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The Barbara Guest feature includes three previously unpublished plays by Guest and a portfolio (edited by Catherine Wagner) of five uncollected poems.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:

(more…)

From John Wilkinson’s fan letter-cum-review of Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy,” a long poem first published in Chicago Review’s British Poetry Issue (53:1) and republished as a chapbook by Barque Press:

The present review seems to be the first of a poem I think the most remarkable poem in English published this century. Having seen the shell-shocked response of two very different audiences I am at a loss to account for the speechlessness unless we’ve been outdone in our jabber and feel abashed (I’m assuming there is some kind of operative ‘we’ about, I hope so). The poem is doing some work nonetheless. A passion for new British poetry was admitted to me more than a year after this poem had been detonated in their heads, by some graduate students on a major poetics program in the US. But given the absence of print or internet commentary, I feel compelled to write a fan letter rather than a critique, and to say a possible poetic future starts here — and if it doesn’t, I suppose I can go and grow vegetables.

1/ From “Writing in the Margins,” James Longenbach’s omnibus poetry review in today’s NY Times:

The strength of American poetry depends on the fact that hardly anybody notices it. To emerging poets, eager for an audience, this marginality may seem frustrating, but it is the source of their freedom. Because nothing is at stake except the integrity of their medium, poets may write about anything in any way, from decorously rhymed couplets to sonically driven nonsense.

…

Throughout “Vellum,” [Matt] Donovan confronts not only the power of art but also its potential uselessness, its beauty inextricable from its unnerving refusal to serve.

2/ From John Wilkinson’s “Off the Grid: Lyric and Politics in Andrea Brady’s Embrace” (first published in Chicago Review 53:1 and reprinted in Wilkinson’s new book, The Lyric Touch):

As lyric has become specialized and distinguished from other linguistic usages, its saving grace has been perceived from every angle as connected with its resistance to profit, instrumentality, and material progress—a perception that echoes all the way from conservative humanism to socialist meliorism, from religious authority to new theology, from formalist traditionalism to post-theory, Language-influenced poetics…. Uselessness is art’s use. The more art’s uselessness has figured as an exalted reduction, the more lyric poetry has been drawn toward prosodic movement as primary, with analysis and argument conducted under the aegis of this last-ditch spirit—spirit now lodged in the ruts of lineation and the angles of enjambment. For uselessness is merely status, while spirit is its working afflatus….Uselessness gives rise to spirit and spirit to the tentative sublime.

Robert Archambeau’s take on Peter Riley’s debate with John Wilkinson in the latest issue of Chicago Review.

A 232-page issue featuring the poetry of Andrea Brady, Chris Goode, Peter Manson, and Keston Sutherland. Also: critical work on these poets by Jeremy Noel-Tod, Simon Jarvis, John Wilkinson, and Matt Ffytche; and an interview with Chris Goode by Sam Ladkin. The issue also includes fifteen reviews of new British poetry (including my review of Peter Larkin’s Leaves of Field [PDF]), a note by Keith Tuma on younger British poets, letters by Catherine Wagner and Peter Riley, and a poster by Andrew Duncan (”Styles of British Poetry 1945-2000″).

Order online!

(more…)

Photos from CR’s 60th anniversary party, which happened November 17 at Around the Coyote, are now available. Lisa Robertson, Tom Raworth, John Wilkinson, and Devin Johnston read at the event, and the John Lennox Band supplied music.