“Truscon, A Division of Republic Steel, 1969-70: A Prose-Poem Sequence Disguised as a Lyrical Essay, Itself Aspiring to Be a Fictional Memoir” by Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson’s essay, “Truscon, A Division of Republic Steel, 1969-70: A Prose Poem Sequence Disguised as a Lyrical Essay, Itself Aspiring to Be a Memoir,” reads like a series of prose poems that cohere seamlessly as a moving and occasionally brutal coming of age story about the author’s first job experience in a steel factory in his hometown of Buffalo,
Some Thoughts on the Sublime Irony of Nothing and the Divine Imagination by Chard DeNiord
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE SUBLIME IRONY OF NOTHING AND THE DIVINE IMAGINATION “The most sublime act is to set another before you.” William Blake “Nothing is the force/ That renovates the World.” Emily Dickinson * The legacy of sublime conceits in both secular and religious literature betrays the same ironic muse in an archetypal arc
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
