Nonfiction

The novel is alive, of course, was never even close to dead, and seems now to be enjoying something very much like a golden age, a period that people in fifty or a hundred years can look back on as we now do on Victorian fiction, or English Renaissance drama. Since I cannot possibly prove…

Except for critics like Hilton Kramer and George Levine in The New York Times Book Review or Naomi Bliven in The New Yorker, Martin Green's reviewers have treated each book in isolation, remarking with surprise that here is a very smart man whom we must keep our eye on. This is unfortunate, because Green's work…

Roth seems to me the most gifted novelist now writing, at least if one puts a stress on tradition in using the word novelist. He translates his intelligence and his feelings into the terms specific to serious fiction, with more firmness than Bellow, more richness than Mailer, more patience and steadiness and taste and tact…

I too have favorite candidates for whatever literature of the 1970's ought to survive. The poems of Amon Liner and James Applewhite ought to last on, and Marguerite Yourcenar's novel The Abyss and Mary Lee Settle's Blood Tie, and the stories of Eve Shelnutt. I have no real confidence that these works will survive. Almost…

The poems of Joyce Peseroff are a great pleasure to read. Many of them (though I will not try to illustrate this here) are very funny; and many of them enter the mind with a persistent force that is startling. "Startling" seems right because Peseroff's way of writing does not involve the loud noises or…

"Where there is room for error," Charles Martin writes, meditating on the past which has been forged by the articulation of the bones of dinosaurs at the Brooklyn Museum, "there is room for us." It is very much the theme of these poems and the ruined, ruinous, funny and terrifying world they conjure. Martin was…

Robert B. Shaw's Comforting the Wilderness (Wesleyan, 1977) deserves attention not only because it is a very good first collection of poems, but also because it raises the question of where American poetry is going at the moment. It exemplifies, I think, a gradual revival of interest in the well-made poem. Since Robert Lowell and…

I was going round Manhattan . . . and I noticed a girl sitting all by herself on the other side of the deck – a girl of about thirty, wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles. I said to my friend, `I…

The following interview took place on two occasions in July of this year at my apartment in Cambridge. Bill Knott drank instant iced tea, as is his custom, and talked easily once we had started. Knott is the author of nine books of poems, most of them published by small presses, beginning with the Naomi…