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:

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.