Poets in Critics Pages of the Brooklyn Rail Respond to Norma Cole's 'From the Threshold'

In the new issue of the Brooklyn Rail, poets in the "Critics Pages" responded to a thought piece by Norma Cole, who is serving as guest critic. In "From the Threshold," Cole considers limits, thresholds, and exile. "Considerations of exile dovetail with questions about what defines or binds a work as, say, 'American,' a continuing preoccupation since this country's revolutionary beginning. What locates a work?" More:

Sometimes we are looking at the location of emotion. And btw, did any of you see Transit (2018), the film directed by Christian Petzold? Adapted from Anna Seghers’ novel published in 1944, France—in exile, having fled Germany in 1933, after Hitler became chancellor, after the spectacle of book burning at the university in Berlin, after her books were placed on the Nazi blacklist, after her apartment had been broken into by the police, after her neighbors had hidden her. Her daughter writes later of how the children, with the last of their money, were sent to swimming lessons, for, who knew, one day perhaps they would have to continue their flight by boat. Can you separate living and writing? Someone receives a book in the mail and writes back on a postcard, “It is life!”

Writes Tisa Bryant (Letters to the Future, ed. Erica Hunt & Dawn Lundy Martin), “I always reach back…to see forward.” Continuity is thrown into question, a threading and a fraying take place. Experience becomes experiment, from the Latin experimentum, which breaks down into experior and mentum. Experior is making a trial of, testing, putting to the test, and also experiencing, undergoing. It has periculum in it, having to do with danger, risk...

Responses on the Critics Pages come from Cole Swensen, Hoa Nguyen, Dale Martin Smith, Farid Matuk, Susan Gevirtz, Will Alexander, David Marriot, Cedar Sigo, Susan Briante, Laura Moriarty, Carlos Lara, Erin Moure, Steven Seidenberg, and Aaron Shurin, all selected by Cole. Read more at the Brooklyn Rail.