April 13, 2012
Craft Note: Duet — Part One (Beginning With A Line by Mark Irwin)
What / you’re looking through is the act of giving, writes Mark Irwin in his “Poem Beginning with a Line by Milosz.” I wrote about this poem, briefly, several months […]
April 6, 2012
“When they rise, it’s as if they were already falling”: On Magdalena Tulli’s “Moving Parts”
Last week I wrote about this year’s Best Translated Book Award and noted a few concerns about the relative lack of women authors in translation. So why not use this […]
April 2, 2012
The Enduring Appeal of Jules Verne
If all Verne had done was predict the future, he would excite my admiration, not my love. How perspicacious the man was! Really ahead of his time! And that’s where […]
March 29, 2012
A year in translation
I’m late to point this out, but throughout March the always rich international-lit blog Three Percent has been running its “25 Days of the BTBA” series, in which it highlights […]
March 25, 2012
Masterpieces in public: on common space and common language
“…Everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as […]
March 20, 2012
Three Mini-Reviews
We’ve recently featured some wonderful reviews of poetry collections on KROnline, including Craig Santos Perez’s discussion of three first books by Latino poets and Kristen Evans’ consideration of beauty and […]
March 18, 2012
The Unwritten Late-Life Poetry of John Keats as Adumbrated in a Posthumous Epistle
T. S. Eliot says somewhere Keats’s poetry hadn’t yet evolved to the point where it could express the philosophical mind we find in the Letters. Keats, at the time of […]
March 14, 2012
Daylight Savings & The Movable Dawn: A Postscript on the Aubade
About as soon as I posted my dialogue with her on the aubade, Tarfia sent me a link to Kenyon Review Writers Workshop faculty member Carl Phillips’ own “Aubade: Some […]
March 7, 2012
Notes on Capital-T Tragedy
1. Why it started with the Greeks and showed up again with the Elizabethans. What makes a tragedy tragic—as opposed to a story with a sad ending—is that the sufferer […]
February 25, 2012
Poetry, Prose, and Prosetry: Shakespeare’s Hybrid Vigor
Prose took over storytelling (both in narrative and dramatic form) beginning in the 17th century. The prose shift in full-scale narrative commences with Quijote, which is why critics have […]
February 23, 2012
And Another Thing:
My favorite word in the English language (at least for today) is and. I’ve realized it’s the basis of my metaphysics—many Gods and one Brahman—as well as of my literary […]
February 23, 2012
Matchup #1: O Rare Ben Jonson vs. A Little-Known 15th Century Welsh Poet
In any discussion of elegies for a lost child, Ben Jonson’s frequently comes up. You may know the one I’m talking about: Farewell, thou child of my right hand, […]