I’m terrified by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Brutal and visceral, which cuts across and divides entire families. This actually started as a prose poem. Then I started winnowing it, to be more lyrical and personal, and symbolic of its aftermath. I wanted the poem to be subtle, leaving out the details of the war for the reader to discover and address.
Simon Anton Nino Diego Baena on "The 84th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War" |
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"I Haven’t Been I"
Colm Tóibín reviews a new biography of Fernando Pessoa, who once wrote, "It has been my tendency to create around me a fictitious world, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances who never existed. (I cannot be sure, of course, if they really never existed, or if it is me who does not exist. In this matter, as in any other, we should not be dogmatic.)"
via LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Teare on Taylor Johnson's Inheritance
"Restless, improvisatory, Johnson favors no single subject matter or mode. They are a poet of theory and memory, of essay and anecdote, of ode and aubade, of self-portraiture and landscape, of deconstruction and sex. Their poems are rangy in form–prose, erasure, projective, epistolary, ekphrastic, even a pantoum and a sonnet–and equally rangy in scene and setting." |
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