407. (Jim Powell)

            Jim Powell, in the final section of Substrate, itself titled “Substrate,” presents us with moments of apprehending persons from … More

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