Strategic: September 2018

Safia Elhillo Breakwater Review

"Although there have been many calls for decolonization in literary studies, the issue remains: how does poetry include rather than exclude myriad traditions and, therefore, myriad voices? how does poetry build upon its foundations a new, decolonized canon?" Emilia Phillips • Ploughshares

Ange Mlinko Poetry

"I’m not going to lose plausible. I won’t go into how this disagreement with my editor sorted out. Both well and not well, as it happened. No one need wonder, of course, about the origins of this dismaying “new meaning” for doughty, previously admired Mr. Plausible. Ben Jonson famously put it most memorably when he noted, “Wheresoever manners and fashion are corrupt, language is. It imitates the public riot.”" Richard Ford Threepenny Review

M. NourbeSe Philip Lyrikline

"When constraints bind, they also tempt escape, provoke insubordination and defiance." R.A. Villanueva in conversation with Ali Lewis • Poetry School

Nikki Wallschlaeger Brick

"He was besotted with Jackson, bored by the philosophy and history of the Literae Humaniores course, and disturbed by a humiliating personal scandal: his solicitor father was exposed as an embezzler, and the family was plunged into insolvency. Housman retreated into two things that would become his life’s focus: painstaking reconstruction of corrupted Latin texts, and his relationship with Jackson. Neither passion, though, was on the syllabus for his final examinations, which Housman duly ploughed." Will Tosh TLS

Momtaza Mehri Poetry International Web

"[Muriel] Rukeyser’s work ought to be preserved precisely because she’s such an unwieldy candidate for feminist canonization. Bridging the old Left and the New, international and domestic politics, foremother and front-runner, her career poses profound challenges to the conventional schools and period divisions through which we narrate twentieth-century literary and political history." Sam Huber • Paris Review

Doireann Ni Ghriofa Irish Times

"The quarrel in this book is between the language-loving poet for whom one phrase deliquesces into another and the more hard-bitten and judicious figure of Autocomplete, who holds language to account, who wants an ethical warrant for his aesthetic skill." John McAuliffe Irish Times

Theresa Lola Brittle Paper

"[F]or the early [Barbara K.] Lewalski, genres exist between literature and other kinds of writing, especially Biblical and speculative, and that instead of being closed boxes, they are open channels that shuttle between fields of discourse." Roland Greene • Arcade

R. Zamora Linmark Contrappasso

"[Jose F.] Lacaba would later recall that in the course of his torture, he was told: 'You’re the one who wrote that poem in that magazine.' He did not reply. 'I was flattered that a constabulary colonel was literate enough to have heard about my poem, but he was making a statement, not asking a question, so I did not bother to confirm or deny his allegation.'" Regine Cabato • CNN Philippines

Hiwot Adilow Apiary

"When I enter the space, it is as if I’ve entered a poem—I do not know what I’ll find, everything in it is unexpected, as it is in a poem. There are other similarities between Chaudhuri’s city and a poem: one gains no information but emerges or returns from it changed (see Chaudhuri’s definition of the poem in his essay on the Gita). What are these ‘Indian Road Signs’?" Sumana Roy • Berfrois

"All of those trails that I have walked, somehow that movement is still inherent in the work. The quality of the poems, the way they meander, the way they move, feels very much like the landscape. Whether dreamscape or landscape, it is tethered to the landscape I come from." Sherwin Bitsui • Culture Trip

Aditi Machado Conjunctions

"A new set of possibilities can unsettle the poetic order, as it can the social—as when a poem doesn’t look like a poem, which most often results in its not being published." Nuar Alsadir • Granta

Rodney Jones Scoundrel Time

"But on second thought I remembered some words of my poetry teacher at Stanford, the doughty rationalist and contrarian Yvor Winters. He said that it was a patriotic good for young American poets to become college teachers, if they had a gift for it. Democracy, he told us, needed a population that had learned to use and understand language as well as possible." Robert Pinsky • Boston Globe

Kevin McIlvoy Scoundrel Time

"To wobble honestly at the edges of selfhood: it is I and not my tendentious memory that is real. I speak the words able to find the mouth. The desire to say something is sincerity enough. The poet (she because none else will) must go where speaking and not where the self leads. Otherwise we need no poets." Brandon Kreitler • Tourniquet Review

Rosmarie Waldrop Conjunctions

"Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned from my religious hybridity is that no faith has ever fully given me a home." Shivanee Ramlochan in conversation with Rajiv Mohabir • Jacket2

Jenny Bornholdt Best New Zealand Poems

"This intractable distance, one might even say deniability, is what makes Minnis’s new work, on the face of it, so breezy and clear, so hard to place at a time when a premium is being put on the idea that poetry should be legible as the reflection of a given identity position." Barry Schwabsky Hyperallergic

Aditi Machado The Spectacle

"It is radical—indeed political—to hold on to your perceptions and not adjust your perspective for the comfort or recognition of a particular audience." Nuar Alsadir in conversation with Maria Isakova Bennett • Honest Ulsterman

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John Ash PN Review

"‘Poetry is personal’, Stevens said in a lecture Moore recorded in a letter. Moore wrote complex poems about love, institutions such as marriage, femininity, virtue, the treatment of people and animals and the world around her, all the while embedding found voices and quotes that are unattributed and stripped of context to shift power dynamics, derailing commonly held beliefs. All while constructing the calmest of facades." Jena Schmitt PN Review

Donna Stonecipher The Spectacle

"I couldn’t think of anything much more self-destructive for a MFA candidate to do than to start churning out poems with titles such as 'I Am ‘So’ Stupid,' 'Lick My Face,' 'My Kangaroo,' 'Everything Nice Has a Crafted Satin Finish,' 'Squid Versus Ass Clown,' and 'Juan Valdez Has a Little Juan Valdez (i.e. Energy Cannon) in His Pants.' Such titles are, well, just plain bad. They evoke a suburban twelve year old’s fumbling misguided attempts to shock her parents." Brian M. Reed in conversation with Kevin Eagan • Critical Margins

Priscila Uppal The Compass

"Poet, novelist and playwright Priscila Uppal has died after a long battle with synovial sarcoma, a rare disease she once called “the Kick in Your Face Cancer.” She was 43." The Toronto Star

Robin Myers Sixth Finch

"In the past we [Burmese] could say we didn’t know much because the military government saw to it that this wasn’t discussed and covered in media. But what’s the excuse today? People apparently know there are armed conflicts, but they don’t know what exactly is going on including the looting, the burning of villages, the raping, the arbitrary arrests, torture, and the land grabbing being carried out by the military." Maung Day • Journal of Poetics Research

Jane Robinson Honest Ulsterman

"Kerridge writes that ‘[The Oval Window] cannot be read quickly and uninterruptedly, except as a beautiful but enigmatic surface, until a great deal of preparation has taken place – so much, that the idea of the eventual, uninterrupted reading turns into a mirage, always ahead.’ The rather obvious response to this kind of reading has two parts. The first suggests that, before Google, or getting hold of a lot of Prynne’s own supporting material, The Oval Window and much else of Prynne’s poetry would have ‘only’ been ‘a beautiful but enigmatic surface’. It is, surely, the sheer beauty of so much of Prynne’s writing which places it so ‘head and shoulders’ above almost any other British language-oriented poetry; and it is this beautiful surface which attracts any reader in the first place. The second part of this response is to suggest, somewhat cynically, that sourcing writing is a game which academics like to play." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

Lori Jakiela Diagram

"The rhythm of reading always seems to me to be a very smooth and slow one, and much more homogeneous than the rhythm of walking. Walking is staccato. You’re constantly on the outside, constantly exteriorizing, accompanied by slight and regular jolts—not at all unpleasant, but not smooth. You’re constantly aware of the outside of your body, whereas when reading we tend to go immediately to the mind of the book, which is obviously our own minds as well." Cole Swensen in conversation with Aaron Lopatin • The Spectacle

Sarah Byrne Irish Times

"Language can’t be separated from the world without separating the world from itself. That’s why Lu Chi answers, even before these predictable questions are asked, by presenting his silk sentence in conjunction with another sentence, a language sentence: “In a single meter of silk, the inﬁnite universe exists; language is a Great Flood from a small corner of the heart.” Silk, the universe, language, and the heart — he links them by creating two parallel clauses that ﬂow into each other and unite only when they have reached far beyond our ﬁeld of vision." Inger Christensen, tr Susanna Nied Poetry

Raymond John de Borja High Chair

"[W]e need the widest possible range of research that art can embody: witness, invention, provocation, exhortation, documentation, discovery, resistance, escape." Lisa Olstein in conversation with Natalie Diaz • Boston Review