Martin Earl : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Author Archive

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Sometimes I wonder how it would go if I had to chose between writing and reading. It’s one of those desert island questions. More than travel, more than interpersonal relations, more than food, sex, sleep, these are the two loves of my life. They are what connect me to myself, and connect my self to the world.

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03.08.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (56)

Martin Earl

Hives

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Brueghel – Children’s Games (1560)
On a recent trip abroad to visit my parents I developed a case of hives. It started in the early hours of the 17th of June, 2006. I woke up with itchy feet at about four in the morning. The next night the same thing happened, though now it had spread to the palms of my hands. Within a week I would begin to wake up covered with welts. The attacks extended to my waking hours. At any given moment a kind of virile punctuation would spread over my body and my face would explode in a hot red flush, like an over-ripe strawberry left behind on a picnic table in the middle of a summer afternoon. Job came to mind. But, whereas Job’s only conceptual outlet was metaphysical, the wrath of God, I had a gamut of competing scenarios, all of which quickly overwhelmed me. The Internet, where I daily (no, hourly) went to confirm my latest hypothesis, only aggravated the hives. After an hour of virtually surging liver enzymes, soaring lymphocytes and hypothalamic concussions, I would scratch my way out of the upstairs office in my parent’s seaside cottage and throw myself into the open air in an attempt to escape my own skin.

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02.27.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (43)

Martin Earl

Translation and its Discontents, Part 3 (reading Blake backwards)

The last major twentieth century poet to have included William Blake in his gallery of crucial ancestors was Allen Ginsberg. Lately, we hear less and less about Blake, not to mention Ginsberg. This is perhaps a shame, but as shames go, not a great shame. They’ll be back; first to return will be, I imagine, Blake of the Songs. In fact, he continues to fascinate scholars and art historians. I’m sure poets will come around to him once again, as Jim Jarmusch did in his film Dead Man.

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02.16.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (42)

Martin Earl

Translation and its Discontents: Part 2 (some preliminary examples of attitude)

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Two of the comments on my recent post stood out from among the others in the tone they struck. They were the ones that generated the dynamic of this particular thread. As obviously as Horace Engdahl was wrong about America and its relation to world literature, the questions that arose seemed to turn upon why he was wrong. One of the two commentators offered to eat his hat, while the other suggested Denmark and Switzerland were irrelevant in terms of the larger picture.

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02.10.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (24)

Martin Earl

Translation and its Discontents: Part I

At the end of last year, in the wake of the annual Nobel to-do, during which J.M.G. Le Clézio took the literary prize, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the jury, publicly declared that “There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world… not the United States…The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature… That ignorance is restraining.”

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01.30.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (22)

Martin Earl

Keep Blogging

What will come after the blog? Where do bloggers go from here? Has the form, as is typical of new media, aged precociously? Are the big print media outlets, with their combination of traditional and new media formats (paper, a website which reproduces more or less a virtual duplication of the hard form, embedded bloggers, video, slideshows, podcasts, etc.) going to overwhelm the individual blogger? Do bloggers, who have not been trained as journalists stand out? How does a dynamically flourishing blog culture avoid redundancy, glut, glibness and overkill?

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01.21.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (30)

Martin Earl

Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik

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I had thought I should begin my stint here at Harriet with a kind of introductory blog, one that would discuss, what else, my ideas and me. But I’ve changed my mind.
Three days ago Kenneth Goldsmith’s post took up a question which, in a word, begs the question. It has already received over sixty comments, which makes it a kind of overnight sensation.