Tag Archives: poetry

“Something Like America”

Posted on December 10, 2018 by JMN

http://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/books/review/political-poetry.html Wordsworth’s description of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is sometimes cited as shorthand for what poets refer to as the lyric “I,” the poet’s vehicle for private, meditative reflection. So what becomes of the lyric “I” if poems are not … Continue reading →

Posted in Quotations | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Twombly Effect

Posted on December 3, 2018 by JMN

hereelsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/0aTwombgal-500×333.jpg Poetic ardor can be exhausting. (As the many quotes from art critics that pepper [Joshua] Rivkin’s book demonstrate, Twombly tends to send writers into lyric overdrive.) (Holland Carter, “A Life of Cy Twombly Brings a Poet’s Eye to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Hannah Arendt on W. H. Auden

Posted on November 30, 2018 by JMN

http://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/persons/509349/509349_v9_ba.jpg [… Auden] was blessed with that rare self-confidence which does not need admiration and the good opinion of others, and can even withstand self-criticism and self-examination without falling into the trap of self-doubt. This has nothing to do with … Continue reading →

Posted in Quotations | Tagged | Leave a comment

Judith Kazantzis

Posted on November 8, 2018 by JMN

Ms. Kazantzis wrote in free verse, her language intelligent but not didactic, powerful but not polemic. It could be witty, with traces of sarcasm. She portrayed women as complex, to correct literature’s pigeonholing them in one-dimensional characterizations as goddess or … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthology, Quotations | Tagged | 1 Comment

Ottoline Morrell on T.S. Eliot, 1916

Posted on November 3, 2018 by JMN

“He is obviously very ignorant of England and imagines that it is essential to be highly polite and conventional and decorous and meticulous.” (Quoted by Louis Menand, “Practical Cat, How T.S. Eliot became T.S. Eliot,” (The New Yorker, September 19, … Continue reading →

Posted in Quotations | Tagged | 2 Comments

Alex Katz at 91

Posted on November 1, 2018 by JMN

“I was in the abstract art world, socially – they all thought I was really stupid. The poets all liked my work – I had some of the smartest people on the planet buying my work. I knew I was … Continue reading →

Posted in Quotations | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

More Liberties Taken

Posted on September 29, 2018 by JMN

I puzzle over how the formal properties of verse help, or fail to help, verse. How do meter and rhyme support imagery and diction if they do, and why not if they don’t? I think rhythm and rhyme originally were … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged | Leave a comment

Liberties Taken

Posted on September 22, 2018 by JMN

I want to think out loud about how poetry works, but without being too scrupulous about terminology. It just slows me down to try to re-research what the proper name for everything is. For a specimen I want to take … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged | Leave a comment

Feelings and Imagination

Posted on September 19, 2018 by JMN

I once authored a proto-blog in the BI (Before Internet) epoch, an ante-deluvian moment on the cyber-scale of time. I was based in a rambling bayou city situated in a large, hidebound, arrière-garde, rump-facing state of the sector of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Soria” Wrecked: Meter and Rhyme

Posted on September 13, 2018 by JMN

“Soria” by Antonio Machado, Spanish Poet, 1875-1939 From “Campos de Castilla,” Antonio Machado, Biblioteca Anaya, 1964. (English translations by James Mansfield Nichols) Translating into meter is a lost cause, but adding a rhyme scheme escalates it to a punishing lost cause. You’re … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthology | Tagged , | Leave a comment