I’m very pleased to announce the launch of Chicago Review 53:4 & 54:1/2, a 368-page triple issue with a special section dedicated to the life and work of Barbara Guest. The issue costs $18 and may be purchased here, or you can subscribe to CR for a year–good for three issues–for just $25 here.

The Barbara Guest feature includes three previously unpublished plays by Guest and a portfolio (edited by Catherine Wagner) of five uncollected poems. The feature also includes critical and personal responses to Guest’s work by Charles Altieri, Eileen Myles, Donald Revell, John Wilkinson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Martha Ronk, Andrea Brady, Brenda Hillman, Nancy Robbin, Patricia Dienstfrey and Rena Rosenwasser, and Garrett Caples.

The issue also includes:

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Fire alone can be fed, kept captive
like a vestal helpmeet, lady or return it to the wild
let fly from canisters a living payload
to prowl the brush bury in an acreage
whose future growth it claims by tender.
—Andrea Brady, “Tracking Wildfire”

Tracey Rosen, our intrepid correspondent in Athens, filed this report last evening:

So, the fires here have been quite remarkable, thanks for asking. I myself am not actually burnt, per se—but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the scorch in my ears as gaia cries out in pain! All seriously, though…it has been rather inconvenient because I’ve had to spend a whole afternoon cleaning ash off of my balcony. Overall, I’ve been doing my best to get footage of the madness and to compile a list of theories explaining their cause. The most colorful include:

And of course, the nebulous “they” that everyone keeps referring to, beginning sentences with the agentive subject: “THEY burned us” (as opposed to the passive voice which would allow room for natural disaster: i.e., “we’ve been burned”).
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The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess, John Wikinson’s book of mostly-collected criticism, is now out from Salt. The essays’ main subjects are poets who came of working age during and just after the British Poetry Revival: John James, Denise Riley, Douglas Oliver, J.H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth. A few American poets (John Weiners, Robert Creeley, Mina Loy) attract his attention as well, and the book includes two essays (on Marjorie Welish and Andrea Brady) that made their first appearances in Chicago Review.

(The next issue of CR will include Wilkinson’s response to Peter Riley’s letter about Wilkinson’s review of Simon Jarvis’s Unconditional. For Robert Archambeau’s jaunty summary of that debate, see here and here.)

The question Wilkinson returns to time and again in his criticism has to count as one of the central questions facing any poet working today: can there be lyric poetry that is not somehow Romantic? What both worries and thrills Wilkinson about Romanticism is its excess, an excess capable of both frustrating and inspiring the dream of political justice. But what is poetry without excess? In a sense, this is the same question that American visual artists were grappling with forty years ago, when modernism gave way to minimalism and, in Michael Fried’s terms, art yielded the stage to objects.

(For a clear and convincing demonstration of the political implications of Romantic attitudes about art—also a useful summary of one of the Frankfurt School’s favorite arguments—see Wolf Lepenies’s Tanner Lectures, The End of “German Culture.” [PDF])

Wilkinson’s subjects are not mere props for his own theorizing. As he writes in the introduction, one of the essays’ major objects is to satisfy “an intense need to argue, for myself as well as for others, the value of poets scarcely heard of when I was writing. This is the kind of thing poets should do, and which the academy should better appreciate and promote.”

The Lyric Touch is available from Salt and from Amazon, as is his recent book of poems, Lake Shore Drive (Amazon | Salt)

Meshworks at Miami of Ohio (admirably managed by Keith Tuma, cris cheek, Justin Katko, and Daniel Ereditario) has some video posted of the Oxford (OH) leg of the British poets’ US tour. (Said poets being Andrea Brady, Keston Sutherland, and Peter Manson, all featured in the British Poetry Issue of Chicago Review.)

They’ve also got video of Sean Bonney, Mairéad Byrne, Tom Leonard, Bernadette Mayer, Stephen Rodefer, and Tom Raworth. Plus, footage from the Contemporary Experimental Women’s Poetry Festival at Cambridge last year.

My open (and terribly earnest) letter in response to some of David Baratier’s comments on the Buffalo POETICS list (which are archived here):

Since no one’s sprinting to our defense, I hope I can be forgiven for offering a brief response to David Baratier’s comments on recent issues of Chicago Review. (Though I write as a co-editor of the magazine, I don’t presume to speak for my fellow editors and staff members. The magazine is too small, too precariously assembled to tolerate a party line.)

I’d like to leave Mr. Baratier’s concerns about the Dorn issue to the side, since I wasn’t at the magazine then and can’t speak for Eirik, except to say his deep knowledge of and serious passion for Dorn’s work hardly qualifies him as a “dabbler.” And I can’t speak to whether our “entire tone has went to silence” or the poetry we publish “promotes inaction.” It’s true that we haven’t had any fan letters from the barricades, but I’m not sure that settles the case. For most people on this planet, the fact that we pay as much attention to poetry as we do would count as evidence for charge that we’re “out of step with the needs of the current age.”
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Andrea Brady’s photos from her visit (with Keston Sutherland, Peter Manson, Matt Ffytche, Sam Ladkin, and Robin Purves) to Chicago, South Bend, Oxford (Ohio), and points east.