to a labor camp for two years in 1989 because of his involvement in widespread pro-democracy protests in China that year. After his release in 1991, he worked as a freelance writer and poet.
We begin with a series that the New York Times has published, different critics answering the question "Why criticism matters" with essays. Zeek then gives us a couple of insightful reviews, followed by Financial Times looking at Shakespeare and The Guardian looking at Tennyson. This should get our critical GPS bearings set for the new year.
Luisetta Mudie brings us three articles, one on how the world is losing Manchurian. The Guardian brings us a poem by Ruth Fainlight, which begins with the words, "These days" and Nabina Das says "Goodbye to Ballimaran" in a poem published in The Caravan. Then Powells bring us a review on the book, "Whatever Happened to Modernism."
to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence. There is so much noise and screen clutter, there are so many Amazon reviewers and bloggers clamoring for attention, so many opinions and bitter misspelled rages, so much fawning ungrammatical love spewed into the ether, that the role of the true critic is actually quite simple: to write on a different level, to pay attention to the elements of style.
could Robert Creeley or John Cage not be considered Jewish practitioners in regards to the qualities expressed by their work (as a student at SUNY Buffalo I recall Creeley repeatedly making the remark that he was in fact Jewish in his heart). To what extent, I might add, could Language writing, though many of its practitioners are not ethnically Jewish, be considered an aesthetically Jewish practice? Language writing's roots in Objectivism, Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding Jackson, European and Russian avant gardes, and poets such as Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Larry Eigner, and Hannah Weiner definitely suggests this case of elective affinity, if not kinship itself.
has provided the reader with as thorough an appreciation of context as we are ever likely to get. If he falls a bit short in this reviewer's view, it is because the Yiddishist affect and the Old Left twang are likely to evade almost every reader (or scholar) save those who went through the Jewish left-wing movements of the 1920s-40s, now the great majority of them gone. It also may be (and this from a special claim of mine) that only those whose mother has been mentally ill are likely to feel the same mixture of guilt and embarrassment, guilt and revulsion, when they read Ginsberg's poem.
"Infinity," [Giacomo] Leopardi offers one of the most stunning line breaks in the history of verse. As he looks out from a hill in Recanati, the poet claims he can see "interminati/Spazi." [Jonathan] Galassi renders the phrase with accuracy and naturalness as "unending spaces," but he loses that enjambment, which in the original not only describes but enacts a moment of utter breathlessness.
But how many of us have actually read them closely and really understood them? The poet Don Paterson begins by 'fessing up: "About a year ago, I decided that I'd stop pretending to myself and to my students that I knew these poems better than I did." He accordingly decided to re-read them, slowly, carefully, one at a time, noting down his reactions. Are the sonnets what we imagine them to be? Do they represent the experience of love in a way that is recognisable to us? "Is their reputation deserved, or have they simply hitched a ride on the plays?"
in believing in the literal truth of every word of scripture. At the same time, there came the even more troubling revelation of the fossils, that the species, far from being created whole and finished, as in Milton's evocation in Paradise Lost, in fact came and went. There were many obsolete animal forms revealed in the fossils. What did this revelation do to the hope that not a sparrow falls to the ground unseen by a loving providence?
living poet and the natural choice in 2004 to become the country's first makar--its national poet laureate. In fact, the role was created for him.
guards as he [Dennis Brutus] was being transported from one prison to another, jumping out of the police car at a red light and setting off in a dash. "That was when I learned what a through-and-through wound was," he said of the bullet which pierced his chest and went out his back. He told of lying on the ground bleeding, "in the shadow of the Anglo American Corporation, appropriately enough," waiting for the ambulance. When a whites-only ambulance arrived by mistake, he was not allowed in it and had to lie on the verge of death for another long period awaiting a second ambulance, this one for so-called coloreds.
birthday in his prison cell Tuesday as calls intensified for the pro-democracy activist's release.
when writing poetry. 
of improvised Arabic poetry that enjoyed its heyday in Lebanon before the 1975-1990 civil war, is making a tentative comeback with thousands of fans on Facebook and YouTube. 
everything changed in publishing. 
certainly knows about snow, how silence grows more silent in the snow. He was born in Detroit and lives at Hemlock Lake in Cass County. (He has two fine collections; the recent one is Emergences and Spinner Falls, New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2002.)
my book. And he was standing at my door, thanking me for it. And he said, oh, it's--it's really neat, you know, that you keep this up, you know, because poetry is basically a dead art. To me, of course, it's not. 
State Arts Board Fellowship for Poetry and a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, [James] Cihlar lives in St Paul. 
of the pathetic fallacy, this speaker offers a unique glimpse of a man's heartfelt encounter in a natural setting. The event seems to be a chance occurrence in which a motorist simply stops to pet some ponies, allured by their beauty in the pasture.
is learning patience, learning to be satisfied with small accomplishments. The hardest thing may be writing itself, having faith that our efforts aren't futile. So listen up, poets, writers, all you "tortured artists": Let's leave the drama to reality TV. Let's stick around. Someone around here has got to clean up all the piss.
by Charles Wright
all too often, wrenched, unidiomatic, and unmusical. The genius of the Russian poet can be intuited--you can sense it in Brodsky's intellectual range, bold metaphors, and rhetorical flow--but not really experienced. Loseff quotes the American poet Robert Hass to the effect that reading Brodsky in English is "like wandering through the ruins of a noble building."
when we at last heard about pizza, my mother decided to make one for us. She rolled out bread dough, put catsup on it, and baked it. Voila! Pizza! And inexpensive, too. Here's Grace Cavalieri, a poet and playwright who lives in Maryland, serving something similar and undoubtedly better.
language are now confined to a few elderly people in a small number of rural villages in northeastern China," said Zhao Zhiqiang, who heads the Manchurian Research Institute at the prestigious China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
Kenyan Childhood
much remains in "Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine" to appeal to the modern reader. We might be inspired to draw topical parallels (the short-lived celebrity marriages, the columns of trite commentary) or to insert "grand and great" names of our own. Certainly it's tempting to feel that the habits and paradoxes of power have not essentially changed in the last 200-plus years.
an invitation to look past their own "scenic boundaries" into the distances--human as well as geographical--we find so difficult to cross. Also I'm hoping that readers will welcome me as a poet as well as an essayist, but if I keep referring to poems as dehydrated beef stew, this may not happen. [--Bette Lynch Husted]
to Jack Kerouac and that's just because the movie On the Road is coming out this year. It's been a long making. Francis Ford Coppola has been sitting on the rights to that book oh God for over 20 years, 30 years. And it's finally coming out sometime in 2011. Hopefully they will release it on Kerouac's birthday and not on the day he died.
said Joe Donnelly, co-editor of Slake, a new Los Angeles-based literary magazine whose first issue ran 232 glossy pages and is focused on long-form writing. "We want to produce something that will linger, to publish in a way that's made to last."
I turned and looked, and could see where the vase and the other objects had been placed. But the setting was altogether different from the picture. The living room is a perfectly nice and neat space, and I had just been sitting there, but when I looked at it again there was absolutely nothing about it that would have brought to mind that photo.
chose to write Betty's romance poems. I wrote Phil's side of the story. 
by Sandra Meek, January 2011
One Evening 
Photos by Andre Lambertson
is "the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities." He admires only the work of artists "aware of the fact that in today's world there is no place for natural, spontaneous creation." A work such as Don Quixote can seem a proto-modernist work in its alertness to "the dead wood of convention" and in its willingness to explore "the nature of novels and their ontological status." Cervantes was therefore the right kind of enchanter, one who knew how to pull "the rug (the magic carpet) from under our feet."
Four seasons pass like ghosts and take their turn
said environmental activist Bill Bunch, executive director of the Save Our Springs Alliance. "She knew the springs like no one else. Her poetry will guide community efforts to save the springs for decades to come."
and crochet, crafts, cooking and baking, writing poetry, reading, painting, teaching Sunday school and talking on the telephone.
from the University of Michigan in 1960. Jack was an Emeritus Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Hartford where he taught for 27 years.
as "a beautiful artist and poet," "incredibly intelligent and a straight A student," "a hero to her younger brother" and "a strong guiding light in the storms flooding her loved ones' lives."
of poetry and edited anthologies lauded for their originality according to the Book Council. 
Maple Grove High School and attended Jamestown Community College. She loved animals, writing poetry, and spending time with friends and family
and wrote short stories, endless poems and limericks, but felt few were good enough to be published (though they were). Her annual Christmas letter/poem was looked forward to by hundreds of friends and family. A thin book of her poetry was published to mark her 70th birthday.
dirt-bike riding, and panning for gold in his beloved Mojave Desert, Ed [Moon] loved telling jokes, gardening, cooking, playing cards, chemistry, of course, and dancing. He was an avid reader; he published books of poetry; he once made his own bars of soap, dipped home-made candles, and bottled his recipe for root beer (and beer).
filling hundreds and hundreds of pages in his lifetime with his ponderings of faith, life and love. Many of these were given to friends and family. Many have been found and archived for his grandchildren.
publishing house in San Francisco associated with the Beats, published her [Janine Pommy Vega's] first book of poetry, "Poems to Fernando," in its Pocket Poets series in 1968. She went on to publish more than a dozen books of poetry while roaming the world on spiritual quests that included treks in the Himalayas and two years as a hermit on the Isla del Sol on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. "Tracking the Serpent," a kind of feminist "On the Road," chronicled her visits in the 1980s to matriarchal power sites in the Amazon, Nepal, France and Britain.
