[»»]Matthew Cooperman: Envy and Architecture: On Barbara Guest’s Realisms [»»]Rachel Blau DuPlessis: ‘The other window is the lark’: on Barbara Guest [»»]Ken Edwards: Pageant of creativity [»»]Catherine Kasper: Barbara Guest’s Career: Defensive Rapture [»»]Erica Kaufman: On “The Location of Things”
Martin Johnston and his wife Roseanne Bonney. Photo by John Tranter.
A note from John Tranter: The Australian poet Martin Johnston was one of a generation of poets who invigorated Australian poetry in the late 1960s and 1970s. His contribution was unusual: he had a European upbringing, having spent fourteen years of his childhood abroad, in England and Greece. Martin died in June 1990 at the age of forty-two. Over the next two years I compiled a selection of most of his published poetry, essays and book reviews together with some interviews and photographs, and Martin Johnston — Selected Poems and Prose was published by the University of Queensland Press in 1993. A large number of Martin’s poems and prose writings are available in Jacket 1, together with some photographs, and another large tranche in Jacket 11, all linked to from the items below.
Photo of Marilyn Monroe, 1955, Long Island, New York by Eve Arnold. Copyright Eve Arnold / Magnum Photos.
Photographer Eve Arnold had a long and productive life: she died in London in January 2012, aged 99. I was honored to meet her a few years before she passed on. She took hundreds of photos of Marilyn Monroe, and is responsible for a remarkable 1955 color photo of Marilyn Monroe reading the last chapter of «Ulysses» by James Joyce in a Long Island playground. There is a gentle irony in MM’s choice of the last chapter.
In «Joyce and Popular Culture», R.B. Kershner quotes a letter from Arnold about the day she took the shot:
Photo: screen shot from the movie “Charlotte Gray.”
Tell me, do you only read American poetry? No French, British, Australian, German … ? Oh, really? Here’s a true story about the unconscious insularity that is rife in the USA among the college-educated. Australian film director Gillian Armstrong said, in 2012:
Gertrude Stein as Miss America, photo by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein was not always revered as a muse of literature. Far from it. Her climb to fame was long and arduous. The English surrealist Huge Sykes Davies dropped this boulder in her path.
Narration. By Gertrude Stein. (The University of Chicago Press.) 11s.6d. [Eleven shillings and sixpence.] This piece was first published in ‘Books of the Quarter,’ in Criterion, UK, 15/61, July 1936, pages 752–5. It is 1,700 words or about four printed pages long.
“In fact all Miss Stein’s old virtues have forsaken her. The trick of constant repetition which gave pleasure when it was used in prose with no rational end, for purely aesthetic purposes, has adapted itself very ill to the making of statements with meaning. It is bad enough to hear a silly theory advanced once, it is agony to hear it advanced twenty times in quick succession.”
Under the horizon