Abigail Deutsch

Nabokov trundles back up the lane

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that writers living under rocks are doing unusually well these days. David Foster Wallace’s Pale King, William Styron’s The Suicide Run, Jung’s The Red Book, Kurt Vonnegut’s Look at the Birdie, and several other posthumous publications are appearing in print for the first time—and so is the last, unfinished work of everyone’s favorite trilingual poet-scholar-novelist-translator-lepidopterist.

You know, Nabokov.

10.30.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Fred Sasaki

Poetry Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London

Philip Larkin*

Poetry contributor Caroline Bergvall attended the 50-some poet, 36-hour poetry marathon at the Serpentine Gallery in London on October 17–18. Her dispatch follows:

I’m writing in from London where I’ve recently been part of a highly ambitious poetry event. The internationally reputed Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park has for the past 4 years been hosting a mad type of event, an annual 36 hours live event, a more or less non-stop art marathon of presentations. This year they decided to create it as a Poetry Marathon. Some 50 poets were slated to take part, each reading for approx. 15 mins—a decent time given the chain of readings and the expected strained attention span.

The event has been summarized in great detail online, complete with program notes, introductory remarks by the curator and high-end cultural entrepreneur Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as pics and comments on many of the readers. Although amazing, I have to admit the event has left me thoughtful…

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10.28.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (21)

Melissa Friedling

Janet

10.27.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

John S. O'Connor

Poetry Noir

This year I’m teaching a new class called Literature and Film. Since I’m always thinking of ways to use poetry in the classroom, we started the year by screening Run Lola Run while we read Oedipus the King (the brilliant Robert Fagles translation replete with devastatingly ironic line breaks). In our film noir unit, we read some terrific noir poems from Kevin Young’s Black Maria . (title links to an NPR interview with Young) and some excerpts from Robert Polito’s fine new collection, Holywood and God. Check out the podcast on Poetry Noir from Poetry off the Shelf.

Then, while we were examining mise-en-scene (for our purposes, the physical setting of the film) in movies such as Double Indemnity and Chinatown, I asked students to write noir poems of their own. As a first step, I had students

10.27.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)