Arquivos da Categoria: English

Edited by Charles Bernstein and Régis Bonvicino

Recalculating by Charles Bernstein

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Charles Bernstein expresses the aesthetics of Recalculating, his first collection of new poetry in seven years, partially through his translations — not necessarily through how he translates the works, but from what he translates. Lots of Baudelaire, including “Be Drunken” and “Venereal Muse,” and poems by Osip Mandelstam, Apollinaire, Catulus, and the more obscure Velimir Khlebnikov and Regis Bonvicino. Poems of darkness and daring, with the absolute thrust of “Catulus 85″ and the Dada sound transformation of Khlebnikov’s “Incantation by Laughter.” Those familiar with Bernstein’s sometimes-confrontational criticism will see a direct connection between what he argues for in poetry and the poetry he translates and includes in this collection.

Luxorius: Poems translated and introduced by Art Beck

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The sixth century Latin poet from Catharge is rollicking and outrageous in these artful translations. I first stumbled on Luxorius almost forty years ago, when a small green volume slipped itself into my hand while wandering the old San Francisco Main Library. That, now out of print, book in the no longer existent stacks was [...]

Review of Words & the World

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Today’s English speaker is more than likely aware of the myriad forms of English informing the polyphonic Anglo poetry world, and the inclusion of such diverse poets as Muldoon, Wright, and Indian Vivek Narayanan intimates as much. Perhaps because the “West” often conveniently forgets that a billion people speak the language, Words & The World importantly underscores the heterogeneous nature of living and writing in Chinese by showcasing writers from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Poetic Dreamers (Half Awake, Half Asleep)

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“Lucid dreaming”—a dream state where one is aware that one is dreaming. Person might try to “influence” the “outcome” of such dreaming, scenarios fashioned into desired results by dreamer. Person might “speak” to entity that appears in dream, “You’re not real—you don’t exist.” Entity’s presence meanwhile has curious ability to persist in its own right.  [...]

Two poems from Dark

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Red by narrow
a succession
folds ideas
before the rain, wet
as a state of attention
that happily lacks
rules. Beyond eyes
matter is volatized, arched
as the neck I attempted
but was resisted from.

João Cabral de Melo Neto

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João Cabral de Melo Neto is arguably the most important poet in Brazilian poetry and poetics ever, but certainly in the period after WWII until the closing of the Millennium. There are, perhaps, poets with a wider range, whose oeuvre may better speak to future generations, but João Cabral’s poems cut like a knife through the fat and rhetoric of Brazilian poetry, and still exercise a brilliant and substantial influence on Portuguese letters. Much of his skill was honed on Iberian poetry, but he also expressed a dry and spare sensibility straight from the sertão of the parched Northeast region he hailed from.

Lee Sherry (1947-2012)

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Susan Caldwell Gallery, October 8-29, 1983 Nielson Gallery, Boston, December 10, 1983 – January 7, 1984 Any painter worth their proverbial salt is forced to confront the relationship to their art. What does their art mean for them – into what realm of desire and fantasy and thought will it move? Lee Sherry’s latest paintings [...]

Looking over My Shoulder: Roof at 35

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I started ROOF Magazine at Naropa Institute in the summer of 1976 at the insistence of Allen Ginsberg and Tom Savage. Tom originally suggested documenting the exciting events that were taking place there. ROOF was how I conceived of sheltering all the different writing tendencies. The first issue of ROOF Magazine included many of America’s [...]

Larry Eigner, An Advertisement

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The poets who appear in Donald Allen’s earthquake anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960 got to write their own biographies. Here’s Larry Eigner’s: “Born in Swampscott, Mass. (out of the nearby hospital in Lynn); still living there, where after public school I took correspondence course from U. of Chicago. I’m a ‘shut-in,’ partly. In 1949, [...]

Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni

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Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up begins with an image of deception. Released from either prison or a flophouse (several reviewers have suggested the latter), Thomas, along with other denizens of the place, moves slowly through the gate. The skuzzy young man—whose face, somewhat like Pound’s metro image of “petals on a wet, black bough,” stands out (he is played after all by the photogenic actor David Hemmings) against the gauntly determined faces of the others—carries a small paper sack like a treasure, keeping his distance from his fellow inmates, seemingly resisting their friendly (we hear none of their conversation) advances.