-decade’s worth of poems, picking up roughly from where Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959–2008 left off.[1

Witness Marcel Broodthaers

The docile aphorism

Poet, artist, composer and publisher Dick Higgins’ culminating work might be his 1987 study, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. The categories he draws up, and the drawing up of them, are as fascinating as the examples in this profusely illustrated book. Categories that replace received notions of prosody in visual terms call for new units of measure. Why replace? Because we equate poetry with verse, using the old would make the term “pattern poetry” redundant, short-circuiting its explanatory power.

False Mirror

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