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Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

Window Poetics

I dwell in Possibility -A fairer House than Prose -More numerous of Windows -Superior – for Doors – What’s a window, to a poet? For Emily Dickinson, above, the act…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

Translating a Milestone: Mon Emily Dickinson in France

In what follows, I explore how the 2017 French translation of Susan Howe’s landmark 1985 text, My Emily Dickinson, as Mon Emily Dickinson by the Dickinson scholar and prolific translator…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

“The Jewel of the North”: Mateo Galindo’s “Encadenar” in Space

all that you touch you changeall that you change changes you [ . . . ] During this “Dim Age” governments defined parts of the North American Southwest as zones…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

“The Mayor Is a Tough Act to Follow”: Some Social Poetry in the Theaters of the Rahm Regime

One Chicago evening in spring 2013, I sat behind Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a small black box theater. We had gathered to see the experimental troupe Theater Oobleck as they…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

The Opacity of Racial Form

In “Toward a Personal Semantics,” a poem published in June Jordan’s 1971 collection Some Changes, Jordan describes a speaker’s hesitation at trusting an unnamed interlocutor’s words: if I do take…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

Introduction: Poetry’s Social Forms

What are the social forms of poetry today? In asking this question for this cluster, we want to place reciprocal pressure on these two central terms — social and forms…

Contemporaries Essays, Roth’s Yahrzeit

The Double’s Allegiance: Philip Roth and the Question of Zion

Midway through Philip Roth’s brilliant and maddening 1993 novel Operation Shylock, Roth’s alter ego — who this time around is simply named Philip Roth — takes a road trip from…

Contemporaries Essays, Roth’s Yahrzeit

Philip Roth and the Fantasies of Authorship

Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself. -The Counterlife In an article in the New York Times published shortly…

Contemporaries Essays, Roth’s Yahrzeit

Philip Roth’s Modest Phase

In the 1950s, when Philip Roth came of age and first began to publish, it was the fate of the writer to have to consider the fate of the individual,…

Contemporaries Essays, Roth’s Yahrzeit

Rough: A Journey into the Drafts of Portnoy’s Complaint

A month ago, I was on the phone with a librarian in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, inquiring about the papers of Philip Roth. Would I need…