Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Reading his poems in The New Yorker , I have always been struck by their air of quiet intelligence. When I heard him read at last year's Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, I thought, here was the real thing . The authority of experience, thought and craft. The testing faith in language. The last three days of my spring break were spent reading his Selected Poems, Quiver of Arrows , and the experience was akin to falling in love.  The poems describe a rich interior landscape--love, grief, reason, violence--in syntax that grows increasingly baroque in the later books. The late style of Henry James comes to mind, especially when later poems refer to the need for "fine discriminations." The complex sentences are broken up, refracted, sounded, by the use of short lines, and so the versification produces an extremely private, meditative and yet dramatic voice, a voice that weighs its sound at every turn. In some poems these discriminations could be refined into airy nothings; they...

Just finished watching the last episode of "The Jewel in the Crown," the fourteen-part serial produced by Granada Studios and first broadcast on British independent TV in January 1984. Based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet , published between 1966 and 1975, the serial focuses on the last days of British rule in India. Peter McLuskie gives here the interesting context of the serial's broadcast and subsequent role in the debate over the deregulation of television in the late 1980's.  Following a commentator on the serial, McLuskie describes "The Jewel in the Crown" as the least nostalgic and most troubled of the cycle of productions in the early '80's that looked back to the glories of the British Raj. The trouble, writes McLuskie, "may have less to do with the serial's overt politics and more to do with its form and style." This is an interesting statement, but it is also potentially a misleading one, for it implies that style is separa...

This is not so much a review as a response, since I am not a golf player and do not understand the sport argot that constitutes the material, metaphor and metaphysics of this ambitious book of poems. Reading this stream of mostly short, untitled poems, I am the small animal that leaps from floating log to floating log, finding a slippery hold on some comprehensible utterance before the water's momentum carries me forward again. The run is not only desperate, it is also thrilling. For despite the poem's obscurities to this reader the complex orchestration of voices, syntax, and lineation is extremely compelling, and I read the book from beginning to end with a rush of excitement. The book wants us to believe that golf is the Game of Life. The sport is a world of male camaraderie and competition, not only between men of similar ages but also men of different generations. The author, in his bio, explains helpfully that he plays frequently "with his father, his brother, his ne...

TLS February 20 2009 from Jon Garvie's review of David Singh Grewal's Network Power: The social dynamic of globalization : He offers detailed accounts of how the English language, the gold standard and neo-liberal economics all, at various times, rose to international dominance. In each instance, he finds that power grows because of the increasing size of a network, rather than because of any intrinsic value.  *** Oliver Reynold's review of art exhibition "The Roundhouse of International Spirits: Arp, Benazzi, Bissier, Nicholson, Richter, Tobey, Valenti in the Ticino": His [Bissier's] philosophy is clear from a remark he made to Benazzi, the sculptor forty years his junior: "Sculpture is born within the self, and it is not a mere formal problem." * Henry de Montherlant famously claimed that happiness always writes white. Here, in the contentment of Bissier's final years, his brush seems unable to help itself: happiness paints what it sees. *** TL...

This work is a part of Wilson's 10-play cycle that explores the African American experience, decade by decade, over the course of the twentieth century. Wilson was born in 1945 and died in 2005. "Joe Turner" takes place in 1911, in Pittsburg, where most of the plays take an inhabitation and a name. The playwright's note gives a clear idea of his aims in this play: It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911. The sun falls out of heaven like a stone. The fires of the steel mill rage with a combined sense of industry and progress. Barges loaded with coal and iron ore trudge up the river to the mill towns that dot the Monongahela and return with fresh, hard, gleaming steel. The city flexes its muscles. men throw countess bridges across the rivers, lay roads and carve tunnels through the hills sprouting with houses. From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of ...

An informative and immensely readable history of the ghazal , from its beginning in Arabic poetry to its spread to Spain, Africa, Persia and the Indian sub-continent, written by David Jalajel. Niranjan Sarker follows it up by examining the "Ghazal as a Form of Urdu Poetry in the Asian Subcontinent."   The essay concludes with a short clip of Waseem Barelvi reciting a ghazal in a 'mushaira' (poetry meet). 

Chatting with AH recently, we talked about the value of creative responses--poem, art, video, reading etc--to someone's work, responses that go beyond leaving a blog or Facebook comment. Don't get me wrong. Such comments are always welcomed; they are human impulses amidst the electronic pulses. To respond creatively, however, requires a different level of reflection and commitment.  It requires a giving of the self, so that not only does the relationship between person and work change from I-it to I-You (in Buber's terms raised by AH), but a creative response changes the initial term from it to I too. We humanize ourselves by giving creatively of ourselves.  And that's what AH has been doing by responding creatively (and critically) to my work for so long. His new poem , written in the form of my sequence "I Am My Names," is a further instance of his humanity.  * Last night VM invited me to see whether her home, not so far from mine in Woodside, would be a goo...