The Letters of T.S. Eliot

THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT. VOLUME 1: 1898-1922, REVISED EDITION EDITED BY VALERIE ELIOT AND HUGH HAUGHTON. New Haven: Yale University Press, 944 pages. $45. THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT. VOLUME 2: 1923-1925 EDITED BY VALERIE ELIOT AND HUGH HAUGHTON New Haven: Yale University Press, 920 pages. $45. Published in Bookforum (Dec/Jan 2012). [...]

The Last Waltz

MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-SEMITE: A NOVEL IN FIVE STORIES BY GREGOR VON REZZORI. Trans. from the German by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: New York Review Books, 287 pages. 2008. $15.95. THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR: PORTRAITS FOR AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY GREGOR VON REZZORI. Trans. from the German by H. F. Broch de Rothermann. New York: New [...]

Spare, Enigmatic Lorine Niedecker

Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life By Margot Peters University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.  $34.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £30.95. Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff published in Times Literary Supplement (FEB 2012). Lorine Niedecker has been fortunate in her critics, most of them poets like herself. From Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, and Charles Tomlinson in [...]

Victorian Modernism

Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience

Jessica R. Feldman. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 261pp. $60.00.

“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 […]

Clive Fisher Hart Crane

The Hell Below Brooklyn Bridge

Clive Fisher. Hart Crane: A Life. 567 pp. Yale University Press. £25.00. 0 300 09061 7

Published in TLS August 30, 2002, p. 9.

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 […]

Aporias of Literary Journalism

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Poetry:

Some Aporias of Literary Journalism

Published in PN Review 115 (April-May 1997): 17-25; Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet, ed. Jeremy Treglown and Bridget Bennett, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), pp. 224-49.

Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: as earlier essays in this book have demonstrated, the worlds of literary journalism […]

Modern Epic by Franco Moretti

The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez,

by Franco Moretti. trans. Quintin Hoare Verso, 180 Varick St., New York, NY 10014-4606. 256 pages; cloth $64.95, paper $19.95.

Published in Electronic Book Review 4 (Winter 1996/97).

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 […]

Druckwerks

Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 298 pp. $35.00 cloth. (VW)

Textual Practice, Volume 11, Issue 1 Spring 1997 , pages 133 – 142.

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:[…]

Party in the Blitz The English Years (Elias Canetti)

Translated by Michael Hofmann. With an Afterword by Jeremy Adler. New York: New Directions. 249 pages. $23.

published in Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2006.

It is a fascinating paradox that the author of the classic study Crowds and […]

Songs in Flight The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE

Songs in Flight, The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann.

Edited and translated by Peter Filkins.  Marsilio.

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in the provincial Southern city of Klagenfurt, not far from the Italian and Yugoslavian […]