Gerard Manley Hopkins

Instress, part 1

The secrets of clouds

Robert Eric Shoemaker
Clouds
Credit: Dmitry Makeev, via Wikimedia Commons

Some poems declare their interest in magic openly through formal choices. Some poems are constructed as and/or “after” ancient or occult spells and take the form of a spell, which has some generally predictable structures. If we go from the ancient spells exemplified in Joshua Trachtenberg’s work, we’ll find these components: appeal, historiolae (historical or mythological precedents/correlates of the situation at hand), invocation, enunciation of names, request.

Attention paid

R. F. Langley

Rob Stanton

The forty-eight poems collected in this volume are the sum total completed by R. F. Langley during his seventy-two-year lifespan, but they contain an outsize vibrancy that intensifies on rereading. They are not well known on this side of the Atlantic, but hopefully this book will start to change that. Their range is not wide — indeed, it is consciously circumscribed (recurring subjects include insects and arachnids, Italian Renaissance art, the Suffolk countryside, church interiors, looking, and writing about looking) — but the attention and thinking they condense is considerable.

A poetics of virtuosity

Brian Kim Stefans
A. R. Ammons.
A. R. Ammons.

“A Poetics of Virtuosity” considers — through the writing of A. R. Ammons, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud, William Carlos Williams, and the obscure Trumbull Stickney — what it means to write against the dominant literary modes of your time.

November 25, 2014

Witness Jackson Mac Low and Gerhard Richter

Generating the haphazard

Patrick Durgin

Last week I began with the installed environment, moved on to surfaces (painted or printed), and emerged into “ambiance.” This week I will consider how chance is deployed to install some essential attribute of the outside, inside of a work. Since visual prosody is the theme of these commentaries, “a work” refers equally to a poem or an image. The environment tailored to resemble itself there is given a voice by an artist who avoids using their own. Essential attributes of the artist’s material should reveal its relation to an outside, and a politics of visual or verbal relation beheld there. My examples are the Asymmetries and Forties by poet Jackson Mac Low and two iterations of the Colors series by painter Gerhard Richter. Mac Low and Richter are equally motivated to exhaust the forces named by “chance” and its cognates so as to question received critical values and to essentialize aesthetic values of their media.

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