-
Submission
Linh Dinh has a new Harriet post called “Poetry and Technology,”and it fairly bristled with interesting ideas. “One may begin writing a poem in complete freedom, that is, in complete randomness,” he notes, “but one should end the exasperating process in abject submission.” Another way of putting is that writing a poem is like digging your own grave! (Linh also says, “With irony, everything is possible.”) One surprise in his post—surprising to me, though others may not find it so—is Linh’s revelation that he writes on a laptop while lying on his belly.Read More
-
Dangerous Considerations
The October 2007 issue of Poetry carries an observant, insightful bit of prose by the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski entitled a “Dangerous Considerations: A Notebook.” He touches on Christmas in Krakow, Gottfried Benn, political disputes occasioned by Zbigniew Herbert’s death, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann (whose Magic Mountain Musil described as a “shark’s stomach”), Ted Hughes’s translations of Yehuda Amichai, a festschrift honoring the poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak, the essays of Gershom Scholem, Saint-John Perse (nom de plume of Aléxis Léger, who in the 1930s served as director of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), E. M.Read More