Dalkey Archive Scholarly

Monogamy elaborates an ideology of romance from extraordinary poems and songs, one by one. Poems and popular songs are still the main medium for preserving the rules of romance. Each chapter is a meditation on one of eight commonplaces about love: that it makes one monogamous, sentimental, vulnerable; that its force is immediate and transformative; or that it is a fickle force, but cannot be bought, and yet endures. Strong poets and lyricists bend these notions, as lovers do too. Great poems and songs come from interstices between celebrated commonplaces, felt desires and second-thoughts. The Book of Love is heterogeneous, complicated. Some love poems reach significant numbers through books and anthologies, and eventually classroom textbooks, and are held in memory by generations of admirers. Many popular songs, however, have reached extremely large audiences, beginning with Broadway musicals, and continuing in the recordings of later jazz vocalists. They are not read, but they are firmly lodged in memory. They are the only poems known by most audiences. Canonical poems are imitated by aspiring poets and versifiers. The actual verse culture is layered with light verse, song lyrics, and Shakespeare's sonnets. To understand what poems effectively teach-about romance, in particular-one should attend closely to songs too, particularly in the U.S. since 1920.

In When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, Rowan Ricardo Phillips pushes African American poetry to its limits by unraveling "our desire to think of African American poetry as African American poetry." Phillips reads African American poetry as inherently allegorical and thus "a successful shorthand for the survival of a poetry but unsuccessful shorthand for the sustenance of its poems." Arguing in favor of the "counterintuitive imagination," Phillips demonstrates how these poems tend to refuse their logical insertion into a larger vision and instead dwell indefinitely at the crux between poetry and race, "where, when blackness rhymes with blackness, it is left for us to determine whether this juxtaposition contains a vital difference or is just mere repetition." From When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness: Phillis Wheatley, like the epigraphs that writers fit into the beginning of their texts, is first and foremost a cultural sign, a performance. It is either in the midst of that performance ("at a concert"), or in that performance's retrospection ("in a café"), that a retrievable form emerges from the work of a poet whose biography casts a far longer shadow than her poems ever have. Next to Langston Hughes, of all African American poets Wheatley's visual image carries the most weight, recognizable to a larger audience by her famed frontispiece, her statue in Boston, and the drama behind the publication of her book, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral. All of this will be fruit for discussion in the pages that follow. Yet, I will also be discussing the proleptic nature with which African American literature talks, if you will, Phillis Wheatley.

Stepping Off the Edge addresses the question of literary edges and endings in contemporary works of literature from France, the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The book includes discussion of works by nine different authors, including Anne Carson, Marie NDiaye, Paul Auster, and César Aira. It considers the way that specific texts identify and interrogate textual boundaries, and also draw attention to questions of closure. Each of these texts also reflect on the way we experience and write about edges and endings in our lives.

How does a novel accrue value? How do certain new and unknown authors and their works make their way from obscurity into the pantheon of the greats, or-at least-the firmament of the stars? Minuit examines the role played by French publishing house Editions de Minuit in altering the conception of literary France, not once but twice. The history of “Les Editions de Minuit” is an integral part of the history of the literary field; in Minuit, Spalding's work captures many of the cultural dimensions of literary production and dissemination at the height of France's post-war intellectual and literary effervescence, and again, in the more recent period, when Minuit became the vehicle for French literature's 'postmodern' turn.

"Anything and everything, depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or a nothing, a path or a problem," says Bernardo Soares, the putative author of Fernando Pessoa's classic The Book of Disquiet. Thomas Cousineau's An Unwritten Novel offers the general reader, as well as students and teachers, an "Ariadne's thread" that will help them to find their way through this labyrinthine masterpiece: a self-proclaimed "factless autobiography" in which all the expected elements of the contemporary novel remain "unwritten."

A Community Writing Itself features internationally respected writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Glück, and Barbara Guest, and important younger writers Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr, and Elizabeth Robinson. The book fills a major gap in contemporary poetics, focusing on one of the most vibrant experimental writing communities in the nation. The writers discuss vision and craft, war and peace, race and gender, individuality and collectivity, and the impact of the Bay Area on their work.

One of the defining texts of twentieth-century Catalan fiction, written by one of its most innovative and cherished writers, Salvador Espriu's Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth is a collection of thirty-four short stories in which the twists and turns of action, character, and place are as winding and sumptuous as the legendary maze of its title. Originally published in 1935 in the midst of great countrywide political and social upheaval, these stories are a mirror, a grotesque mirror, held up to Catalan and Spanish society. Infused with a deep sense of mythic power, blending social realism with lush modernist experiment, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth is a triumph of style. Perhaps best known for his poetry, Espriu's rich lyricism and highly evocative use of the Catalan language are here brought to life in the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips's remarkable English language translation of a classic of world literature.