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ISSUE 22 - DECEMBER 2020

CONTENTS

Ange Mlinko: “Having faith in one’s craft is a way to survive the world.”

Fanny Howe: “Someone did a study of poets, and most of them who are doing well now went to good universities and grew up with money—inherited money. But no one would dare have a conversation about that.”

Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young: “The other option is to accept that this economy of favors cannot be undone without a dramatic rethinking of how poets are supported, valued, and ultimately understood to be excellent, which would require creating new metrics for evaluation.”

Charlotte Mew: “The darkness of a room is dead, the unlit night of the open moor and the seashore is a living darkness; the forest darkness, always stirred by elusive voices, is like no other—an enchanted dark.” 

Mairead Case: “My work is rooted in the way I felt listening to songs through headphones as a teenager. When you listen, you know the sound is separate from your body because it vibrates it. And if something feels better afterward, or clearer or lusher or even just temporarily palliated, even just different, you could begin to trust that the outside world might bring good. It might hold you sensibly, sometimes. And then, you can hold it.”       

I. A. Richards: “Metre adds to all the variously fated expectancies which make up rhythm a definite temporal pattern and its effect is not due to our perceiving a pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned ourselves. With every beat of the metre a tide of anticipation in us turns and swings, setting up as it does extraordinarily extensive reverberations. We shall never understand metre so long as we ask, Why does temporal pattern so excite us? and fail to realize that the pattern itself is a vast cyclic agitation spreading all over the body, a tide of excitement pouring through the channels of the mind.”
    








Abraham Wugters, Queen Christina (1661)