Nonfiction

Craig Raine's new kind of poetry has yet to reach a substantial audience in the United States. But, if the reviews can be believed, Raine's reputation in Britain exceeds that of any contemporary poet on this side of the Atlantic. Raine's four books- The Onion, Memory, A Martian Sends a Post Card Home, Rich, and…

I discovered Craig Raine's work (first his remarkable second book A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and then his first book The Onion, Memory) about eight years ago. I was immediately struck by its eloquence, which is never stuffy or merely decorative, by the sharpness of its tone, and by the odd rightness of its…

Asked what he worked at, Oscar Wilde's brother Willie would reply, "At intervals." This kind of innocuous controlled explosion which sends a phrase sky-high the moment before it reassembles, younger and wiser and apparently unfazed, is analogous to the effect achieved by certain poems. It defamiliarizes, yes, but mostly in order to refamiliarize. It glamorizes…

Déconstruction est passée, as they say on the Champs-Elysées. One mirror facing another inside a mirrored sphere spins scintillations too tiny and brief to illuminate the unetherized body slabbed for autopsy. Deconstruction is reflective, but of what? Of collective despair, some scholars think. Though we each push our own hopes before us like wheel-barrows through…

There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca . . . . I distinctly remember wondering, stroll- ing the bright and un-blasted streets, why it was that all the other American cities weren't depopulated now that their young people were free once again to get up…

The original intention of editing an issue of Ploughshares was a collection of dramatic verse, either written directly for theatrical performance or adaptable for the stage. There were few submissions. Instead, resolutely lyrical poems came, altering intention. There are many names I would have liked to see here, but the pleasures of discovery of new…

Thirty-seven years after publication of the first Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams, New Directions has given us a new one. In 1949 Williams himself did the selecting, and Randall Jarrell was called upon to provide an introduction. Charles Tomlinson, an Englishman who did not "seriously begin to read Williams until 1956-his Desert Music and…

I A Contradiction of Fundamental Logic "If the motion of the world aimed at a final state, that state would have been reached," Nietzsche writes in Will To Power (#708). To build a poetics upon that notion, as John Ashbery has done, is to insist upon its corollary, the notion of eternal return. It is…

In one of his poems, Wallace Stevens leaves us a record of the writer as connoisseur, imposing order on chaos, and, on the other hand, deliberately upsetting the established order. Elizabeth Sewell, in The Structure of Poetry, views the process of writing poems as a mediation between extremes from logic to nightmare. And these polarities…