¡Bemsha SWING!

11 abr 2006

A poetic language that features a lot of shifts of tone and register, a lot of surprises, will be perceived by some to be mostly uniform in tone, relatively unvaried. At least by me, sometimes. *Objectively* the poetry can be demonsrated to be varied and surprising, yet I tend to hear only one predominant tone. It's kind of hard to explain.

4 comentarios:

Matthew Schmeer dijo...: THANK YOU! You just validated my review of John Olson's Oxbow Kazoo which is causing a brouhaha over at Verse. Maybe you won't agree with my arguments in panning the book, but at least with this post you've singled out the primary thrust I was trying to make. Now only if I had said it as simply and directly. Damn.; 2:02 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: I feel this way about Dean Young, say. I was making more of a statement about myself as a reader, but there may be other readers like me.; 2:04 p. m.
Henry Gould dijo...: I hear you. word games are not Catullus. nor Rilke.; 3:19 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: What I think I meant was that rapid shifts of tone can be assimilated into a larger tonal category of "whimsy." Having a lot of variation, then, can lead to a kind of paradoxical flatness. Differences in tone stop meaning what they should mean.; 3:58 p. m.

Publicar un comentario

Suscribirse a: Enviar comentarios (Atom)

Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

11 abr 2006

4 comentarios:

Archive

Seguidores