Good news for those interested in the state of poetry criticism: there's a feature on that very topic just now available in the latest issue of The Battersea Review. It includes contributions by...
...William Logan
...Marjorie Perloff
...Mike Theune
...David Bromwich
...and my own contribution, "The Work of Criticism in the Age of Mechanical Recommendation"
As usual, The Battersea Review feels like a great party, with all sorts of guests. Outside of the symposium on criticism, the focus of the current issue is on French-language writing, and there's too much to list, but as a longtime lover of all things Tintin, let me point to Alexandra Kulik's piece on the life of Tintin's creator Hergé, "Tintin and the Well of Dissatisfaction."
Nice piece! The "good for X" part reminds me of a conversation I was having with a colleague the other day about the need to fill in the gap after "difficult" when talking about poems: "difficult to X," not "difficult" in the abstract.
ReplyDeleteIt really does keep one honest about what one means to say, doesn't it? As for difficulty -- I find what George Steiner has to say in the title essay of "On Difficulty" quite interesting. He has a typology offering four distinct kinds of difficulty. It's not exhaustive, but quite suggestive.
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