CHICAGO REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"An Interview with Frank Bidart","authors":"Andrew Rathmann, D. Allen, Frank Bidart","doi":"10.2307/25304764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304764","url":null,"abstract":"This interview was conducted at the Prairie Restaurant in downtown Chicago on Saturday, October 16, 1999. ANDREW RATHMANN: For me, and I'm sure for many others, one of the pleasures of your poetry is its rhetorical intensity--by which I mean the absence of irony, and your willingness to venture grand statements about life, death, guilt, desire, and so forth. I find this aspect of your work thrilling. But as you know, there is a strong climate of opinion these days that finds such statements either naive or embarrassing in some way, whereas you are not embarrassed. FRANK BIDART: Unembarrassable! Well-- AR: I don't want to ask you, \"Why aren't you an ironic poet?\" But I would like to know what you make of the turn toward irony, or toward a cooler and more cerebral kind of writing. FB: We live in an armored age. There has come to be astonishing sophistication in producing an armored self on paper--in a way that makes the poems that were \"armored\" twenty years ago look positively candid and naive. And I think it's a trap, I think it's a terrible trap. Frost says, quoting Horace, \"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.\" There's a kind of power that art can have--that the art I most love has--that you can't have if everything is presented from an ironic perspective. \"Ironic perspective\" doesn't say it--from a point of view where the work, as I say, is infinitely protected, but also closed, and doesn't venture connections to the vagaries and range of the emotional life. Maybe I should put it this way: If you can't tell when something goes wrong in a work, that this line is bad or this move wrong, you also can't tell when there's something right. There's a kind of power in writing that has a building sense of a center, that then opens the writer to the objection that something has g one wrong, something has not fulfilled itself, something has not developed from the poem's spine. Without risking that, you can't have the kind of decisive and powerful rightness that I crave as a reader. There is an ancient tradition in Western art--and I say Western because I don't truly know other kinds of art--in which you can talk about a central action in a poem or a play or an epic. You experience its center in terms of that action, and you can think about--you can talk about--how successful it is in relation to the fulfillment of that action. DANIELLE ALLEN: Is there an ambiguity in the phrase \"a building sense of center\"? When you first used it, I understood something about the poet's own commitment to the world and to a particular interpretive focus that the reader would have to identify in order to assess the poetry. FB: I mean the Aristotelian sense of action. It \"builds\" in the sense that it has a progress: it's not simply \"this event and this event and this event,\" but the second event has some relation to the first, and both of those events affect what happens later; there's an arc to the action. There's a sense of progressive learning about necessity.","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304764","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69013353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An E-Mail Interview with Thalia Field","authors":"Eric P. Elshtain, T. Field","doi":"10.2307/25304782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304782","url":null,"abstract":"The construction of the flying saucer is not so much a dilemma of hardware as it is a poetic challenge. Terence McKenna, History Ends in Green Doesn't Gabrielle's being made the tool of her mother's murder convince you of the necessity--at least the poetic necessity--of the curse? Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse This conversation took place over a period of four months via electronic mail. The centerpiece of the conversation is Field's recent book, Point and Line (New Directions, 2000), but hovering around the event were side conversations--about Freud, Tibetan Buddhism, the profession of poetry, science, and other subjects--which informed both questions and answers. The medium of electronic mail allows for time and space not afforded by the more \"intimate\" setting of a table, two cups, and a tape recorder. Which is very much to the point of Field's work; she keeps the fields of literature open (which can be seen in the way she treats the textual page) in order to keep the written up to date with the world and its vicissitudes. The characters in Field's book are treated by the world as they try to treat each other, and Field attempts to capture what interferes with forming a life, a character, a setting, a space in which to play at being. This sense of discomfort is a key to the work and the conversation; it is both a poetic necessity and poetic challenge. What do you trust? I think \"trust\" and the mind keeps slipping over into \"belief\": I make believe, but should I have trust? Believing is gravity's constants, the furniture, the house, the street, culture, people. Isn't trust the belief that these things will be there when I sit on them, test them, return to them? Maybe I think I have my house, my life, the gist of a story... But I trust these things precisely because they're not to be believed. Sometimes slowly, sometimes catastrophically, houses are always on the go, the mind is always lost, history just ahead of \"me.\" That bat trusts only that it must listen carefully; if it flew on \"trust\" alone, would it crash? It's the noun which fails, the verb which might work out. Fundamentally, writing creates itself as it loves, names, maps the world which is destroyed in its arriving; there's nothing to sit on for long, so I guess I trust that a chair is a landfill or fire wood, that I'm on a constant stage of timing, that belief is the middle of a conversation whose voices change. How much was Point and Line thought of as a book? Did you feel restricted by that form in any way? As I worked on the stories in Point and Line, I began to become interested in the determining elements of what now seems to be called the \"book format\" in a world of publishing in which the book is one choice among many. The decadent state of affairs of the book opens up a lot of possibility with using its structures to talk about \"bookness\" in general--so I began to think of ways in which the reader's movement through the book might become part of the pacing and kinetic exp","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304782","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69013584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In the Kitchen","authors":"John Taggart","doi":"10.2307/25304740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304740","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304740","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69013155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sills: Selected Poems","authors":"Eirik Steinhoff, Michael O’brien","doi":"10.2307/25304757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304757","url":null,"abstract":"Michael O'Brien. Sills: Selected Poems. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2000. Rarely is a selected poems one's first introduction to a poet, but in the case of Michael O'Brien's Sills, I think we have to make a welcome exception. Although he published work by Frank Kuenstler, Rachel Blau, Serge Gavronsky, and many others in The Eventorium Muse in New York in the 1960s, O'Brien appears to be little known in today's circuit (for instance, the Muse isn't included in Granary's Secret Location on the Lower East Side). His earlier books are nearly impossible to find, so we need this collection to make clear what a strong voice it is that we've been missing. O'Brien is a younger contemporary of the NewYork School, but his poetry distinguishes itself from their sprawling, inclusive poetics by hearkening back to that leaner school of New Yorkers, the Objectivists. His early work is inflected with the influences of Hart Crane, French Symbolism, and Surrealism (he's translated Eluard), which is to say that he comes close at points to the nonce wit of Ashbery or Koch. But his general tendency is in a different direction, more contained and more precise. As this book traverses 40-odd years of the poet in city and country, alone and in company, at home and on the street, it traces an itinerary through what one poem calls \"perceptual difficulties\" (38) and what another calls \"the world and its likeness\" (75). These poems are stripped of decoration, and although the majority consist of short lines, O'Brien has a formal range that maintains a spark in a variety of configurations on the page, from pentameter lines to prose poems (the latter bearing none of the inertia that the form has lately been subject to). The first person pronoun appears in roughly half of these poems, although there's no doubt that someone moves behind those without it, setting them in motion: it would be impossible to conceive of them as less than lived. When the lyric \"I\" does appear there's usually an element of honesty in the voice, an unforced, relaxed reflexiveness, as in the following recognition of the limits of poetry as equipment for living (to use Burke's memorable phrase): I thought the poem Was a cotton I packed anger in But when morning cracked like a seed Wit was the foot I stood upon. (54) In these pages there is a Fennelosan tachography afoot that results in compressed lines with the connectives between them left out: \"the best join's unseen\" one poem prompts ( 111). The intervals between lines sometime link up, and sometimes do not-which is to say that this is a style that jumps and cuts between lines, leaving argument in the interstice and forcing the reader into the poem. O'Brien is more a disjunctive than a discursive poet, and there's a certain pleasure to be taken in the speed with which his poems unfold. There are clear links intermittently, but even when the join is uncertain, vagueness is held at bay by the persistence of particulars that supply a synapse between a liv","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304757","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69012916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Great Life","authors":"J. L. Clézio, C. Dickson","doi":"10.2307/25304739","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304739","url":null,"abstract":"Everyone calls them Pouce and Poussy, at least that's what their nicknames have been since childhood, and not many people know that their real names are Christele and Christelle. People call them Pouce and Poussy because they're just like twin sisters, and because they're not very tall. To be honest, they're actually short, quite short, and both very dark, with a strange childlike face and a button nose and nice shiny black eyes. They're not pretty, not really, because they're too small, and a bit too thin as well, with tiny arms and long legs and square shoulders. But there's something charming about them, and everyone likes them, especially when they start laughing, a funny, high-- pitched laughter that rings out like tinkling bells. They laugh quite often, almost anyplace, in the bus, in the street, in cafes, whenever they're together. And as a matter of fact, they're almost always together. When one of them is alone (which happens sometimes on account of different classes or when one of them is sick), they don't have fun. They get sad, and you don't hear their laughter. Some people say that Pouce is taller than Poussy, or that Poussy has finer features than Pouce does. That might be so. But the truth is, it's very difficult to tell them apart and surely no one ever could, especially since they dress alike, since they walk and talk alike, since they both have that same kind of laugh, a bit like sleigh bells being shaken. That's probably how they got the idea of starting out on their great adventure. At the time they were both working in a garment shop where they sewed button holes and put pockets on pants with the label Ohio, USA on the right-hand back pocket. That's what they did for eight hours a day and five days a week from nine to five with a twenty minute break to eat lunch standing by their machine. \"This is like prison,\" Olga, a coworker, would say. But she wouldn't talk very loudly, because it was against the rules to talk during working hours. Women who talked, who came to work late, or left their post without permission, had to pay a fine to the boss, twenty, sometimes thirty or even fifty francs. There was to be no down time. The workers finished at five sharp in the afternoon, but then they had to put the tools away, and clean the machines, and carry all the fabric scraps and bits of thread to the back of the workshop and throw them in the waste bin. So in fact, they didn't really finish work till half past five. \"No one stays on for long,\" Olga would say \"I've been here for two years, because I live nearby. But I won't stay another year.\" The boss was a short man of around forty, with grey hair, a thick waist, and an open shirt displaying a hairy chest. He thought he was handsome. \"You'll see, he's bound to make a pass at you,\" Olga had said to the young girls, and another girl had sneered, \"The man's a womanizer, a real pig.' Pouce couldn't have cared less. The first time he came walking up to them during working hours, with his","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304739","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69013126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Master Thief: A Poem in Twelve Parts","authors":"Eric P. Elshtain, C. Guthrie","doi":"10.2307/25304756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304756","url":null,"abstract":"Camille Guthrie. The Master Thief: A Poem in Twelve Parts. Honolulu: Subpress, 2000. Chapter 22 of Exodus describes laws and ordinances against thievery. In verse 8, Yahweh proclaims that if a thief who has given stolen goods to their original owner is not found, \"then the master of the house shall be brought unto the judges, to see whether he hath put his hand unto his neighbor's goods.\" If found guilty, the thief/master would then have to pay the neighbor back double the worth of the stolen property. Camille Guthrie, arguably, pays back double what she has stolen in this fine book, but she also shows what's been nearly stolen from her as a girl turning into a woman: the ability to tell her own story, without the aid of received narratives and types. According to Jewish mythology, the bone of a yid'oa' (beast or bird) in the mouth of a human yidde'oni, speaks of itself. In The Master Thief: A Poem in Twelve Parts, the bone and the mouth often trade places: the poet puts poems in her own mouth, where they speak of themselves-this book is filled with unattributed and unaltered quotes-and the poems put the poet in their mouths, out of which form fragments of personae and lexicons: \"...Out of it, she carved a mouthpiece-the bone began of itself to sing: Now I will show myself to you in my true form\" (61). We crib stories all the time, and put many bones in our mouth, but often at the expense of telling something true about ourselves. The poet here attempts to glean a truth out of this conflict. Each section in this book of twelve long poems takes on a signature form: fragmentary dialogues, mock idylls, near-pantoums. The sections are prefaced by 18 Ih-century chapter headings, which in and of themselves are poems of a high order: So she said Yes and put her hand in his hand-Snippety-snap-Fast & Loose vital currents began to circulate-The particulars of the inheritance-A number of wild useful plants-\"How dare you sneak into my garden like a thief? I'll make you pay dearly for this\"--Oh, that I had a letter!-A further account of the mistake-Which way? Which way? (15) Each section and preface are mini- bildungsromans at once utilizing and commenting in (rather than on) this genre. Recall Melville's chapter on \"FastFish and Loose-Fish\" in Moby-Dick. A Fast-Fish, whether connected to a boat or displaying a \"waif\" (a \"token of prior possession\") \"belongs to the party fast to it.\" But a \"Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.\" And what, asks Melville, \"to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish?\" This, for Guthrie, is the masterthief's point of departure. Isn't the human self loose, finding in literature ways to fast itself? And isn't literature itself loose, waiting to be fixed to a human self? By highlighting the psychic-borrowings the self engages in, Guthrie builds a poem of experience, rather than reflection; a poem written as part of the attempt to have a life, rather than a poem writte","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304756","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69012877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Red Horse","authors":"Eugene Dubnov, Christopher P Newman, J. Heath-Stubbs","doi":"10.2307/25304746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304746","url":null,"abstract":"Having just come to university, I was anxious not to miss any lectures. And so every Tuesday and Wednesday, when they started early, I was half asleep in the Metro on my way to the faculty. As the train moved out of Lenin Hills Station, I opened my eyes, hearing voices speaking in a foreign language, and glanced across at the people opposite. There were five of them: two girls and three boys, chatting non-stop. I did not know the language, but it sounded very beautiful. They were in their early twenties. One of the girls had incredible eyes, emerald green, huge, constantly moving, playing and laughing. She noticed that I was staring at her, and became even more excited, like a good actress who is aware of her attractions for the audience. Each time, as she turned her head from side to side talking to her friends, her glance would linger on me slightly longer. I just could not take my eyes away from her. Even her friends noticed my gaze: looking at me, they exchanged a few words and laughed warmly. I hardly noticed the stations passing by, until the whole group stood up to get out at Lenin Library Station. The girl with the eyes hesitated for a moment, smiled at me, and followed the others. My stop was next, but I half-thought of running after them to see where the girl went, and perhaps even to talk with her. But then I thought of the lecture I would miss, and anyway she was probably with her boyfriends and it was not for me that she had been performing. I could not concentrate on my lectures and seminars that day. Finally I decided to confess to Golovakha. He was my closest friend, and he had recently saved me from my former roommates by telling me how idiotic they were and suggesting that we should write a letter to the faculty authorities requesting that we be allowed to share a room together. He, with his usual businesslike approach, asked me which station the girl had gotten off at. When he heard that it was Lenin Library, he immediately said that the girl was almost certainly a student at the University, since that station was in the University area, the time was the time when lectures started, and she was together with a group of young people. Now, if she was a student, according to his calculations of probability I was bound to run into her again within the next two months. I never doubted his judgment, and I felt much better. Soon all of us were sharing a room in the dormitory. That is, myself, Golovakha, Mishutka, and Yosio Sato. Trying to recruit people for our room, we selected Mishutka for his huge nose. It was his main asset, and he constantly picked it; his other attractions were that he was not entirely stupid and that he recognised straightaway the leading role of Golovakha and myself. Yosio Sato we found at the first Young Communist League meeting. Being a foreigner, he did not have to attend, as we did, but he came out of curiosity, and we noticed the ironic expression in his usually impassive Japanese eyes as he watched the pr","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304746","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69012768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cold-Water Flats","authors":"Anne Winters","doi":"10.2307/25304704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304704","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304704","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69012754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Breaking Cover: Peter Riley's Passing Measures","authors":"Nigel Wheale","doi":"10.2307/25304721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304721","url":null,"abstract":"Breaking cover: Peter Riley's Passing Measures1 Kc: ...what tradition is present in your writing? PR: English poetry. All of it, good, bad and indifferent, popular and unpopular, overvalued and neglected, the lot. It's an entire climate, all the poetry being written at this time in this country. Kc: [Gasp!]2 There is no audience: there is one reader at a time comprising the potential of all readers, who has to be entirely trusted and honoured and is infinitely demanding. Which is to say that the poet is, actually, in love with the reader. There can be no qualification to that, except, of course, the reader's absence.3 Oxford University Press's outrageous decision to shed its poetry list in 1998 gives a misleading impression of the current state of poetry publication in the U.K. Indeed, this is an opportune time to attend to a loosely related group of poets who began writing in the U.K. during the mid-1960s and early 1970s, but whose work has not been easily obtainable until now. Michael Schmidt's Carcanet Press and Neil Astley's Bloodaxe Books, two of the most prolific poetry publishing houses in Britain, have begun to bring out single-author collections of writing which until the last few years had been side-lined by the larger publishers. In 1997 Bloodaxe published Barry MacSweeney's The Book of Demons, the poet's first \"overground\" publication since Hutchinson published his debut collection, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, as long ago as 1968. And in 1999 Bloodaxe in association with Folio and Fremantle Arts Centre Press published J. H. Prynne's monumental Poems, a corpus of writing which has variously inspired, enthused, and (more usually) infuriated British readers and poets ever since 1968. Carcanet had begun to anthologise some of this \"left-field\" writing in the late 1980s, and in 1995 published Michael Haslam's A Whole Bauble, gathering an exemplary, individual career from 1977 to 1994. In 1996 Penguin Modern Poets brought out a concise selection of poems from Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, and lain Sinclair-Sinclair had tried to promote the poetry of Doug Oliver and others through an ill-fated Paladin Poetry series in the early 1990s. And in 2000 Carcanet in association with \"infernal methods\" published R. F. Langley's Collected Poems, a life-work of just seventeen poems over 72 pages. This immediately garnered a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was also shortlisted for the prestigious national Whitbread Poetry Award (won in the previous year by Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf). The independent presses and fugitive magazines must have been doing something right for all those years in the margin (I should declare an interest here, as R. F. Langley's infernally methodical publisher). It's also vital to highlight two other ambitious collectings from this loosely-related wave of writing: Denise Riley's Selected Poems, (absolutely no relation!) issued by Reality Street Editions (2000), and Anna Mendelssohn's ","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304721","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69013052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Raworth's Sonnets","authors":"N. Dorward","doi":"10.2307/25304696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304696","url":null,"abstract":"From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s the major project of the British poet Tom Raworth was a series of sonnet sequences, whose main sections have been published as Sentenced to Death (1987), Eternal Sections (1993), and Survival (1994). My intention here is to elaborate some commentary on this project in the form of loosely thematic readings, in which I try to draw out and explore patterns of image and idea that can contribute to my and others' understanding of these poems. If the context were a poetry more obviously discursive or settled than Raworth's this might sound like an unexceptionable project; but such a task might seem both difficult and beside the point in relation to a poetry that destabilizes ideas of unitary meaning, of \"content\" of a poem's being \"about\" something. To give a sense of the style of these poems, and the challenges they pose to conventions of interpretation and commentary, I'll quote one sonnet (I am using the word loosely: the poems are 14 lines long, but they are not conventionall y metrical nor do they feature regular rhyme). Here is the opening poem of Eternal Sections: in black tunics, middle-aged in the stationery store every gesture, even food: to it thought which breaks stereotypes which constitute extenuated to the point none of the action's promoters the user experiences no need of acting dedicated to commerce the history of our own stiffness of manner no longer aligned How might one discuss poetry like this, at once so elusive and shifting, yet strangely familiar in its collage of recognizable idioms and situations? The poem's phrases are unpredictably choppy or continuous, and sometimes seem assembled according to shape rather than sense. (Note, for instance, the parallel constructions involving \"which' \"no/none' \"in,\" and \"of\"; or the near mirror-image of \"every\" and \"even\" in line 3.) Yet the poem does tempt interpretation: its wry allusions to \"thought\" and \"stereotypes\" glance self-reflexively at the very acts of thinking and writing, and the last line points to the poems own realignment of once-familiar phrases. But it would seem that any act of \"close reading\"--of \"reading for content\"--would either be wilfully synthetic or merely document the trace of private associations (mine) that are both unstable and of doubtful value to another reader. So before moving to some commentary on the poetry, I want to frame that commentary by sketching in some of the concerns about contemporary poetry, and the way one talks about it, that acts of close reading might speak to. In proportion to the length of Raworth's career and the evident importance of his work to several generations of poets from the UK, North America, and Europe, there has been remarkably little substantial criticism about his poetry: I'd count about half a dozen articles once one discounts brief reviews. I would guess that this critical lack is due to the poetry's elusiveness, and also to Raworth's characteristic unwillingness to frame his work wit","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2001-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304696","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69012453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}