This interview was conducted at the Prairie Restaurant in downtown Chicago on Saturday, October 16, 1999. ANDREW RATHMANN: For me, and I'm sure for many others, one of the pleasures of your poetry is its rhetorical intensity--by which I mean the absence of irony, and your willingness to venture grand statements about life, death, guilt, desire, and so forth. I find this aspect of your work thrilling. But as you know, there is a strong climate of opinion these days that finds such statements either naive or embarrassing in some way, whereas you are not embarrassed. FRANK BIDART: Unembarrassable! Well-- AR: I don't want to ask you, "Why aren't you an ironic poet?" But I would like to know what you make of the turn toward irony, or toward a cooler and more cerebral kind of writing. FB: We live in an armored age. There has come to be astonishing sophistication in producing an armored self on paper--in a way that makes the poems that were "armored" twenty years ago look positively candid and naive. And I think it's a trap, I think it's a terrible trap. Frost says, quoting Horace, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." There's a kind of power that art can have--that the art I most love has--that you can't have if everything is presented from an ironic perspective. "Ironic perspective" doesn't say it--from a point of view where the work, as I say, is infinitely protected, but also closed, and doesn't venture connections to the vagaries and range of the emotional life. Maybe I should put it this way: If you can't tell when something goes wrong in a work, that this line is bad or this move wrong, you also can't tell when there's something right. There's a kind of power in writing that has a building sense of a center, that then opens the writer to the objection that something has g one wrong, something has not fulfilled itself, something has not developed from the poem's spine. Without risking that, you can't have the kind of decisive and powerful rightness that I crave as a reader. There is an ancient tradition in Western art--and I say Western because I don't truly know other kinds of art--in which you can talk about a central action in a poem or a play or an epic. You experience its center in terms of that action, and you can think about--you can talk about--how successful it is in relation to the fulfillment of that action. DANIELLE ALLEN: Is there an ambiguity in the phrase "a building sense of center"? When you first used it, I understood something about the poet's own commitment to the world and to a particular interpretive focus that the reader would have to identify in order to assess the poetry. FB: I mean the Aristotelian sense of action. It "builds" in the sense that it has a progress: it's not simply "this event and this event and this event," but the second event has some relation to the first, and both of those events affect what happens later; there's an arc to the action. There's a sense of progressive learning about necessity.
{"title":"An Interview with Frank Bidart","authors":"Andrew Rathmann, D. Allen, Frank Bidart","doi":"10.2307/25304764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304764","url":null,"abstract":"This interview was conducted at the Prairie Restaurant in downtown Chicago on Saturday, October 16, 1999. ANDREW RATHMANN: For me, and I'm sure for many others, one of the pleasures of your poetry is its rhetorical intensity--by which I mean the absence of irony, and your willingness to venture grand statements about life, death, guilt, desire, and so forth. I find this aspect of your work thrilling. But as you know, there is a strong climate of opinion these days that finds such statements either naive or embarrassing in some way, whereas you are not embarrassed. FRANK BIDART: Unembarrassable! Well-- AR: I don't want to ask you, \"Why aren't you an ironic poet?\" But I would like to know what you make of the turn toward irony, or toward a cooler and more cerebral kind of writing. FB: We live in an armored age. There has come to be astonishing sophistication in producing an armored self on paper--in a way that makes the poems that were \"armored\" twenty years ago look positively candid and naive. And I think it's a trap, I think it's a terrible trap. Frost says, quoting Horace, \"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.\" There's a kind of power that art can have--that the art I most love has--that you can't have if everything is presented from an ironic perspective. \"Ironic perspective\" doesn't say it--from a point of view where the work, as I say, is infinitely protected, but also closed, and doesn't venture connections to the vagaries and range of the emotional life. Maybe I should put it this way: If you can't tell when something goes wrong in a work, that this line is bad or this move wrong, you also can't tell when there's something right. There's a kind of power in writing that has a building sense of a center, that then opens the writer to the objection that something has g one wrong, something has not fulfilled itself, something has not developed from the poem's spine. Without risking that, you can't have the kind of decisive and powerful rightness that I crave as a reader. There is an ancient tradition in Western art--and I say Western because I don't truly know other kinds of art--in which you can talk about a central action in a poem or a play or an epic. You experience its center in terms of that action, and you can think about--you can talk about--how successful it is in relation to the fulfillment of that action. DANIELLE ALLEN: Is there an ambiguity in the phrase \"a building sense of center\"? When you first used it, I understood something about the poet's own commitment to the world and to a particular interpretive focus that the reader would have to identify in order to assess the poetry. FB: I mean the Aristotelian sense of action. It \"builds\" in the sense that it has a progress: it's not simply \"this event and this event and this event,\" but the second event has some relation to the first, and both of those events affect what happens later; there's an arc to the action. There's a sense of progressive learning about necessity.","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304764","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69013353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The construction of the flying saucer is not so much a dilemma of hardware as it is a poetic challenge. Terence McKenna, History Ends in Green Doesn't Gabrielle's being made the tool of her mother's murder convince you of the necessity--at least the poetic necessity--of the curse? Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse This conversation took place over a period of four months via electronic mail. The centerpiece of the conversation is Field's recent book, Point and Line (New Directions, 2000), but hovering around the event were side conversations--about Freud, Tibetan Buddhism, the profession of poetry, science, and other subjects--which informed both questions and answers. The medium of electronic mail allows for time and space not afforded by the more "intimate" setting of a table, two cups, and a tape recorder. Which is very much to the point of Field's work; she keeps the fields of literature open (which can be seen in the way she treats the textual page) in order to keep the written up to date with the world and its vicissitudes. The characters in Field's book are treated by the world as they try to treat each other, and Field attempts to capture what interferes with forming a life, a character, a setting, a space in which to play at being. This sense of discomfort is a key to the work and the conversation; it is both a poetic necessity and poetic challenge. What do you trust? I think "trust" and the mind keeps slipping over into "belief": I make believe, but should I have trust? Believing is gravity's constants, the furniture, the house, the street, culture, people. Isn't trust the belief that these things will be there when I sit on them, test them, return to them? Maybe I think I have my house, my life, the gist of a story... But I trust these things precisely because they're not to be believed. Sometimes slowly, sometimes catastrophically, houses are always on the go, the mind is always lost, history just ahead of "me." That bat trusts only that it must listen carefully; if it flew on "trust" alone, would it crash? It's the noun which fails, the verb which might work out. Fundamentally, writing creates itself as it loves, names, maps the world which is destroyed in its arriving; there's nothing to sit on for long, so I guess I trust that a chair is a landfill or fire wood, that I'm on a constant stage of timing, that belief is the middle of a conversation whose voices change. How much was Point and Line thought of as a book? Did you feel restricted by that form in any way? As I worked on the stories in Point and Line, I began to become interested in the determining elements of what now seems to be called the "book format" in a world of publishing in which the book is one choice among many. The decadent state of affairs of the book opens up a lot of possibility with using its structures to talk about "bookness" in general--so I began to think of ways in which the reader's movement through the book might become part of the pacing and kinetic exp
飞碟的建造与其说是一个硬件难题，不如说是一个诗意的挑战。加布里埃尔成为谋杀她母亲的工具，难道不让你相信诅咒的必要性——至少是诗意上的必要性吗?这段对话通过电子邮件进行了四个月。对话的核心是菲尔德的新书《点与线》(Point and Line，新方向出版社，2000年出版)，但围绕着这次活动的还有一些关于弗洛伊德、藏传佛教、诗歌职业、科学和其他主题的旁听席，这些旁听席既提供了问题，也提供了答案。电子邮件这一媒介所占用的时间和空间是一张桌子、两个杯子和一台录音机等更为“亲密”的摆设所无法提供的。这正是菲尔德研究的重点;她保持文学领域的开放(这可以从她对待文本页面的方式中看出)，以便使作品与世界及其变迁保持同步。在菲尔德的书中，人物被世界对待，就像他们试图对待彼此一样，菲尔德试图捕捉那些干扰他们形成生活、角色、环境和空间的因素。这种不适感是工作和谈话的关键;这既是诗歌的需要，也是诗歌的挑战。你相信什么?我一想到“信任”，头脑就不断滑向“信念”:我制造信任，但我应该信任吗?相信是万有引力的常数，家具，房子，街道，文化，人。信任不就是相信当我坐在它们上面，测试它们，再回到它们身边时，这些东西就会在那里吗?也许我认为我有我的房子，我的生活，一个故事的要点……但我相信这些东西，正是因为它们不值得相信。有时是缓慢的，有时是灾难性的，房子总是在移动，思想总是迷失，历史就在“我”前面。那只蝙蝠只相信它必须仔细倾听;如果它只依靠“信任”飞行，它会坠毁吗?它是名词的失败，动词的可能成功。从根本上说，写作创造了它自己，因为它热爱、命名、描绘了这个在它到来时被摧毁的世界;没有什么东西可以长时间坐着，所以我想我相信椅子是一个垃圾填埋场或柴火，我在一个恒定的时间舞台上，这个信念是在一个声音变化的谈话中。《点与线》在多大程度上被视为一本书?你觉得那种形式有什么限制吗?当我在写《点与线》的故事时，我开始对现在被称为“书籍格式”的决定因素产生兴趣，在这个出版世界里，书是众多选择中的一种。这本书的颓废状态打开了很多可能性，用它的结构来谈论一般的“书性”——所以我开始思考读者在书中的运动可能成为作品节奏和动态体验的一部分。然后，当这个系列开始更多地集中在一起时，我添加了“书尾”作品——这样叙事就能突破那些最官僚的形式。我不认为PL前线的任何竞争隐喻撕裂了主题的领域。在《因此我是A》中，这个角色假定的沉默是她(情节剧?)对解释性心理目的的挑战，这种目的是作为一种叙事救赎(以及隐含的知识、整体性和意识)的方式提供的。．..
{"title":"An E-Mail Interview with Thalia Field","authors":"Eric P. Elshtain, T. Field","doi":"10.2307/25304782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304782","url":null,"abstract":"The construction of the flying saucer is not so much a dilemma of hardware as it is a poetic challenge. Terence McKenna, History Ends in Green Doesn't Gabrielle's being made the tool of her mother's murder convince you of the necessity--at least the poetic necessity--of the curse? Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse This conversation took place over a period of four months via electronic mail. The centerpiece of the conversation is Field's recent book, Point and Line (New Directions, 2000), but hovering around the event were side conversations--about Freud, Tibetan Buddhism, the profession of poetry, science, and other subjects--which informed both questions and answers. The medium of electronic mail allows for time and space not afforded by the more \"intimate\" setting of a table, two cups, and a tape recorder. Which is very much to the point of Field's work; she keeps the fields of literature open (which can be seen in the way she treats the textual page) in order to keep the written up to date with the world and its vicissitudes. The characters in Field's book are treated by the world as they try to treat each other, and Field attempts to capture what interferes with forming a life, a character, a setting, a space in which to play at being. This sense of discomfort is a key to the work and the conversation; it is both a poetic necessity and poetic challenge. What do you trust? I think \"trust\" and the mind keeps slipping over into \"belief\": I make believe, but should I have trust? Believing is gravity's constants, the furniture, the house, the street, culture, people. Isn't trust the belief that these things will be there when I sit on them, test them, return to them? Maybe I think I have my house, my life, the gist of a story... But I trust these things precisely because they're not to be believed. Sometimes slowly, sometimes catastrophically, houses are always on the go, the mind is always lost, history just ahead of \"me.\" That bat trusts only that it must listen carefully; if it flew on \"trust\" alone, would it crash? It's the noun which fails, the verb which might work out. Fundamentally, writing creates itself as it loves, names, maps the world which is destroyed in its arriving; there's nothing to sit on for long, so I guess I trust that a chair is a landfill or fire wood, that I'm on a constant stage of timing, that belief is the middle of a conversation whose voices change. How much was Point and Line thought of as a book? Did you feel restricted by that form in any way? As I worked on the stories in Point and Line, I began to become interested in the determining elements of what now seems to be called the \"book format\" in a world of publishing in which the book is one choice among many. The decadent state of affairs of the book opens up a lot of possibility with using its structures to talk about \"bookness\" in general--so I began to think of ways in which the reader's movement through the book might become part of the pacing and kinetic exp","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304782","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69013584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael O'Brien. Sills: Selected Poems. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2000. Rarely is a selected poems one's first introduction to a poet, but in the case of Michael O'Brien's Sills, I think we have to make a welcome exception. Although he published work by Frank Kuenstler, Rachel Blau, Serge Gavronsky, and many others in The Eventorium Muse in New York in the 1960s, O'Brien appears to be little known in today's circuit (for instance, the Muse isn't included in Granary's Secret Location on the Lower East Side). His earlier books are nearly impossible to find, so we need this collection to make clear what a strong voice it is that we've been missing. O'Brien is a younger contemporary of the NewYork School, but his poetry distinguishes itself from their sprawling, inclusive poetics by hearkening back to that leaner school of New Yorkers, the Objectivists. His early work is inflected with the influences of Hart Crane, French Symbolism, and Surrealism (he's translated Eluard), which is to say that he comes close at points to the nonce wit of Ashbery or Koch. But his general tendency is in a different direction, more contained and more precise. As this book traverses 40-odd years of the poet in city and country, alone and in company, at home and on the street, it traces an itinerary through what one poem calls "perceptual difficulties" (38) and what another calls "the world and its likeness" (75). These poems are stripped of decoration, and although the majority consist of short lines, O'Brien has a formal range that maintains a spark in a variety of configurations on the page, from pentameter lines to prose poems (the latter bearing none of the inertia that the form has lately been subject to). The first person pronoun appears in roughly half of these poems, although there's no doubt that someone moves behind those without it, setting them in motion: it would be impossible to conceive of them as less than lived. When the lyric "I" does appear there's usually an element of honesty in the voice, an unforced, relaxed reflexiveness, as in the following recognition of the limits of poetry as equipment for living (to use Burke's memorable phrase): I thought the poem Was a cotton I packed anger in But when morning cracked like a seed Wit was the foot I stood upon. (54) In these pages there is a Fennelosan tachography afoot that results in compressed lines with the connectives between them left out: "the best join's unseen" one poem prompts ( 111). The intervals between lines sometime link up, and sometimes do not-which is to say that this is a style that jumps and cuts between lines, leaving argument in the interstice and forcing the reader into the poem. O'Brien is more a disjunctive than a discursive poet, and there's a certain pleasure to be taken in the speed with which his poems unfold. There are clear links intermittently, but even when the join is uncertain, vagueness is held at bay by the persistence of particulars that supply a synapse between a liv
Michael O ' brien。《诗选》。剑桥，马萨诸塞州:Zoland Books, 2000。很少有人会选择一首诗作为对一位诗人的第一次介绍，但就迈克尔·奥布莱恩的《西尔斯》而言，我认为我们必须破例。虽然他在20世纪60年代在纽约的Eventorium Muse出版了Frank Kuenstler, Rachel Blau, Serge Gavronsky和其他许多人的作品，但在今天的圈子里，奥布莱恩似乎很少为人所知(例如，下东区Granary's Secret Location并不包括Muse)。他早期的作品几乎是不可能找到的，所以我们需要这本合集来弄清楚我们所缺失的是多么强烈的声音。奥布莱恩是纽约学派的一个年轻的同代人，但他的诗歌与他们的散漫、包容的诗学不同，他的诗歌听取了纽约人的精简派——客观主义者的声音。他的早期作品受到了哈特·克兰、法国象征主义和超现实主义的影响，也就是说，他在某些方面接近阿什伯里或科赫的当代智慧。但他的总体倾向是另一个方向，更克制，更精确。这本书穿越了这位诗人40多年的生活，在城市和乡村，独自一人和同伴，在家里和街上，它通过一首诗所称的“感知困难”(38)和另一首诗所称的“世界及其相似性”(75)来追溯他的旅程。这些诗没有装饰，虽然大多数都是短句，但奥布莱恩有一个正式的范围，在页面上的各种配置中保持着火花，从五步诗到散文诗(后者没有最近形式所受的惯性)。第一人称代词出现在大约一半的诗歌中，尽管毫无疑问，有人在那些没有第一人称代词的诗歌后面移动，让他们运动起来:不可能把他们想象成没有生命的人。当抒情的“我”确实出现时，声音中通常有一种诚实的成分，一种不受强迫的、轻松的反射，就像下面承认诗歌作为生活工具的局限性一样(用伯克令人难忘的短语):我认为这首诗是我装愤怒的棉花，但当早晨像种子一样破裂时，机智是我站立的脚。(54)在这几页中，有一种芬尼洛桑语速法正在进行，这种语速法导致行文被压缩，行文之间的连接词被省略:一首诗写道:“最好的连接是看不见的”(111)。行间的间隔有时连贯，有时不连贯，也就是说，这是一种行间跳跃和切入的风格，在间隙中留下论点，迫使读者进入诗歌。与其说奥布莱恩是一位散漫的诗人，不如说他是一位分离的诗人，他的诗歌展开的速度给人一种快感。有明显的联系断断续续,但即使加入是不确定的,模糊是湾举行的持久性细节供应之间的突触生活世界和一个移动的脑海里:“一天没有字幕一行在银行一个注意力减弱或分散建筑装饰看到窗外直到20倍比较没有(37)诗歌可能仅注释(划线的日记),但O ' brien完全认识到:“言论不是文学，”他在另一首诗中写道，“逮捕是文学”(39页)。当建筑装饰从日常的架子上(“在窗外看了二十遍”)移到独特的架子上(“直到它什么都没有”)时，就会出现停滞。对比较和“图像”、“窗户”、“眼睛”、“光线”和“阴影”的关注反复出现在西尔斯的作品中，这表明奥布莱恩是一位对视觉感兴趣的诗人，并因相似而活跃起来，尽管他对这两者都很谨慎。这种对相似和比较的关注来自于对柏拉图主义的强烈参与，以及对其局限性的坚定认识。《皮肤》中引用的一个声音问道:“为什么要增加实体?．..
{"title":"Sills: Selected Poems","authors":"Eirik Steinhoff, Michael O’brien","doi":"10.2307/25304757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304757","url":null,"abstract":"Michael O'Brien. Sills: Selected Poems. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2000. Rarely is a selected poems one's first introduction to a poet, but in the case of Michael O'Brien's Sills, I think we have to make a welcome exception. Although he published work by Frank Kuenstler, Rachel Blau, Serge Gavronsky, and many others in The Eventorium Muse in New York in the 1960s, O'Brien appears to be little known in today's circuit (for instance, the Muse isn't included in Granary's Secret Location on the Lower East Side). His earlier books are nearly impossible to find, so we need this collection to make clear what a strong voice it is that we've been missing. O'Brien is a younger contemporary of the NewYork School, but his poetry distinguishes itself from their sprawling, inclusive poetics by hearkening back to that leaner school of New Yorkers, the Objectivists. His early work is inflected with the influences of Hart Crane, French Symbolism, and Surrealism (he's translated Eluard), which is to say that he comes close at points to the nonce wit of Ashbery or Koch. But his general tendency is in a different direction, more contained and more precise. As this book traverses 40-odd years of the poet in city and country, alone and in company, at home and on the street, it traces an itinerary through what one poem calls \"perceptual difficulties\" (38) and what another calls \"the world and its likeness\" (75). These poems are stripped of decoration, and although the majority consist of short lines, O'Brien has a formal range that maintains a spark in a variety of configurations on the page, from pentameter lines to prose poems (the latter bearing none of the inertia that the form has lately been subject to). The first person pronoun appears in roughly half of these poems, although there's no doubt that someone moves behind those without it, setting them in motion: it would be impossible to conceive of them as less than lived. When the lyric \"I\" does appear there's usually an element of honesty in the voice, an unforced, relaxed reflexiveness, as in the following recognition of the limits of poetry as equipment for living (to use Burke's memorable phrase): I thought the poem Was a cotton I packed anger in But when morning cracked like a seed Wit was the foot I stood upon. (54) In these pages there is a Fennelosan tachography afoot that results in compressed lines with the connectives between them left out: \"the best join's unseen\" one poem prompts ( 111). The intervals between lines sometime link up, and sometimes do not-which is to say that this is a style that jumps and cuts between lines, leaving argument in the interstice and forcing the reader into the poem. O'Brien is more a disjunctive than a discursive poet, and there's a certain pleasure to be taken in the speed with which his poems unfold. There are clear links intermittently, but even when the join is uncertain, vagueness is held at bay by the persistence of particulars that supply a synapse between a liv","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304757","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69012916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Everyone calls them Pouce and Poussy, at least that's what their nicknames have been since childhood, and not many people know that their real names are Christele and Christelle. People call them Pouce and Poussy because they're just like twin sisters, and because they're not very tall. To be honest, they're actually short, quite short, and both very dark, with a strange childlike face and a button nose and nice shiny black eyes. They're not pretty, not really, because they're too small, and a bit too thin as well, with tiny arms and long legs and square shoulders. But there's something charming about them, and everyone likes them, especially when they start laughing, a funny, high-- pitched laughter that rings out like tinkling bells. They laugh quite often, almost anyplace, in the bus, in the street, in cafes, whenever they're together. And as a matter of fact, they're almost always together. When one of them is alone (which happens sometimes on account of different classes or when one of them is sick), they don't have fun. They get sad, and you don't hear their laughter. Some people say that Pouce is taller than Poussy, or that Poussy has finer features than Pouce does. That might be so. But the truth is, it's very difficult to tell them apart and surely no one ever could, especially since they dress alike, since they walk and talk alike, since they both have that same kind of laugh, a bit like sleigh bells being shaken. That's probably how they got the idea of starting out on their great adventure. At the time they were both working in a garment shop where they sewed button holes and put pockets on pants with the label Ohio, USA on the right-hand back pocket. That's what they did for eight hours a day and five days a week from nine to five with a twenty minute break to eat lunch standing by their machine. "This is like prison," Olga, a coworker, would say. But she wouldn't talk very loudly, because it was against the rules to talk during working hours. Women who talked, who came to work late, or left their post without permission, had to pay a fine to the boss, twenty, sometimes thirty or even fifty francs. There was to be no down time. The workers finished at five sharp in the afternoon, but then they had to put the tools away, and clean the machines, and carry all the fabric scraps and bits of thread to the back of the workshop and throw them in the waste bin. So in fact, they didn't really finish work till half past five. "No one stays on for long," Olga would say "I've been here for two years, because I live nearby. But I won't stay another year." The boss was a short man of around forty, with grey hair, a thick waist, and an open shirt displaying a hairy chest. He thought he was handsome. "You'll see, he's bound to make a pass at you," Olga had said to the young girls, and another girl had sneered, "The man's a womanizer, a real pig.' Pouce couldn't have cared less. The first time he came walking up to them during working hours, with his
{"title":"The Great Life","authors":"J. L. Clézio, C. Dickson","doi":"10.2307/25304739","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304739","url":null,"abstract":"Everyone calls them Pouce and Poussy, at least that's what their nicknames have been since childhood, and not many people know that their real names are Christele and Christelle. People call them Pouce and Poussy because they're just like twin sisters, and because they're not very tall. To be honest, they're actually short, quite short, and both very dark, with a strange childlike face and a button nose and nice shiny black eyes. They're not pretty, not really, because they're too small, and a bit too thin as well, with tiny arms and long legs and square shoulders. But there's something charming about them, and everyone likes them, especially when they start laughing, a funny, high-- pitched laughter that rings out like tinkling bells. They laugh quite often, almost anyplace, in the bus, in the street, in cafes, whenever they're together. And as a matter of fact, they're almost always together. When one of them is alone (which happens sometimes on account of different classes or when one of them is sick), they don't have fun. They get sad, and you don't hear their laughter. Some people say that Pouce is taller than Poussy, or that Poussy has finer features than Pouce does. That might be so. But the truth is, it's very difficult to tell them apart and surely no one ever could, especially since they dress alike, since they walk and talk alike, since they both have that same kind of laugh, a bit like sleigh bells being shaken. That's probably how they got the idea of starting out on their great adventure. At the time they were both working in a garment shop where they sewed button holes and put pockets on pants with the label Ohio, USA on the right-hand back pocket. That's what they did for eight hours a day and five days a week from nine to five with a twenty minute break to eat lunch standing by their machine. \"This is like prison,\" Olga, a coworker, would say. But she wouldn't talk very loudly, because it was against the rules to talk during working hours. Women who talked, who came to work late, or left their post without permission, had to pay a fine to the boss, twenty, sometimes thirty or even fifty francs. There was to be no down time. The workers finished at five sharp in the afternoon, but then they had to put the tools away, and clean the machines, and carry all the fabric scraps and bits of thread to the back of the workshop and throw them in the waste bin. So in fact, they didn't really finish work till half past five. \"No one stays on for long,\" Olga would say \"I've been here for two years, because I live nearby. But I won't stay another year.\" The boss was a short man of around forty, with grey hair, a thick waist, and an open shirt displaying a hairy chest. He thought he was handsome. \"You'll see, he's bound to make a pass at you,\" Olga had said to the young girls, and another girl had sneered, \"The man's a womanizer, a real pig.' Pouce couldn't have cared less. The first time he came walking up to them during working hours, with his","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304739","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69013126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Camille Guthrie. The Master Thief: A Poem in Twelve Parts. Honolulu: Subpress, 2000. Chapter 22 of Exodus describes laws and ordinances against thievery. In verse 8, Yahweh proclaims that if a thief who has given stolen goods to their original owner is not found, "then the master of the house shall be brought unto the judges, to see whether he hath put his hand unto his neighbor's goods." If found guilty, the thief/master would then have to pay the neighbor back double the worth of the stolen property. Camille Guthrie, arguably, pays back double what she has stolen in this fine book, but she also shows what's been nearly stolen from her as a girl turning into a woman: the ability to tell her own story, without the aid of received narratives and types. According to Jewish mythology, the bone of a yid'oa' (beast or bird) in the mouth of a human yidde'oni, speaks of itself. In The Master Thief: A Poem in Twelve Parts, the bone and the mouth often trade places: the poet puts poems in her own mouth, where they speak of themselves-this book is filled with unattributed and unaltered quotes-and the poems put the poet in their mouths, out of which form fragments of personae and lexicons: "...Out of it, she carved a mouthpiece-the bone began of itself to sing: Now I will show myself to you in my true form" (61). We crib stories all the time, and put many bones in our mouth, but often at the expense of telling something true about ourselves. The poet here attempts to glean a truth out of this conflict. Each section in this book of twelve long poems takes on a signature form: fragmentary dialogues, mock idylls, near-pantoums. The sections are prefaced by 18 Ih-century chapter headings, which in and of themselves are poems of a high order: So she said Yes and put her hand in his hand-Snippety-snap-Fast & Loose vital currents began to circulate-The particulars of the inheritance-A number of wild useful plants-"How dare you sneak into my garden like a thief? I'll make you pay dearly for this"--Oh, that I had a letter!-A further account of the mistake-Which way? Which way? (15) Each section and preface are mini- bildungsromans at once utilizing and commenting in (rather than on) this genre. Recall Melville's chapter on "FastFish and Loose-Fish" in Moby-Dick. A Fast-Fish, whether connected to a boat or displaying a "waif" (a "token of prior possession") "belongs to the party fast to it." But a "Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it." And what, asks Melville, "to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish?" This, for Guthrie, is the masterthief's point of departure. Isn't the human self loose, finding in literature ways to fast itself? And isn't literature itself loose, waiting to be fixed to a human self? By highlighting the psychic-borrowings the self engages in, Guthrie builds a poem of experience, rather than reflection; a poem written as part of the attempt to have a life, rather than a poem writte
{"title":"The Master Thief: A Poem in Twelve Parts","authors":"Eric P. Elshtain, C. Guthrie","doi":"10.2307/25304756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304756","url":null,"abstract":"Camille Guthrie. The Master Thief: A Poem in Twelve Parts. Honolulu: Subpress, 2000. Chapter 22 of Exodus describes laws and ordinances against thievery. In verse 8, Yahweh proclaims that if a thief who has given stolen goods to their original owner is not found, \"then the master of the house shall be brought unto the judges, to see whether he hath put his hand unto his neighbor's goods.\" If found guilty, the thief/master would then have to pay the neighbor back double the worth of the stolen property. Camille Guthrie, arguably, pays back double what she has stolen in this fine book, but she also shows what's been nearly stolen from her as a girl turning into a woman: the ability to tell her own story, without the aid of received narratives and types. According to Jewish mythology, the bone of a yid'oa' (beast or bird) in the mouth of a human yidde'oni, speaks of itself. In The Master Thief: A Poem in Twelve Parts, the bone and the mouth often trade places: the poet puts poems in her own mouth, where they speak of themselves-this book is filled with unattributed and unaltered quotes-and the poems put the poet in their mouths, out of which form fragments of personae and lexicons: \"...Out of it, she carved a mouthpiece-the bone began of itself to sing: Now I will show myself to you in my true form\" (61). We crib stories all the time, and put many bones in our mouth, but often at the expense of telling something true about ourselves. The poet here attempts to glean a truth out of this conflict. Each section in this book of twelve long poems takes on a signature form: fragmentary dialogues, mock idylls, near-pantoums. The sections are prefaced by 18 Ih-century chapter headings, which in and of themselves are poems of a high order: So she said Yes and put her hand in his hand-Snippety-snap-Fast & Loose vital currents began to circulate-The particulars of the inheritance-A number of wild useful plants-\"How dare you sneak into my garden like a thief? I'll make you pay dearly for this\"--Oh, that I had a letter!-A further account of the mistake-Which way? Which way? (15) Each section and preface are mini- bildungsromans at once utilizing and commenting in (rather than on) this genre. Recall Melville's chapter on \"FastFish and Loose-Fish\" in Moby-Dick. A Fast-Fish, whether connected to a boat or displaying a \"waif\" (a \"token of prior possession\") \"belongs to the party fast to it.\" But a \"Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.\" And what, asks Melville, \"to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish?\" This, for Guthrie, is the masterthief's point of departure. Isn't the human self loose, finding in literature ways to fast itself? And isn't literature itself loose, waiting to be fixed to a human self? By highlighting the psychic-borrowings the self engages in, Guthrie builds a poem of experience, rather than reflection; a poem written as part of the attempt to have a life, rather than a poem writte","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304756","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69012877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eugene Dubnov, Christopher P Newman, J. Heath-Stubbs
Having just come to university, I was anxious not to miss any lectures. And so every Tuesday and Wednesday, when they started early, I was half asleep in the Metro on my way to the faculty. As the train moved out of Lenin Hills Station, I opened my eyes, hearing voices speaking in a foreign language, and glanced across at the people opposite. There were five of them: two girls and three boys, chatting non-stop. I did not know the language, but it sounded very beautiful. They were in their early twenties. One of the girls had incredible eyes, emerald green, huge, constantly moving, playing and laughing. She noticed that I was staring at her, and became even more excited, like a good actress who is aware of her attractions for the audience. Each time, as she turned her head from side to side talking to her friends, her glance would linger on me slightly longer. I just could not take my eyes away from her. Even her friends noticed my gaze: looking at me, they exchanged a few words and laughed warmly. I hardly noticed the stations passing by, until the whole group stood up to get out at Lenin Library Station. The girl with the eyes hesitated for a moment, smiled at me, and followed the others. My stop was next, but I half-thought of running after them to see where the girl went, and perhaps even to talk with her. But then I thought of the lecture I would miss, and anyway she was probably with her boyfriends and it was not for me that she had been performing. I could not concentrate on my lectures and seminars that day. Finally I decided to confess to Golovakha. He was my closest friend, and he had recently saved me from my former roommates by telling me how idiotic they were and suggesting that we should write a letter to the faculty authorities requesting that we be allowed to share a room together. He, with his usual businesslike approach, asked me which station the girl had gotten off at. When he heard that it was Lenin Library, he immediately said that the girl was almost certainly a student at the University, since that station was in the University area, the time was the time when lectures started, and she was together with a group of young people. Now, if she was a student, according to his calculations of probability I was bound to run into her again within the next two months. I never doubted his judgment, and I felt much better. Soon all of us were sharing a room in the dormitory. That is, myself, Golovakha, Mishutka, and Yosio Sato. Trying to recruit people for our room, we selected Mishutka for his huge nose. It was his main asset, and he constantly picked it; his other attractions were that he was not entirely stupid and that he recognised straightaway the leading role of Golovakha and myself. Yosio Sato we found at the first Young Communist League meeting. Being a foreigner, he did not have to attend, as we did, but he came out of curiosity, and we noticed the ironic expression in his usually impassive Japanese eyes as he watched the pr
{"title":"The Red Horse","authors":"Eugene Dubnov, Christopher P Newman, J. Heath-Stubbs","doi":"10.2307/25304746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304746","url":null,"abstract":"Having just come to university, I was anxious not to miss any lectures. And so every Tuesday and Wednesday, when they started early, I was half asleep in the Metro on my way to the faculty. As the train moved out of Lenin Hills Station, I opened my eyes, hearing voices speaking in a foreign language, and glanced across at the people opposite. There were five of them: two girls and three boys, chatting non-stop. I did not know the language, but it sounded very beautiful. They were in their early twenties. One of the girls had incredible eyes, emerald green, huge, constantly moving, playing and laughing. She noticed that I was staring at her, and became even more excited, like a good actress who is aware of her attractions for the audience. Each time, as she turned her head from side to side talking to her friends, her glance would linger on me slightly longer. I just could not take my eyes away from her. Even her friends noticed my gaze: looking at me, they exchanged a few words and laughed warmly. I hardly noticed the stations passing by, until the whole group stood up to get out at Lenin Library Station. The girl with the eyes hesitated for a moment, smiled at me, and followed the others. My stop was next, but I half-thought of running after them to see where the girl went, and perhaps even to talk with her. But then I thought of the lecture I would miss, and anyway she was probably with her boyfriends and it was not for me that she had been performing. I could not concentrate on my lectures and seminars that day. Finally I decided to confess to Golovakha. He was my closest friend, and he had recently saved me from my former roommates by telling me how idiotic they were and suggesting that we should write a letter to the faculty authorities requesting that we be allowed to share a room together. He, with his usual businesslike approach, asked me which station the girl had gotten off at. When he heard that it was Lenin Library, he immediately said that the girl was almost certainly a student at the University, since that station was in the University area, the time was the time when lectures started, and she was together with a group of young people. Now, if she was a student, according to his calculations of probability I was bound to run into her again within the next two months. I never doubted his judgment, and I felt much better. Soon all of us were sharing a room in the dormitory. That is, myself, Golovakha, Mishutka, and Yosio Sato. Trying to recruit people for our room, we selected Mishutka for his huge nose. It was his main asset, and he constantly picked it; his other attractions were that he was not entirely stupid and that he recognised straightaway the leading role of Golovakha and myself. Yosio Sato we found at the first Young Communist League meeting. Being a foreigner, he did not have to attend, as we did, but he came out of curiosity, and we noticed the ironic expression in his usually impassive Japanese eyes as he watched the pr","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304746","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69012768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Breaking cover: Peter Riley's Passing Measures1 Kc: ...what tradition is present in your writing? PR: English poetry. All of it, good, bad and indifferent, popular and unpopular, overvalued and neglected, the lot. It's an entire climate, all the poetry being written at this time in this country. Kc: [Gasp!]2 There is no audience: there is one reader at a time comprising the potential of all readers, who has to be entirely trusted and honoured and is infinitely demanding. Which is to say that the poet is, actually, in love with the reader. There can be no qualification to that, except, of course, the reader's absence.3 Oxford University Press's outrageous decision to shed its poetry list in 1998 gives a misleading impression of the current state of poetry publication in the U.K. Indeed, this is an opportune time to attend to a loosely related group of poets who began writing in the U.K. during the mid-1960s and early 1970s, but whose work has not been easily obtainable until now. Michael Schmidt's Carcanet Press and Neil Astley's Bloodaxe Books, two of the most prolific poetry publishing houses in Britain, have begun to bring out single-author collections of writing which until the last few years had been side-lined by the larger publishers. In 1997 Bloodaxe published Barry MacSweeney's The Book of Demons, the poet's first "overground" publication since Hutchinson published his debut collection, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, as long ago as 1968. And in 1999 Bloodaxe in association with Folio and Fremantle Arts Centre Press published J. H. Prynne's monumental Poems, a corpus of writing which has variously inspired, enthused, and (more usually) infuriated British readers and poets ever since 1968. Carcanet had begun to anthologise some of this "left-field" writing in the late 1980s, and in 1995 published Michael Haslam's A Whole Bauble, gathering an exemplary, individual career from 1977 to 1994. In 1996 Penguin Modern Poets brought out a concise selection of poems from Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, and lain Sinclair-Sinclair had tried to promote the poetry of Doug Oliver and others through an ill-fated Paladin Poetry series in the early 1990s. And in 2000 Carcanet in association with "infernal methods" published R. F. Langley's Collected Poems, a life-work of just seventeen poems over 72 pages. This immediately garnered a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was also shortlisted for the prestigious national Whitbread Poetry Award (won in the previous year by Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf). The independent presses and fugitive magazines must have been doing something right for all those years in the margin (I should declare an interest here, as R. F. Langley's infernally methodical publisher). It's also vital to highlight two other ambitious collectings from this loosely-related wave of writing: Denise Riley's Selected Poems, (absolutely no relation!) issued by Reality Street Editions (2000), and Anna Mendelssohn's
突破封面:彼得·莱利的传球措施1 Kc:……你的写作有哪些传统?英语诗歌。所有的一切，好的，坏的，冷漠的，受欢迎的，不受欢迎的，被高估的，被忽视的，所有的一切。这是整个气候，这个国家所有的诗歌都是在这个时候写的。Kc:(喘气![2]没有听众，只有一个读者代表着所有潜在的读者，他必须得到完全的信任和尊重，而且要求无限高。也就是说，诗人实际上爱上了读者。当然，除非读者不在场，否则对此没有任何限定牛津大学出版社(Oxford University Press)在1998年做出了一个令人发指的决定，取消了它的诗歌名单，这让人们对英国诗歌出版的现状产生了一种误解。事实上，这是一个关注一个关系松散的诗人群体的好时机，他们在20世纪60年代中期和70年代初开始在英国写作，但直到现在才容易获得他们的作品。Michael Schmidt的Carcanet Press和Neil Astley的Bloodaxe Books，这两家英国最多产的诗歌出版社，已经开始推出个人作家的作品集，直到几年前，这些作品一直被大型出版商边缘化。1997年，血斧出版社出版了巴里·麦克斯威尼的《恶魔之书》，这是自1968年哈钦森出版他的处女作《来自绿色酒店的男孩讲述他母亲的故事》以来，这位诗人的第一本“地上”出版物。1999年，血斧出版社与Folio和弗里曼特尔艺术中心出版社联合出版了j·h·白兰的不朽诗集。自1968年以来，这些诗集给英国读者和诗人带来了各种各样的灵感、热情，(通常情况下)也激怒了他们。Carcanet在20世纪80年代末开始将这些“左翼”作品选集，并于1995年出版了Michael Haslam的《A Whole Bauble》，收集了1977年至1994年期间的典型个人职业生涯。1996年，企鹅现代诗人出版了道格拉斯·奥利弗、丹尼斯·莱利和莱恩·辛克莱的简明诗集，辛克莱曾试图在20世纪90年代初通过一个命运多舛的《圣骑士诗歌》系列来推广道格·奥利弗和其他人的诗歌。2000年，Carcanet与“地狱的方法”联合出版了R. F. Langley的《诗集》，这是一部72页的17首诗的一生作品。这本书立即获得了诗歌图书协会的推荐，并入围了著名的国家惠特布里德诗歌奖(前一年由谢默斯·希尼翻译的《贝奥武夫》获得)。这些年来，独立出版社和逃亡杂志一定做了一些正确的事情(作为R. F. Langley内部有条不紊的出版商，我应该在这里宣布我的兴趣)。同样重要的是要强调这一松散相关的写作浪潮中的另外两部雄心勃勃的作品集:丹尼斯·莱利的《诗歌选集》(绝对没有关系!)由现实街出版社(2000)出版，以及安娜·门德尔松的《不可和解的艺术》，由Folio and Equipage出版社(2000)出版。也许唯一能将这些不同的诗歌统一起来的是一种意图，严肃地挑战读者对写作可能产生的要求的期望，部分由于这种雄心壮志，这些作家对诗歌语言的本质进行了许多仔细和反思的陈述。在丹尼斯·莱利的《自我的话语:认同、团结、讽刺》(斯坦福大学，2000年)的第三章“抒情自我”中，我们可以找到最新的自我反思评论。因此，这种有时不妥协的诗歌变得更可读的方式提出了一个有趣的问题:出版文化的哪些变化使这种作品变得更引人注目?当这些诗歌离开了它们的写作和当地流通的直接背景时，对它们的阅读是如何发展的?这篇关于英国近期出版历史的概述不仅有助于定位彼得·莱利的诗歌，而且实际上是必要的，因为他在三十多年来为美国的非正式写作网络和联盟做出了如此重要的贡献. ...
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From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s the major project of the British poet Tom Raworth was a series of sonnet sequences, whose main sections have been published as Sentenced to Death (1987), Eternal Sections (1993), and Survival (1994). My intention here is to elaborate some commentary on this project in the form of loosely thematic readings, in which I try to draw out and explore patterns of image and idea that can contribute to my and others' understanding of these poems. If the context were a poetry more obviously discursive or settled than Raworth's this might sound like an unexceptionable project; but such a task might seem both difficult and beside the point in relation to a poetry that destabilizes ideas of unitary meaning, of "content" of a poem's being "about" something. To give a sense of the style of these poems, and the challenges they pose to conventions of interpretation and commentary, I'll quote one sonnet (I am using the word loosely: the poems are 14 lines long, but they are not conventionall y metrical nor do they feature regular rhyme). Here is the opening poem of Eternal Sections: in black tunics, middle-aged in the stationery store every gesture, even food: to it thought which breaks stereotypes which constitute extenuated to the point none of the action's promoters the user experiences no need of acting dedicated to commerce the history of our own stiffness of manner no longer aligned How might one discuss poetry like this, at once so elusive and shifting, yet strangely familiar in its collage of recognizable idioms and situations? The poem's phrases are unpredictably choppy or continuous, and sometimes seem assembled according to shape rather than sense. (Note, for instance, the parallel constructions involving "which' "no/none' "in," and "of"; or the near mirror-image of "every" and "even" in line 3.) Yet the poem does tempt interpretation: its wry allusions to "thought" and "stereotypes" glance self-reflexively at the very acts of thinking and writing, and the last line points to the poems own realignment of once-familiar phrases. But it would seem that any act of "close reading"--of "reading for content"--would either be wilfully synthetic or merely document the trace of private associations (mine) that are both unstable and of doubtful value to another reader. So before moving to some commentary on the poetry, I want to frame that commentary by sketching in some of the concerns about contemporary poetry, and the way one talks about it, that acts of close reading might speak to. In proportion to the length of Raworth's career and the evident importance of his work to several generations of poets from the UK, North America, and Europe, there has been remarkably little substantial criticism about his poetry: I'd count about half a dozen articles once one discounts brief reviews. I would guess that this critical lack is due to the poetry's elusiveness, and also to Raworth's characteristic unwillingness to frame his work wit
{"title":"On Raworth's Sonnets","authors":"N. Dorward","doi":"10.2307/25304696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304696","url":null,"abstract":"From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s the major project of the British poet Tom Raworth was a series of sonnet sequences, whose main sections have been published as Sentenced to Death (1987), Eternal Sections (1993), and Survival (1994). My intention here is to elaborate some commentary on this project in the form of loosely thematic readings, in which I try to draw out and explore patterns of image and idea that can contribute to my and others' understanding of these poems. If the context were a poetry more obviously discursive or settled than Raworth's this might sound like an unexceptionable project; but such a task might seem both difficult and beside the point in relation to a poetry that destabilizes ideas of unitary meaning, of \"content\" of a poem's being \"about\" something. To give a sense of the style of these poems, and the challenges they pose to conventions of interpretation and commentary, I'll quote one sonnet (I am using the word loosely: the poems are 14 lines long, but they are not conventionall y metrical nor do they feature regular rhyme). Here is the opening poem of Eternal Sections: in black tunics, middle-aged in the stationery store every gesture, even food: to it thought which breaks stereotypes which constitute extenuated to the point none of the action's promoters the user experiences no need of acting dedicated to commerce the history of our own stiffness of manner no longer aligned How might one discuss poetry like this, at once so elusive and shifting, yet strangely familiar in its collage of recognizable idioms and situations? The poem's phrases are unpredictably choppy or continuous, and sometimes seem assembled according to shape rather than sense. (Note, for instance, the parallel constructions involving \"which' \"no/none' \"in,\" and \"of\"; or the near mirror-image of \"every\" and \"even\" in line 3.) Yet the poem does tempt interpretation: its wry allusions to \"thought\" and \"stereotypes\" glance self-reflexively at the very acts of thinking and writing, and the last line points to the poems own realignment of once-familiar phrases. But it would seem that any act of \"close reading\"--of \"reading for content\"--would either be wilfully synthetic or merely document the trace of private associations (mine) that are both unstable and of doubtful value to another reader. So before moving to some commentary on the poetry, I want to frame that commentary by sketching in some of the concerns about contemporary poetry, and the way one talks about it, that acts of close reading might speak to. In proportion to the length of Raworth's career and the evident importance of his work to several generations of poets from the UK, North America, and Europe, there has been remarkably little substantial criticism about his poetry: I'd count about half a dozen articles once one discounts brief reviews. I would guess that this critical lack is due to the poetry's elusiveness, and also to Raworth's characteristic unwillingness to frame his work wit","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304696","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69012453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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