Future Of Poetry Research Articles

Tre lettori di Pound nell’Italia di oggi: Agamben, Montesano, Magris

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is one of the most influential and most controversial American poets of the twentieth century. His multidimensional career and uncompromising life encapsulate crucial questions about the role of the writer in society: What is the relationship between experimental art and extreme political views? Can art survive what Walter Benjamin called the “sickness of tradition”? What is the future of poetry in a world dominated by technology and economic rationalism? This essay explores these questions by focusing on the reception of Pound in contemporary Italy. More specifically, three texts written by some of the most perceptive Italian readers of Pound will be examined: Giorgio Agamben’s introduction to the Italian translation of Pound’sSelected Prose: 1909-1965(2016), Giuseppe Montesano’s new introduction to Cantos scelti(2017), and an article on Pound by Claudio Magris published in the Italian newspaperCorriere della Serain October 2018.

Tagore Removes Fear and Demolishes Wall for Peace, Prosperity and Harmony

Rabindranath Tagore is a perennial fountain of immaculate imagination which is the soul of poetry. His poetry has element of truth and reckoning force to affect men, mind, social surroundings, etiquette of the citizen of the country and humanistic approach towards life—live and let live. Unequivocally, we would say his poetry is high order of excellence. Had Watson, Wilson, Eliot, Saintsbury, Tillotson, Allott, Arnold, F. R. Levis, Richard alive they would have glorified versification, imagination, diction, melody, substance, style, regularity, uniformity, balance, and precision of Rabindranath Tagore. Romanticism of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, witticism of Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan classicism of Dante, and Homer, criticism of Arnold, satire of Dryden beautiful and smooth verse flow of Chaucer all are quite apparent in the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Who says significance of poetry is no more and future of poetry is buried. As long as pain and pleasure, sorrow, suffering and merry-making, cruelty and enmity, humanity and fraternity, honesty and humility, demon and Solomon, hypocrite and pious, battle and consequences are alive in the universe, mines of verses are treasure-trove for the vibrancy and survival of human beings. It has brightness of the sun, twinkling of stars, fragrance of flowers, height of mountains, depth of the seas, and palpitation of the human hearts definitely melodious voice of nightingale, innocence of lamb, and strength of tiger, who can forget it as a finer spirit of all knowledge.

"Some Ovid of the Films": W. B. Yeats, Mass Media, and the Future of Poetry in the 1930s

This essay addresses Yeats’s negotiation of poetry’s relationship, during the 1930s, with the emerging mass culture. Rather than contextualizing Yeats’s view on the future with a traditional critical framework such as Romantic apocalyptical discourse, a closeness to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and dystopian novels is explored. The main focus is on an unfinished draft for A Vision, “Michael Robartes Foretells,” and the way it envisages the changing situation for literature at the end of an epoch. Yeats’s use of classical parallels and linking of poetry and cinema are given special attention. His suggestion that the poetry of the future may be affected by the emergent medium of cinema provides an ambivalent perspective, not simply suggesting the degeneration of poetry in a context of Americanized mass culture but also possibilities of metamorphosis and spirituality. The interpretation of “Michael Robartes Foretells” is framed by other examples of Yeats’s engagement with mass media in the 1930s, in the form of Virginia Woolf’s diary report of table talk and Yeats’s radio broadcasts. All in all, Yeats’s view on poetry’s position balances between a conservative fear of marginalization and a more hopeful view of its potential to reinvent itself in a new historical context.

Being a better human: in conversation with Angifi Dladla

In 2017, the South African poet Angifi Dladla released his second collection of poetry, Lament for Kofifi Macu, published by Deep South Press. This follows a hiatus of 11 years since the publishing of his debut work The Girl who then Feared to Sleep & Other Poems. The new collection marks a departure from several aspects of Dladla’s previous works but continues his uncompromisingly critical gaze at the structure and personalities of contemporary South African politics. With the perceived promise of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s “New Dawn” still fresh in the minds of many, will hopes for a successful post-apartheid future once again gain prominence or is South Africa destined to continue its struggle with economic inequality, racial tensions and squandered opportunities for years to come? Speaking to Tom Penfold after the release of Lament, Dladla gives his views on this question, his latest release, and his views on the future of poetry in South Africa.

The days of poetry are running out

The purpose of writing this essay is to make an observational decision about where the future of poetry will stand due to the unprecedented development of technology and science. In this article, I tried to show how the poems got separated after the invention of printing from the early and medieval poems. In spite of using computer equipment, especially poetry writing, poetry is changing its old anatomy. There is considerable reason to think about this change that technology has a close relation with the writing of poetry. As a result, a visible change in the poems of poetry that has been used so far is a visible change. To prove the reality of my project, I have tried to illustrate the concept of change of poetry, the history of printing, the history of anthropology, language and myths. But even though this fact is still a huge change, the concept of poetry in human mind does not seem to change.

Inventário Poético: Anotações sobre os resíduos do humano na literatura

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n2p53Este ensaio pretende dissertar sobre o texto de ficção eletrônica de Richard Holeton – Frequently Asked Questions About “Hypertext” – publicado por N. Katherine Hayles na Eletronic Literature Collection (vol. 1, 2006), obra que fornece um rico material para leituras “pós-humanistas” sobre o futuro da poesia como um locus privilegiado de expressão anímica. Trata-se de uma releitura irônica de um texto parodístico de autoria de Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire (1962). Ao contrário do que sugere o título, porém, o texto de Holeton não se apresenta como um ensaio acadêmico sobre a escrita digital, mas como um poema experimental sujeito aos mirabolantes exercícios analíticos de diversos críticos fictícios, praticantes de algumas linhas dos atualmente populares Estudos Culturais. A obra possibilita ao leitor uma reflexão bem-humorada sobre os perturbadores desdobramentos da escrita, da leitura e da produção de conhecimento na contemporaneidade.

Introduction

Introduction Kaveh Akbar I didn't want to write an intro to this memorial. I thought it important Franz's be the first voice a reader encountered. His five new poems included here are extraordinary—incantatory, magisterial, impossibly charming even in their desolation. The first time I read them I became predictably emotional—like countless others, I've desperately missed his voice. Huge chunks of his later books seem written explicitly to steel his beloveds in his absence, but in these new pieces his voice comes across the actual beyond to speak to us of stillness and solitude and wild strawberries and so much more. I'm getting goosebumps now just typing about them. I think Franz's work and everyone else's work here stands on its own, from his wife Elizabeth's wrenching recollections of their long marriage to David Young's stunningly earnest essay about his and Franz's extraordinary relationship to all the other poems and prose written about or for or to or through Franz by people who loved him or loved his work. So why then am I writing this? To say, briefly, that in the one month this memorial was open for submissions, I got hundreds upon hundreds of poems, essays, letters, and tributes sent to me to consider for the space. They came in from all over the world, from writers and non-writers alike. In almost every single submission I got, there was a story about a seminal interaction with Franz, virtual or in the real world. Dozens of people wrote to tell me about correspondences with Franz about poetry, about life, about addiction, about baseball. Even more wrote about quiet mentorships spanning months or years or decades, mentorships for which Franz never accepted a penny. The theme throughout all these correspondences was this—for all his well-documented struggles living the life of a semi-public intellectual while simultaneously battling serious mental and physical illnesses, Franz devoted an astonishingly large percentage of his psychic and temporal resources to nurturing and encouraging young poets. He may have earned some infamy for burning bridges in the academic and literary spheres, but he was constantly erecting new ones privately, quietly, out of the spotlight, with young and unestablished writers who had nothing to offer him but their poems and their sincere gratitude. It would be impossible for me to account for all these stories in this space, but it feels important to me that I at least make mention of their existence. The memorial aims to preserve the legacy of Franz's life in poetry, and it's become abundantly evident to me that a central part of that legacy is the substantial investment Franz made in the future of poetry. Any thorough consideration of his contribution to American letters must consider both his singular body of poetry and his lifelong practice of supporting poets. —Kaveh Akbar [End Page 155] Copyright © 2017 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and National Boundaries

The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and National Boundaries

English

Sri Aurobindo, a man of the supramental plane of consciousness has found ‘Mantra’ to be the future of Poetry, the poetry which expresses the deepest spiritual reality. He discovers that poetry written from some higher plane of, what he calls, the Intuitive Mind Consciousness and Over mind Consciousness, the two uppermost planes of spiritual consciousness on the plane of Mind is the Mantra. Since man is yet to evolve to these higher planes of the spiritual mind-consciousness, the Mantra is the future poetry. On examination of Tomas Transtromer’s Answers to Letters and some other poems of the present century it is found that the evolution of consciousness is going on, and the poetic consciousness is destined to evolve to such higher planes of the Mantric Consciousness.  Key words: Poetry of Future, Mantra, Sri Aurobindo, Tomas Transtromer.

Kirjoittamisen arkipäiväistäminen Pentti Saarikosken ja Mirkka Rekolan runoudessa

Writing as Part of the Everyday in Pentti Saarikoski’s and Mirkka Rekola’s Poetry This article examines the processes of writing as part of the everyday in Pentti Saarikoski’s kuljen missa kuljen and Mirkka Rekola’s Ilo ja epasymmetria, both published in 1965. I argue that both collections make this process visible, and both authors thus actively participate in the discussion about poetry in the 1960s through their poetry. While Saarikoski’s poetry was appreciated as communicative, democratic poetry, Rekola’s writing was considered as old-fashioned modernist poetry – a characterization associated at the time also with Finnish-Swedish poetry. In this article, I show that despite the attitudes prevalent in the sixties and the conversations concerning the essence and future of poetry, e.g. in the Turku poetry seminar in 1962 and the modernism debate in 1965, Saarikoski and Rekola do not differ as much in their aspirations as in their strategies. Writing as part of the everyday is a statement that comments on the conversation concerning literature and the essence of poetry. Both poets employ the concreteness of writing as a tool. They combine walking and writing, and show that writing is quotidian; it is work like any other type of work. Rekola’s language focuses on the complexity of perceiving, describing and writing, while Saarikoski examines what kind of perceptions and elements of everyday life can be written into a poem. Both poets also employ the processes examined here to show how form and content both refer to the idea of liberation and the creation of a new reality.

The Future of Poetry

I have seen the future of poetry, and it is in the past. 1984, to be exact, when a precocious algorithm named RACTER published its first book, a tidy little affair called The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed . Its weird surrealist illustrations aside, The Policeman’s Beard was notable for two quirks, first, being written by a robot, and second, despite being written by a robot, reading like poetry by John Ashbery.

In Barry Bonds I See the Future of Poetry

Barry Bonds is not only the future of athletics, but he's also emblematic of the future of poetry. More machine than man, chemically enhanced, Bonds is our first mainstream posthuman public figure. Bonds's milestone signifies an end to the humanist discourse; he is a martyr for the future.

Fictionality, Theatricality and Staging of Self: A New Look at Pushkin's 'Egyptian Nights'

THE SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW Volume 84, Number 3 July 2006 Fictionality, Theatricality and Staging of Self: A New Look at Pushkin's 'Egyptian Nights' ALEXANDRA SMITH WITH many critics having labelled as decadent the period I833-35, in which Pushkin's'Egipetskienochi' ('EgyptianNights') was written, it is possible to interpretPushkin'snarrativeas an example of the performance of the modern poetic self that manifestsitself best at a time of cultural catastrophe and the collapse of established values. Leslie O'Bell suggestsreading the story of an artistembedded in 'Egipetskie nochi' as a two-fold narrative:'as the triumph of the independence of artand the fellowshipof the poets' and as 'the instructivetragedyof the poet as man who is threatenedby his dependence on society." Indeed, Pushkin'sunfinishedtale highlightsthe tensionbetween life and artand presentsthe artistas 'a living paradox, now "low",now "high",bound to his social personalityyet transcendingit'.2O'Bell places the storyin 'the "deadtime" of the Russian/Egyptian nights'.3David Herman sees it as an allegory that predictsPushkin'sdemise as a writerand human being.4 For Herman, 'Egipetskie nochi' expresses Pushkin's anxiety about the future of poetry, and about poets who might emerge from Alexandra Smith is Lecturer in Russian at the University of Sheffield. The author thanks Caryl Emerson for some useful discussions of the topic related to Pushkin and theatre; and Carol Ueland, Neil Cornwell and two anonymous SEERreviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments on the draft of this article. 'Leslie O'Bell, Pushkin's'Egyptian Nights': TheBiography of a Work,Ann Arbor, MI, I984 (hereafter, O'Bell) pp. iio-ii. 2 Ibid., p. i ii. Ibid., p. I2I. 4 David Herman, 'A Requiem for Aristocratic Art: Pushkin's "Egyptian Nights"', Russian Review,55, October I996, 4, pp. 66i-8o (hereafter, Herman) (p. 662). 394 A NEW LOOK AT PUSHKIN' S 'EGYPTIAN NIGHTS' society'slowerclassesdueto theadvanceof technology andthespread of culture: The improviser challenges the authority of social exclusions and violates the defenses of Charskii's home with the same ease as his artistic selfreinventions make a mockery of the borders of identity. Superior poetry turns out to be merely the flip-side of dissolving hierarchies and social disruption.5 Herman observesthat the Italian'slivelihooddependson creation on demandand is symbolically dialogizedsinceit beginsalwayswith chuzhoe slovo.6 Suchcommentsarevalid,yet I believethe mainconcernsPushkin expresses in 'Egipetskie nochi'revolvearoundquestions ofidentityand a searchforthesurpassing of thehedonistic worldview thathadlargely shapedPushkin's workspriorto the I83os. In itsphilosophical aspects, 'Egipetskie nochi' standsclose to Malen'kie tragedii (Little Tragedies): it givesprideof place to notionsof moralresponsibility and individual choice.According to G. A. Lesskis, in the I830s Pushkin starteddevelopinga newworldvieworientedmoretowardssocialinteractions and moralchoice: Pushkincomes to realize the inner contradictionof the hedonisticprinciple that makes the hedonist's individual life senseless and devalued; [...] Pushkinexposes the fatal consequences of the hedonistic type of behaviour for people who came in close contact with it.7 This assessment of Pushkin's evolutionas a writerand thinkerhelps usmodifyHerman's viewof Pushkin's demiseasan individual. 'Egipetskie nochi' in fact offersPushkin'sre-evaluationof the hedonist's valuesas theyrelateto the creativeprocess.We can detecta shiftin Pushkin'sown scale of values,from the assumptionthat rebellious behaviourin itselflargelycontributes to the formationof the creative self,to the realizationof the responsible aestheticattitudeto life that relieson dialogicconscience.MikhailBakhtin's worksexaminedsuch an outlookclosely.As CarylEmersonexplains, In 'Author and Hero', Bakhtin [...] stresses the impossibilityof selfactualizationand self-realizationwithout the other as a necessarywitnessto what I do. Eventuallyit will be redefinedas addressivity [obrashchennost ]. The absolute need for response begins to compete with the moral requirement of responsibility.8 'Ibid., p. 665. 6 Ibid., p. 668. 7 G. A. Lesskis, "'Kamennyi gost"' (tragediia gedonizma)', in V. E. Vatsuro et al., Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy, Leningrad, I989, 13, pp. 134-45 (p. 136). 8 Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, MikhailBakhtin:Creation of a Prosaics,Stanford, CA, I990 (hereafter, Morson and Emerson), pp. 75-76. ALEXANDRA SMITH 395 Monika Greenleaf points out that in I826-30 Pushkin's life and art 'were subjected to teleological pressures similar to those that had mythicized Mozart's life and death'.9 During this period Pushkin aspired to combine his role of national poet with that of leading dramatist.As Greenleaf comments, 'When BorisGodunov was banned from the Russian stage, Pushkinwas denied access to the most...

In the Valley of the Shadow of Books

Matthew Arnold suggested part of our challenge when he announced in his general introduction to The English Poets (1880) that future of poetry is (1) Arnold intended to bestow on poetry a metaphysical immensity, one defined by taking up the work that dogmatic religion could no longer perform. But by proclaiming poetry's high destiny in this particular bibliographic setting, Arnold bore clouded witness to a counter-history featuring poetry collections that were physically immense. I want to recall that obscured history and suggest how the study of Victorian poetry in the future will benefit from more careful and curious thinking about Victorian books and Victorian readers. The English Poets, the four-volume for which Arnold provided a general introduction, was a particular kind of book, a historically organized collection aiming at a comprehensive coverage of the national tradition or some widely accepted chapter of it. Like Arnold, we have all grown up with this type of book, and David Latane's recent review essay about our ample options exemplifies a professional fluency in anthologese. In the meantime, we have been tempted into thinking that books such as The English Poets have always been around. In a recent special issue of this journal, Golden Treasury and the Victorian Anthology, Jonah Siegel was right to say that it has been easy to forget the novelty of the genre--at least as it is currently understood. (2) Indeed, we ought to remember that Francis Turner Palgrave's famous collection is not an in the same sense as The English Poets is. Palgrave did not aim for his collection of lyrics to be a historical Anthology, but one such collection--Alexander Chalmers' The Works of the English Poets (21 vols., 1810-1814)--he did identify as the essential resource for the project. (3) And, as we now know, such immense books only became possible following the 1774 House of Lords judgment on the case of Donaldson v. Beckett, which effectively ended a common law right to perpetual copyright. Before 1774, any design to publish a large series of complete texts involving a wide range of authors would have been extremely costly, if not simply impossible, given the difficulties arising from the fragmentary pattern of ownership of the copyright scattered among protective booksellers. The 1774 ruling has long been recognized as an important event in the history of British publishing, but it took the work of Thomas Bonnell, Trevor Ross, and others to establish in detail how the ruling stimulated the proliferation of a new literary super-genre that deeply influenced future critical and poetic practice. (4) The appearance of Hugh Blair's The British Poets (44 vols., 1773-76), John Bell's The Poets of Great Britain (109 vols., 1776-82), The Works of the English Poets (with biographical introductions by Samuel Johnson [58 vols., 1779-81]), and Robert Anderson's The Works of the British Poets (13 vols., 1792-95) made the last quarter of the eighteenth century a time when the poetic canon was materially embodied in an unprecedented way. Many more collections were to follow, and the rapid journey they made from bookseller's innovation to cultural staple constitutes one of the great bibliographic transformations of modern British literary history. Anthologies and literary miscellanies, of course, predated that period. But they were rarely organized upon historical, author-centered principles, and they rarely attempted to put forward a canon. The primary connotations of anthology today--as an authoritative gathering--suggests how the ancient meaning of the word--a gathering of flowers--was crushed and obscured by the weighty pretensions of those expansive Poets of the 1770s and later. From this perspective The English Poets of 1880 marked an important transition in the history of the modern English literary anthology. It was the first to include the contributions of many different editors, a collection of readers gathered on the threshold of institutionalized English studies. …

Passing Fashion: Mallarme and the Future of Poetry in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

flight of poetry is only parodied by the wing-span of an open newspaper.' Thus wrote Stephane Mallarm6 in 1893, voicing a defense of poetry against the vulgar literary sub-genre of journalism. Literary history has generally upheld this image of Mallarm6 as the defender of high literature against the incursions of a debased, commercial language.2 And yet nothing fascinated Mallarm6 more than the nascent consumer society of fin-de-siecle Paris.3 The obvious

Poetry at Stake: Blaise Cendrars, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Poetry in the Literature Classroom

Cultural studies has tended to neglect poetic texts, but poetry is in fact well suited to provoke classroom debates concerning the cultural construction of the aesthetic object, as Blaise Cendrars's Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (Nineteen Elastic Poems) confirms. Bakhtin's notion of the heteroglossic helps to demonstrate that Cendrars's poems are also “rejoinders” in a dialogue with their institutional other: advertising. But Cendrars does not merely claim advertising as poetic material; he identifies poetry as a form of advertisement. Cendrars suggests that the symbolic capital of poetry cannot exist unless the poem brings attention to itself by means of a practice that it posits, paradoxically, as its other. However, the fact that poetry is constructed by advertising its difference does not make poetry equivalent to advertising. Cultural studies reveals the institutional construction of poetry, but only close textual analysis can highlight the semiotic distinctions between poetry and advertising that institutional boundaries engender.

The divination of reality: The conflict between mythical and instrumental, oral and written narratives, and the future of poetry

There is a prevailing idea among intellectuals that, fearing hubris in the absence of certainty, moral weakness and a condition of utopian hopelessness should be faced with heroic resignation. This posture finds its poetic expression in Eliot's famous line, that things will end ‘not with a bang but a whimper’, a kind of heroism which those without armchairs can ill afford. The author supposes that for futurists as well as others the one commodity which determines the outcome is hope. This article examines the aetiology of hopelessness in English post-war poetry. It includes some discussion of Arabic and African poetics and attempts to formulate a position on language as a dialect within nature; a dialectic on which nature depends, a nature whose unique point of conscious articulation is human. To achieve this, the poetries of cultural pluralism cannot avoid the recapitulation of ancestral traditions, so that the structure of common origins, and not that of divergent custom, shapes the future. At the same time this achievement may depend on certain epistemological revisions which also throw light on the contemporary relevance of orality.

Poetry in the future, the future of poetry: Huxley and Orwell on Zamyatin

Poetry in the future, the future of poetry: Huxley and Orwell on Zamyatin

Selected Writings of Edward S. Curtis: Excerpts from Volumes I-XX of The North American Indian ed. by Barry Gifford

Reviews 71 Carolyn Forché’s ambitions seem much less lofty. And her poems are accordingly less daring but more often successful. The first section of her book, “Burning the Tomato Worms,” is warm, moving towards senti­ mentality but avoiding it. However, this is the best section of her book; when Stanley Kunitz, in the introduction, describes her “imagination” as “passionate and tribal,” his terms rightly apply to her own world, her Slovak grandmother, even that European peasant world; but when she begins to give us images of the world of Indians one cannot accept her as tribal. She is not; there is a lingering paternalism in the present move of so many young white poets to give depth to experience by seizing upon the world of the American Indian. Fórche is an outsider and I think she sometimes recognizes that, although her poems are ambiguous, like her book’s title. Too, Mr. Kunitz suggests that her “Kalaloch” “may very well prove to be the outstanding Sapphic poem of an era.” The poem is about as passionate as Kunitz’ euphemisms. In short, Dorn and Forche are both highly competent, effective, and, yes, American. But they are not the future of poetry, at least as represented here. L. L. LEE, Western Washington State College Selected Writings of Edward S. Curtis: Excerpts from Volumes I-XX of The North American Indian. Ed. by Barry Gifford. (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1976. ix + 143 pages + plates, $5.95.) The rediscovery of Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) is one by-product of the rediscovery of the American Indian that has been underway since the middle 1960’s. Curtis, a Seattle photographer, was himself part of an earlier vogue of the Indian. He reached maturity in the 1890’s at a time when many artists, responsive to the fin-de-siecle nostalgia over the passing of the Western frontier, were turning to Indian themes .The twentieth century loomed large, threatening the imminent extinction of native culture in the rush of technological growth. Here was a last chance to capture something of a vanishing America, to capture the fading glory of the red man before he reached the end of his trail. Several talented sculptors, painters and photographers rose to the challenge. None exceeded Curtis in ambition or intensity of commitment. He proposed to become nothing less than a latter-day George Catlin, preserving in words and pictures an imperishable record of a perishing race. Between 1897 and 1930 he photographed and studied some eighty native societies in Western North America, traveling from the Rio Grande to the Bering Strait. Twenty sumptuous volumes, each accompanied by a portfolio of photogravure prints, resulted from his efforts. 72 Western American Literature Collectively titled The North American Indian, they found their way into the libraries of the great institutions and the very wealthy. Curtis tried to reach a larger audience by writing a few popular books and magazine articles and producing a romantic film about the Kwakiutl with a title aimed at the boxoffice, In the Land of the Head Hunters. But his life’s work, The North American Indian, remained inaccessible to the average reader, and Curtis lived out his final years in relative obscurity. With the vogue of things Indian in the 1960’s, Curtis photographs suddenly began to pop up everywhere. Lavish picture books have been devoted to his work. All of his own titles are back in print, including The North American Indian. In the Land of the Head Hunters has appeared several times in an edited version on educational television. As a result of this concentrated attention, Curtis’ photographs are today widely familiar. His literary endeavors are not, and Barry Gifford’s anthology Selected Writings of Edward S. Curtis is apparently intended to fill the void. It is neither a picture book nor (despite the misleading cover title The Portable Curtis) a genuine “selected writings” since it consists exclu­ sively of excerpts from The North American Indian. Gifford states that these have been chosen on the basis of representativeness and interest. But in both respects his book leaves something to be desired, and the question remains: Who is this anthology intended for? Because it...

The Future of Poetry

The Future of Poetry