Strategic: July 2018

Mark Anthony Cayanan Rogue Agent

"I was in New York waiting on a platform and it was rush hour, and it was completely silent. People were not saying anything; they were just standing there. Looking at the ground, not doing anything and not talking to each other. If I attempt to give language to this, it is that it all felt apocalyptic. I am looking at this with a deep sense of disappointment." Ladan Osman in conversation with Gaamangwe Joy Mogami • Africa in Dialogue

Regine Cabato QLRS

"I hope that the point is made in proposing a necessary criterion for good translation of poetry: do all you can to preserve the original form." Xujun Eberlein • LARB

Norman Erikson Pasaribu Asymptote

"As Orwellian specters cast shadows over our dialogue on federal surveillance, Bones Will Crow instructs us on how poets have deployed our own oft-reviled modern and postmodern techniques to bear the most high-stakes witness possible." Jerome Murphy • LARB

Heather McHugh Scoundrel Time

"I was honoured to have him accept me into the Writer’s Association after the publication of my book, ‘My First Coup D’Etat’.I am yet to know anyone who was not delighted after listening to one of those beautiful poetic renditions by Prof., which we are going to miss forever.Prof., like the eponymous ‘Rosimaya’, you have finished our Friday and wrecked the rest of our week." John Dramani Mahama on Atukwei Okai Ghanaweb

Angelo V. Suárez Gauss

"For A Dictionary of the Revolution (2014–2017), Hanafi made a 'vocabulary box' with 160 words in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. Hanafi chose words that were circulating in public discourse immediately following the 2011 revolution. The box was then used to generate conversation with over two hundred people across Egypt, in Alexandria, Aswan, Cairo, Mansoura, Sinai, and Suez. Transcriptions of these conversations functioned as raw material for the artist’s assemblage of imaginary first-person voices speaking around each of the terms." Eva Heisler • Asymptote

Andrea Brady Blackbox Manifold

"The effect of the arrival of the free market on magazines and journals was ambiguous. On the one hand, regional journals and special interest magazines flourished in areas such as Warmia, Masuria, Pomerania and Silesia. An ‘escape from the centre’ became a real option. In geographical and cultural terms, this meant breaking free of Warsaw. Politically, it implied a move away from socialist centralisation. Many new ventures were inspired and fuelled by ideas about so-called ‘small fatherlands’, which could be re-discovered or invented amidst the rubble of socialist notions of national unity. On the other hand, the quality of published journals varied and their outreach was often limited." Waldemar Kuligowski Eurozine

Raymond John de Borja Kritika Kultura

"Du Fu’s a great person to translate, but there goes eight years of your life. Finally it’s done." Stephen Owen, qtd. by Jill Radsken • Harvard Gazette

Paul Muldoon Blackbox Manifold

"Indeed, at the outset of The Criterion, Eliot famously took no salary, continuing to work full-time at Lloyds Bank and squeezing his editorial responsibilities into evenings, weekends and holidays. In this respect, he also represents the highly personal, non-professional style of editorship that intrudes into the private sphere, and not without cost to his health." Matthew Philpotts Eurozine

Jam Pascual Cha

"The whole experience [of translation] has taught me a lot about the freedom that comes through constraint." Mira Rosenthal in conversation with Emily Wolahan • Two Lines

Mohamed Al-Harthy, trans. Ibtihaj Al-Harthi Arabic Literature Today

"Translating was crucial in giving me the courage to try writing in English. Exploring the space between languages has remained essential for me. I see translating and writing as two modes of the same process. The two modes inform and cross-pollinate each other." Rosmarie Waldrop in conversation with Eric M. B. Becker • Words Without Borders

She Who Has No Master(s), trans. Genève Chao and Quan Tran

"[P]oetry, even when it is not overtly political, when it prefers the universal, when it is staunchly private, if not blatantly apolitical, or when it is fiercely formally experimental to the point of illegibility, is nevertheless already a form of consciousness-raising, say, by cultivating attentiveness to language, to structures of thinking, to the idea of an other, to a self who is not our own—and these are necessary to participate meaningfully in political life." Conchitina Cruz in conversation with Ivy Alvarez • Cordite Poetry Review

Doireann Ni Ghriofa Poetry Ireland Review

"In a recent interview, Li-young Lee commented, ‘I think poetry is the mind of God. All the great poems that I love seem to me to all have that little ingredient. You feel like you’re in the presence of the mind of God.’ Such utterances tend to scare people on this side of the Atlantic; people might agree with Lee’s comments but they would be unlikely to say them. And Lee, who is much lauded on his side of the Great Pond, is not afraid to embrace the vatic." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

James Galvin The Manchester Review

"Oddly enough, “I Shall Be Free” shares with [Robert Frost's] “Dedication” the distinction of never having been performed: it is one of very few songs from an officially released album which Dylan has never sung in concert." Daniel Karlin TLS

Paul Batchelor The Compass

"If there can be such a person as the darling of poetry, that person is currently Elizabeth Bishop. ‘Darling’, I accept, is a somewhat patronising term, but I use it as a means of characterising the degree of fondness that has developed around her work. As a poet she is often ‘cherished’, and has achieved the billing that publicists, marketing departments and blurb writers prize above all others: she is ‘beloved’." Simon Armitage PN Review

Louise Gluck Threepenny Review

"He sought to be both Virgil and Dante: at once an imperturbable tour guide to our age of horrors, and a pensive and troubled spiritual seeker. It’s a particular quality of tonal slipperiness that makes Lowell’s greatest poems so enthralling: just when we seem to be tiring of his rhetorical and imagistic bombast, he suddenly offers statements of disarming candor." David Wojahn Kenyon Review

Dermot Healy Gallery

"The culture at large really wants to convince young writers that the writing itself is the last thing that matters." Ange Mlinko FSG

"To respond to Logan’s essay truly on Logan’s terms requires not that I defend Vuong, nor even attack Logan. It requires that I engage with the ideas that Vuong represents to Logan, which have larger consequences for all writers of color, and implicates far more reviewers than Logan." Paisley Rekdal • Asian-American Writers' Workshop

Justin Quinn The Manchester Review

"You start out believing that poetry is either self-expression or memoir (not to denigrate personal experience—our individual lives are of monumental importance to each of us). But gradually you end up knowing that the great texts issue from a larger, deeper, more communal body of—well, “knowledge” is a puny word to describe it. It’s a kind of transpersonal experience. And you can’t get there without a slow, laborious, time-consuming effort of reading and re-reading. It’s the re-reading that has mattered most to me—realizing that things I read in school 20 or 30 years ago are only now making sense to me." Ange Mlinko Lithub

Michael Prior The Manchester Review

"Here are a few of the different things that happen in the book: God takes a stroll through postwar Paris; drunken soldiers pull over a bus in Ghana; two vapid uptalking young women discuss their sexy Halloween costumes; a small-town reporter catalogues a summer’s worth of car accidents; a Japanese grandfather recreates his rural homeland in a hospital room; a teenager hears rumours about something called the internet; a young girl in Austria imagines setting up her widowed grandmother with a former Nazi." Richard Sanger • The Walrus

Doireann Ni Ghriofa Irish Times

"If [John] O’Donnell’s is a populous literary imagination, John F Deane’s is much more a continuing dialogue between self and soul, in which the narrative voice strikes always an unabashedly high tone. Against the desiccated, hyper-ironised, and textually self-pleasuring tendency in contemporary verse, Deane’s Dear Pilgrims (Carcanet Press) comes as something of a shock. It is serious, veering towards solemn, and given to abstract gestures and apostrophes." Caitriona O'Reilly Irish Times

D.A. Powell The Manchester Review

"In the beginning, there is polyphony, false starts, botched experiments, and mixed motives. Usually." Paul Batchelor on Geoffrey Hill Poetry

"Ronda posits nature as a remaindered category of poetic thinking. A non-dominant cultural form, poetry might best represent what capitalism has spoiled. The analogy between poetic and natural remainders that determines Ronda’s choice of texts is original." Jean-Thomas Tremblay LARB