Articles - May 2012

Into the Field: Steve Evans

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Steve Evans is a critic and scholar of poetry and poetics, and a professor at the University of Maine in Orono. He helps run the National Poetry Foundation and directs the UMaine New Writing Series, for which hes hosted numerous visiting writers and scholars. Steve’s research often focuses on recorded poetry readings, and hes posted many of his personal favorites on his blog The Lipstick of Noise.

Into the Field: Patrick Durgin

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I met up with Patrick Durgin at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches literature, writing, and critical theory. Patrick has published books and journals under the Kenning Editions imprint since 1998, during which time he’s lived in a number of poetry-rich locales: Iowa City, the Bay Area, Buffalo, Ypsilanti, and now the Windy City.

Obscure things have already been said (PoemTalk #53)

Joan Retallack, 'Not a Cage'

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One day Joan Retallack decided it was time to discard some books and journals from her personal library. Among them were Martin Buber’s I and Thou; a collection of short stories by David Kranes (Utah Press, 1979) called Hunters in the Snow; a 1974 volume of poems by Richard Howard; a published interview with Rita Dove; 1981 issues of The Socialist Review and Georgia Review; an issue of the Chicago Review that included an important line of Dante; books of poetry by Maxine Kumin, Ai, Burt Hatlen and Thomas McGrath; a 1988 number of Gargoyle magazine in which was published a poem by Angel Gonzalez beginning “The most obscure things have already been said”; Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch; Explanation and Understanding by Georg Henrik von Wright (Cornell, 1971); and others. This act of elimination, which on the contrary turned out to be a recycling and an archiving, produced a poem she came to call “Not a Cage,” after John Cage. <--break- />

Where the real exceeds the ideal (PoemTalk #52)

Cole Swensen, 'If a Garden of Numbers'

The Gardens of the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte.

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Cole Swensen’s book Ours is a sequence of poems — or is perhaps best described as a poetic project. André Le Nôtre (1613-1700) was the principal gardener of King Louis XIV; he designed and led the construction of the park of the Palace of Versailles. The poems in Swensen’s book indicate a range of interests in Le Nôtre’s work and beyond, but his Gardens of the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte are of special interest, and they are the topic of the poem we chose to discuss, “If a Garden of Numbers.”  The poem, and our talk about it, raised a number of compelling questions. Are historical research and the lyric compatible?