Archive for the ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry’ Tag
Poeticritical Serendipity
Donald Wellman reviews Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing, describing it as follows:
Fourteen lines on each page, that’s sonnet length. Little rhyme [or] syllogism employed. No tidy conclusions. Each line as long as it needs to be. Most discontinuous with one another but not necessarily so. It seems there may not be a logic other than method in the construction of Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing (Omnidawn 2016). Nothing follows, no conclusions, the title says it all.
The well-read might be circumspect about a book composed in this manner, sections riming with a sonnet’s length, parataxis the lines’ principle of arrangement, by a poet long-associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (Hejinian is included in both Silliman’s In the American Tree (1986) and Messerli’s “Language” Poetries (1987)), published in 2016.
Such readers might be prompted to further reflection over the implications of these compositional characteristics of Hejinian’s book when they read in Alice A. Kuzniar’s Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin about Karoline von Günderrode’s fifteen-verse “Ein apokalyptisches Fragment” (published in 1804), that “…each verse appears as a disjointed fragment in an unconnected, nonteleological series”.
I leave this juxtaposition to speak for itself, for readers with ears to hear and hearts that care to.
New Selected Poems of Paul Celan
I’ve been hunting up and following those of my contemporaries eager to slip between the Scylla of Academic L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and the Charybdis of the Mainstream Workshop poem, and synchronicitously I see a new selected poems of Paul Celan is in the offing, one whose selection upsets the reception of Celan that would make of him an anti-lyrical, formalist, proto-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet. As Station Hill’s catalogue puts it:
Paul Celan, arguably the mid-20th century’s most important German-language poet, is commonly pigeonholed as a poet of the Holocaust—a term, however, he never used. Undoing facile assumptions about Celan, Corona charts a more idiosyncratic and personal path through Celan’s large oeuvre, choosing 103 poems from among the more than 900 Celan published. The bilingual selection includes work from all of Celan’s periods and genres. Without ignoring the poet’s well-known work of memory and memorialization, it seeks to open a space for new appreciation of Celan’s love poems, as well as his poems on political events, painful reflections on his stays in mental hospitals, and quasi-burlesque verse.
My interest is piqued!