Author Archive
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.
Abigail Deutsch
Vendler, vidi, vici
In his introduction to Something Understood—the recent volume of poems and essays honoring critic Helen Vendler—Stephen Burt notes how her readings of poetry lead her back to the poets themselves. In Vendler’s aesthetics of sympathy, “the effort to understand how a form works as it does, why it moves us, why a poet chose to use it, is also an effort to imagine what that poet might have been thinking and feeling.” From Vendler’s work on Wallace Stevens, Burt writes, “Not just a body of poetry but a person emerges.”
Stevens uses a remarkable “I.” (Also a remarkable ear. As the man on the dump might say, “ho-ho.”) His “I” is confident, mysterious, prophetic, singular without being personal. On the other hand, Burt writes, “When Stevens says ‘he’ or ‘one,’ he can often mean ‘I,’ and we might occasionally ask whether, when [Vendler] says ‘Stevens,’ she means ‘I.’” If she had been a poet, she has written, she would have been Stevens, and Burt’s description of her writing could as easily apply to Stevens’ poetry: “An insistence on ideas amid passions, on the arrangements and abstractions of art amid the mess and sensory detail of life, and vice versa.”
Abigail Deutsch
And how should I begin?
In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton paints and points and dallies, filling eight lines with sorrow and hope and mountains and fruit, disobeying the strictures of English grammar in favor of the more contorted Latinate, including, even, an “or” in line seven that threatens to undermine his progress, such as it is, until, in the beginning of line nine, he finally delivers the phrase “In the beginning”—the first words of Genesis—and then the sentence continues for several more lines, such that “In the beginning” serves as a sort of hinge, swinging the reader backward into the book’s preliminary lines or forward, if he will, into what follows, itself functioning as a sort of “or,” an opener of possibilities, a poser of questions.
It’s not over yet.
As if in tardy celebration of Milton’s 400th birthday (which, you’ll remember from all the parties, was last year), scholars and graphic novelists and rightist revisionists have been reworking the Bible. Certain conservatives are seeking to reform and void the King James version, which they view as troublingly liberal, while a Dutch scholar investigates Genesis’s first verb. R. Crumb’s Genesis is forthcoming, as is David Rosenberg’s Literary Bible. You’re doubtless wondering, as I am: will any of these make the Good Book an even Better Book?
Abigail Deutsch
Poetry is dead! Long live poetry!
Writers keep writing about the end of writing.
The English department is declining. Comparative literature has died. Book reviews? Print journalism? Poetry?
There’s just one problem: no one gets into details. I want to know exactly when and why literature, and poetry in particular, will croak. Will it happen in bed or on the street? Will poetry die in peace, or in the throes of a guilty conscience?
And so, in the style of the solemn journalism covering this crisis, I offer a few speculative reports for a nonexistent newspaper (call it my personal musepaper).
Abigail Deutsch
In memoriam: William Safire, a gem of a wordsmith
Was William Safire a poet?
No.
He was a Nixon speechwriter, a conservative pundit, a four-time novelist, and a funny, fastidious observer of English usage.
But can we detect his influence, however great or small, on such dextrous manipulators of contemporary verse as Matthea Harvey, Heather McHugh, and Paul Muldoon (among others, perhaps including you, dear commenter)?
Yes.
And could anyone encounter a poem about a bartender, say, without recalling Safire’s column on bartenders, barmen, barmaids, barkeeps, innkeepers, and so forth?
I certainly can’t.
Some background:
Abigail Deutsch
“The” “age” “of” “genius”
In a recent Slate article, Ron Rosenbaum explores uses and abuses of the word “genius,” suggesting:
Maybe genius has been, if not democratized, more widely and thinly distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a precious few…. Maybe we no longer live in the kind of romantic age that created Byron, the template of genius.
Or maybe we do.
Abigail Deutsch
Keats lives! (for a while)
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate:—
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.—Lord Byron
Keats didn’t actually die because of a bad review. But if he had, how would he feel now that Bright Star, Jane Campion’s film about him, is garnering so much positive press?
Being dead, he probably wouldn’t feel much of anything. If he weren’t dead, though, his waxen cheeks would flush, his vague eyes focus, his chapped lips tremble. He’d study Entertainment Weekly and Time Out and The San Francisco Chronicle. He’d linger over the blog entries, gasping with pleasure – or horror? “O, for a glass of vintage!” he would whisper, emotions high. It would take him so long to read all the reviews that, unfortunately, he would die before he finished.
And so it is in memoriam to John Keats (1795-2009) that I offer a round-up of numerous, luminous Bright Star reviews. Your blogger found a total of 55, terminating her search only when she could no longer focus her eyes.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian
STAFF WRITERS
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
RECENT COMMENTS
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>Anyone who’s read even just the section on the fetish character of the commodity is ... MORE »
Kent Johnson | 03.14.10 -
Yes indeedy. Below is the first half of the sonnet. It is one ... MORE »
Mabool | 03.14.10 -
@Sina:
Can a poet be “successful” outside of the academy?
... MORE »
Colin Ward | 03.13.10 -
People want to pretend there's an alternative to careerism. Would it were so. But as ... MORE »
Michael Robbins | 03.13.10 -
That's not a magic box, Joseph. It's called capitalism. What you seem so astonished at ... MORE »
Michael Robbins | 03.13.10
Women’s History Month: A Salute (3)
Teachability, Pedagogy, and Why You Can Easily... (5)
Poetry podcasts, online resources, oh and... (13)
Poetry, Politics, & Why I am Not an Activist (19)
Conference Spotlight: Native American Literature... (4)
RECENT POSTS
- Who or what is a poet critic and why is the academy so up in Poetry’s face?
- Beyond Careerism? (Redistributing Poetic Effort)
- To Live with Honor is a Journey Without Frontiers
- Teachability, Pedagogy, and Why You Can Easily Find My Book At Used Bookstores
- Women’s History Month: A Salute
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PREVIOUS WRITERS
- A.E. Stallings (54)
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
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