Jim Powell, in the final section of Substrate, itself titled “Substrate,” presents us with moments of apprehending persons from … More
Category: 20th and 21st Centuries
404. (T.S. Eliot)
Criticism has one basic task: to explain what is justifiably, rightly extraordinary in a work of literature. This involves making … More
403. (Wallace Stevens)
Surfaces are the occasion of Stevens’ poetry; so obvious a statement for a poet among whose best early poems is … More
402. (Jim Powell)
The obvious question to ask about Jim Powell’s second collection of poems, Substrate, published twenty five years after the first, … More
400 (T.S. Eliot)
I’ve tried to work out, in the last five posts, how it is that the most remarkable “Romance” narrative poems … More
394. (Ezra Pound)
Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos inspires questions, and is itself the answer to some of the questions; if we feel the … More
390. (Ezra Pound)
Pound felt himself to be in an earthly hell, in the cage in which the Pisan Cantos were written. But … More
383. (Wallace Stevens)
There is no sine qua non for poetic success, but it is difficult to imagine making sense of whether a … More
380. (Toni Morrison)
In an earlier post on Song of Solomon I tried to make sense of the presence of melodrama in the … More
379. (Leo Tolstoy)
Hadji Murat should be a tragedy—it is not. That is the crucial fact about it. Tolstoy refused to write tragedy, here … More