Tag Archives: spring 2007

ROCKDRILL 8: VIA | SURREALISM'S BAD RAP

ROCKDRILL 8: VIA Caroline Bergvall Optic Nerve/Carcanet (£14.95) SURREALISM'S BAD RAP Garrett Caples Narrow House Recordings ($12) by Christine Hume "Here is the great secret:" Tristan Tzara famously manifestoed, "Thought is made in the mouth"—and, I would add, comprehension hits consciousness more directly via listening, which is more continuous with thinking and feeling than reading. Two […]

BONE SONGS

André Gregory Theater Communications Group (13.95) by Justin Maxwell André Gregory's Bone Songs is a layered, melancholic work driven by its language. The publication of the play itself—Gregory's first, though he is an acclaimed director and filmmaker—is one manifestation of this complex layering, since Bone Songs is the theatrical avatar of Gregory's performance "After Dinner with André," […]

THE IMAGINARY POETS

edited by Alan Michael Parker Tupelo Press ($19.95) by Stephen Burt Is a poet we read in translation in some sense a fake poet, or a poet made up by her translators, or an artifact, for us, of our assumptions about her culture? What do poets get, and what do poets need, from explorations in […]

BOND SONNETS

Clark Coolidge by Noah Eli Gordon Drawing from the lexicon of sexualized international intrigue, Clark Coolidge's Bond Sonnets (available as a free PDF download here) was originally published in The Insect Trust Gazette in 1965. Although these eighteen sonnets, featuring mostly five-word lines, merely hint at the aural, lexical, textural, musical, and referential breakthroughs of one of our most […]

CHINA NOTES & THE TREASURES OF DUNHUANG

Jerome Rothenberg Ahadada Books ($12.95) by Lucas Klein In his monumental essay "Paz in Asia," Eliot Weinberger chronicles the great modernist poets and translators who never went to Asia—Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, Bertolt Brecht—and those who did—Victor Segalen, Kenneth Rexroth, and of course Octavio Paz. While the number of western poets who have been infatuated […]

Vinea Press

LIFE LINE AS A SKYSCRAPER Ioana Ieronim GOOGLE ME! Saviana Stănescu BALKAN APHRODITE Nicolae Tzone translated by Sean Cotter and Ioana Ieronim THE MARCH TO THE STARS Mihai Ursachi translated by Adam Sorkin with the author All published by Vinea Press ($14 each) by Robert Murray Davis American poets find it difficult enough to reach […]

NECESSARY STRANGER

Graham Foust Flood Editions ($12.95) by Chris McCreary Graham Foust's third collection, Necessary Stranger, begins with "1984," a poem whose very title brings with it a sort of ambiguity. Is the narrator of the poem simply speaking about an earlier time in his life when he came to a sort of consciousness? Is the title a […]

SPRING 2007

Noah Eli Gordon, Vinea Press, Jerome Rothenberg, André Gregory, and more... INTERVIEWS Reconsidering the World: An Interview with Noah Eli Gordon Interviewed by Joshua Marie Wilkinson A prolific younger poet discusses his writing process and the 2007 publication of four collections of poetry. FEATURE Vinea Press Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis Four new translations of recent […]