Close Listening w/ Charles Bernstein

On November 11, 2009, Marjorie Perloff spoke with Charles Bernstein on Close Listening. Their conversation and a reading from The Vienna Paradox have been archived at Pennsound.You will also find links at Charles Bernstein’s blog and Ron Silliman’s blog. Click through directly to the audio files at Pennsound below. Close Listening readings and conversations at [...]

Beckett’s Yeatsian Turn

“An Image from a Past Life”:

Beckett’s Yeatsian Turn

Published in Fulcrum, No. 6, 2007

–Reciting from Yeats’s “Friends,” in coming to the lines

While up from my heart’s root

So great a sweetness flows

I shake from head to foot,

Sam would stand up and repeat them, saying “Imagine such feeling—“So great a sweetness flows / […]

Yeats After Long Silence

HOW TO READ A POEM: W. B. YEATS’S “AFTER LONG SILENCE”

After Long Silence

Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant. [1]
Yeats’s eight-line poem was originally […]

Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats

LOC#: 78-102959

The Beckett/ Feldman Radio Collaboration

Words and Music as Hörspiel

Published in The Beckett Circle 26, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 207-11.

Beckett’s third radio play, Words and Music, written for BBC Radio and broadcast in November 1962, presents a curious anomaly in the Beckett canon, for a good portion of this radio play is given over to a musical score, to be written by a collaborator. For its first […]

Easter 1916

Yeats’s World War I Poem

published in Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry

When Pearce summoned Cuchulain to his side,
What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied? [1]
‘How does the war affect you?’ wrote W. B. Yeats’s old friend and fellow occultist Florence Farr from Ceylon in October 1914. At first Yeats shrugged it off: in […]

Yeats’s Political Identities

Allison, Jonathan, ed. Yeats’s Political Identities: Selected Essays. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. 352 pp. $44.50.

Published in ANQ 10, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 53-55.

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s remarkable “Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats” (1965) sets the stage for this excellent collection of essays on the vexed relationship between the poetic […]