Recently added articles from Chicago Review:
Stephen Rodefer's position.
Jan 01, 2009; ... Stephen Rodefer's poetry is a digest of the New American poetry and its chosen precursors. Olson and Villon, Ginsberg and Catullus, O'Hara and Baudelaire--Rodefer approaches them as colleagues, with envy and admiration. He disorders their experiments and appropriates their voices to ...
An interview with Stephen Rodefer: you were a student of Charles Olson's in the mid-1960s at SUNY, Buffalo. What was that like?(Interview)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Well, at the start it was altogether uncertain. I mean, at registration in the gym in the fall of '63, I didn't exactly know what to sign up for as an elective. Someone next to me said, "Myth and Literature, that guy's a poet." Well, I'd never heard of him, but I liked poets, especially ...
Life in Rodefer.(Stephen Rodefer)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... "We all await an idiot's judgment." --Stephen Rodefer "What we need more than critics" Rodefer wrote in 1986, "is historians." The line is from one of Rodefer s few published essays in prose, but it might easily be taken for one of the many opinions in prose moments ...
"I lie in dawn's great faculty": Stephen Rodefer's translation of Francois Villon.(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... First, Villon, for those who don't remember. One long poem, one only longish, and a handful of ballades, written in Middle French around 1460. "Thief, murderer, pander, bully to a whore, he is honored for a few score pages of unimaginative sincerity" in the words of a young Ezra Pound, who ...
Prologue to language doubling.(Essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Boris Pasternak (older than Mayakovsky and alive after the Allen anthology) speaks somewhere of the necessity for writers to disregard the approval of their admirers, lest their writing be tempted to repeat itself. He speaks of the urge for perfection in a mode of writing as the mark of ...
What I see in the Silliman project.(Ronald Silliman)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The purpose of criticism is to wake the reader and the writer out of their complacency. Those who expect that any good writer should proceed by turning out a series of masterpieces, each similar to the last, only more developed in every way, are simply ignorant of the conditions under ...
Rodefer: a study.(Stephen Rodefer)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Stephen Rodefer was at UCSD when I first knew him. A father (divorced) of two young boys and a respectable worker at the library archives, he was still all poet. I was a mother (divorced) of three and noted the good way he had with children: an affection, ease, and humor that I thought I ...
The law we love is erotic memory.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> Ever to love re-membering thoughts erect like a scabrous holiday recamped in erasing nakedness where the sun pleasures the world like a god pulling little cupid off in gilded showers when men's and women's incomplete recumbant fragility come without lying or coming and absent ...
To any reader: whose mind's uterus is awash with Nietzsche's semen.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> Lasso sots. Seize mistakers, peach sniffers, lazy boys hijack penthouse esprit de corpsers who travail and noose our groceries with amiable remedies ejaculating mendicants nourished on VERMIN Our peaches are TITS, our repentence laughter OUI-OUI fashions on fat payments ...
Elevator.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> Overboard gallies, over pools, 'midst blue heaven over valleys, over seas, over mountains and in the air like overclouded ovid in Asia Minor at the grave of his brother Sappho lamenting outdoors the entanglements of her student So spirit kill me with the agility of o'er ...
Coughing laughter before yawning death: lines written to Benjamin Friendlander in March, picnicking a few miles above Tintern Abbey, Cantax, at Byron's pond.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> Now the cobbled walls were falling in for the Shoa some mad little mad coon dog in a rage bit the runners on along the quay, shot by Canal Plus and me or you coming in time to see MADAME GOSSACH power-walking by, the better not to face into the fracas but stay home and bet ...
Stephen Rodefer: toward a checklist: books, chapbooks, & selected broadsides.(List)
Jan 01, 2009 ... The Knife. Toronto: Island Press, 1965. After Lucretius. Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut Libraries, 1973. [Broadside.] One or Two Love Poems from the White World. Placitas, NM: Duende, 1976. Villon. San Francisco: Pick Pocket Series, 1976. [Written ...
Minimum sum.(RAE ARMANTROUT)(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009 ... <Pre> 1 Something like a frilly tube worm launched what I want to call a satellite into what I want to say was "space" to make it sound familiar. 2 Undertone ...
Someone.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> 1 I hear them talking outside. I know they're planning to come in. They haven't yet because they're waiting for someone or something. You might be ...
Lasting.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> 1 Now light sits in the chairs, limns the wooden filigree milled to indicate leisure. Perfect molecules of plastic sheet the ...
Along.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> A scatter of cold cases makes two separate strings Rival news hours mime discovery. * For so long we've been practicing- unwrapping our surprise. * In ...
Roses.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> Where the shadows refuse equally to fend for themselves and for the light without which there wouldbe no shadow. Where the world as I'd known it, once, stammers blindfolded with a rough sash, trampling the blood-grass,the mint with its spiked of ...
After the thunder, before the rain.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> Cicadas, or locusts-by whatever name, they've at last gone silent, like suitors outmatched by what the body can sometimes ask for and, other times, require. You've said what you've said. So have I. What I think I meant, though, was not guilt, but humility: being able to see--to ...
Cause and effect.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> ... like rain when, if it could, it would surrender, how it stops for a moment seeming to be rain; instead, processional, all those intentions to which nevertheless the hours at last shut down, intention being no more the point, now, than even the trees ...
Schilderachtig.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> Corot green Wtwael yellow Van Ruisdael brown These and more smuggled out from art history into a landscape just beginning to smudge under the endless patting of the pine branches whose dumbshow deer amble amid en route to picture books. * That the Flemish ...