Eli S. Evans: Is That It

Not everything Gertrude Stein wrote is worth calling poetry. Stein says so herself in “Poetry and Grammar,” because “for me the problem of poetry was and it began with Tender Buttons to constantly realize the thing anything so that I could recreate that thing.”

We recognise oscillation to be the natural order of the world.

I was born in 1989 at the end of hip-hop’s infancy. By the time I dropped into being, hip-hop had a Grammy and platinum records.

Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism restages and reactivates Fredric Jameson’s call, over twenty years prior, for a new situation and new mode of criticism adequate to late capitalism.

For Tranströmer is ever conscious of the split between the fact of routine and a truth of the imagination.

“The Body of Michael Brown”; an attempt, as it is, of an intellectual, resolute, unemotional, detached, blasé, imperious person, to cast into literature not merely his wit and arrogance, but pre-existing form and content, unaltered, regardless of convention

by Virginia Woolf The great ponds at Sheffield Place at the right season of the year are bordered with red, white and purple reflections, for rhododendrons are massed upon the banks and when the wind passes over the real flowers the water flowers shake and break into each other....

The claim for a “new” American poetry of engagement would seem to imply an earlier American poetry that lacked such engagement.

Vladimir Nabokov was hiking down a mountain on a summer afternoon. It was 1943, and he and his companion, James Laughlin, had made their way up a peak in northern Utah to find butterflies for Nabokov’s collection.

How may we speak of that which goes off the record in an age of digital colonisation?