The Only Critic by J.T. Barbarese
J.T. Barbarese makes the trenchant claim in his essay “The Only Critic” that memory itself serves as the “only critic” of poetry by virtue of its acumen for retaining what W.H. Auden called “memorable speech.” “Memory is what we remember…not a storage facility,” he writes. “It is a hoarder, so it isn’t choosey or tidy.” One must, therefore, work at
A Frozen Present: D. Nurkse on the Language of Fascism and “The Land of Magic”
This timely essay, which is also a trenchant exegesis of Henri Michaux’s unfinished poem “The Land of Magic,” witnesses to the fascist forces that subvert reason in the euphemistic “land of magic,” the “land” that was France during the Dreyfus Affair that lasted from 1894 to 1905, as well as the “land” that was France and Germany during World War
The Edson Letters by Peter Johnson
As Russell Edson’s close friend and faithful correspondent during the last twenty five years of his life, Peter Johnson initiated and then sustained an affectionate conversation with his mentor and friend–“Little Mister Prose Poem.” Writing profoundly to each other from the periphery of the mainstream poetry world, or as both Johnson and Edson might say, from the peanut gallery of
