July 15, 2012
Life Alone Lives Forever: Quest Stories and the Principle of Irreplaceability
I’ve read somewhere (in more than one place, I think) that all stories, or almost all stories, are variations on one story, treasured across cultures and eras, the Quest. The […]
July 7, 2012
On Laurent Binet’s HHhH
I sought out with immense eagerness the English translation of Laurent Binet’s Prix-Goncourt-winning novel, HHhH. This book concerns Operation Anthropoid, the plot to assassinate the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. I had […]
July 5, 2012
Public Confession: I Covet Terza Rima
Of all the rhyme schemes out there, the one I covet is terza rima, verse’s triple-double, the braided tercet. I suspect I love its interlock, its trinities that couple […]
July 2, 2012
The Jack of All Modes
When you publish a novel, there’s often a flurry of interviews over the ensuing months. The interviewers repeat questions independently of one another. It’s an interesting indicator of what people […]
May 20, 2012
The Reproductive Success of a Poem
There’s more than one way of conceiving of the “success” of a poem; one that’s never talked about is its biological/evolutionary success, that is: How effectively does it replicate itself? […]
May 13, 2012
The Reconquest of the Long Form
There are, by my count, only two things that can save a long poem in English. Heterogeneity (Eliot and Pound; and those polyphonic, formally quite various sustained dramatic poems of […]
May 10, 2012
Victor Hugo and the Two Tolstoys
One of the keys to Tolstoy is his early admiration of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. The young Tolstoy visited Hugo during a trip to Europe; the young Russian Count read and […]
May 2, 2012
On Conceptual Poetry
No Conceptualist Poet has yet come up with a concept as mind-bogglingly difficult as mine: Create a poetry that exploits existing grammatical and syntactical paradigms (sometimes as deceptively simple […]
April 27, 2012
James Bond and the Insufficiency of the World
On her Majesty’s Secret Service is one of the best of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, in spite of the fact that he gets married at the end, which […]
April 23, 2012
The Two Unsurpassable Poems in the English Language
Every successful poem is unsurpassable in its own way. Even a brief rhyme, like— John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone. —cannot be improved upon, repeated, or replicated. It is a […]
December 21, 2011
Hitchens as a Man of Letters
The indifferent are not enemies of literature. They don’t value literature highly enough to do violence to it. The true enemy of literature is passionate about literature; he or she […]
December 14, 2011
What’s in a Name?
The controversy continues regarding The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove. The barest outline of the issue is as follows: Helen Vendler, in the New York […]