In her recently published Why Translation Matters, one of our finest translators, Edith Grossman, expands her three Yale talks to provide a fascinating look at her theory and praxis, while scolding the publishing world. My full review of Why Translation Matters is available at Cerise Press. Cerise Press is one of my favorite on-line publishers [...]
Archive for Poetry
Theatre Review: Kings: The Siege of Troy
Kings: The Siege of Troy, an adaptation by Jim Milton of Christopher Logue’s wonderful poem entitled Kings, is ending its run this week (March 2011) at Manhattan’s Workshop Theatre. Handcart Ensemble, Verse Theater Manhattan, and WorkShop Theatre Company collaborated in this production, not that I know exactly what role each played.
This was a fine, engaging [...]
Book Review: Alan Farrell, Expended Casings
In his foreward (whimsically rendered “Deployed Forward”), Alan Farrell ridicules pretension, incomprehensibility, poetry as therapy, literary critical jargon, posturing, the cult of free verse, swingebuckling, and shallow war poetry cliches. Nevertheless you sense that he is trying to be restrained and polite, and barely succeeding. Farrell’s reader might then expect carefully crafted and elegantly ironic [...]
Book Review: William Logan, The Undiscovered Country
Poetry is the only art form in America that I can think of that no longer has a bracing tradition of real criticism. Novels, plays, films, operas . . . we expect critics to note honestly whatever flaws and failures they see in specific works.
Critical reviews often hurt sales and egos, but without them an [...]
Book Review: Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense
A few years ago nearly everyone thought that poetry was finally dead, that the few remaining poets were living solitary lives as poetry presses shut down and poetry readers diminished. Then along comes technology to the rescue: new printing technologies, vast social networking sites, poetry blogs, online publishers, and inexpensive personal web sites. Now new [...]