Just received, and something I’m really going to be very happy to read: the new Chicago Review, whose essays’n'criticism section amounts to a festschrift for Robert von Hallberg. You can’t read the essays online– you’ll have to buy the issue, or read it in some good library– but you can read new poems by Rae Armantrout, along with a swath of book reviews.
Trying to track down something in a literary magazine you can’t find, and one your library doesn’t own? If the magazine is British, you’re in luck: I had to look up something in the much-lamented Thumbscrew and there’s lots of ‘screws at the Southbank Centre Poetry Library. Also Angel Exhaust for the avant-gardiste, a few New Welsh Reviews, and many more. That’s what the Internet is for. (Well, that, and some other things. Pictures of cats, say.)
One of my new favorite poetry bloggers, Mike Chasar at Poetry and Popular Culture, has been puncturing pretensions for a while now: in his, or their (friends do it too) latest, we see how and why the Hallmark card might surpass even (say) Susan Howe, or Pound, in requiring its projected readers to focus on the materiality of the page on which the verse appears. (Is a sigh in order? Perhaps.)
Merry holidays! Here’s a useful interview with Rae Armantrout, whom another blog has now declared our poet of the year.
And here I am writing about Timothy Donnelly, surely one of the best books of the year. Watch this space.
