“From the modernism that you want,” the poet David Antin has quipped, “you get the postmodernism you deserve.” It is an adage that applies nicely to Jessica R. Feldman’s argument: from the modernism that she wants, she gets […]
On 12 September, 1927, Hart Crane wrote to his patron, the banker Otto Kahn, asking for financial help. Kahn had already given him $2,000 to work on his projected epic poem The Bridge, which Crane […]
Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: as earlier essays in this book have demonstrated, the worlds of literary journalism […]
Is it possible, in the late 1990s, to say something genuinely new about the masterpieces of the past two centuries, those “sacred texts that the modern West has subjected to a lengthy […]
In 1986, the year she received her PhD in Visual Studies from Berkeley, Johanna Drucker produced a letterpress book, in an edition of fifty copies, called Through Light and the Alphabet. In her recent Century of Artist’s Books, she recalls:[…]
It is a fascinating paradox that the author of the classic study Crowds and […]
Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in the provincial Southern city of Klagenfurt, not far from the Italian and Yugoslavian […]
At last: a first-rate, lively, and imaginative translation of Apollinaire’s Alcools (1913) to set side by side with Ron Padgett’s Complete Poems of Blaise Cendrars (California, 1992). I say at last because both these great French avant-garde poets have […]
* * *For the past decade, John Ashbery has been producing a new book of poems almost every year—a situation that, for just about any other poet, would signify excess. Can the lyric poet, one wonders, continue to produce at this rate?