So things have been rather quiet here for the past month or so, and I thought I'd offer a little update, or explanation, of where things are headed for the next month or so.
October 29, 2016
October 7, 2016
Review: The War Works Hard
Mikhail, Dunya. The War Works Hard (Trans. Elizabeth Winslow). New Directions 2005.
Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller
War has preoccupied poets for millennia. Poets have meditated on war since Homer, and contemporary efforts scrutinize war so much as to create its own genre. Anti-war poetry sought to remove the aloof veil surrounding the poem and replace it with something hard, abject, impermissible. It was an attempt of the twentieth century post-war crowd to provide a jolt of ethics into the hearts of a crowd growing increasingly disillusioned. Regardless of how one judges the success of anti-war poetry, the project did succeed, more or less, to destabilize war's many faces. Thus, war has been examined and analyzed, glorified and justified, bemoaned and criticized; but has it ever been thanked? There is a somber, knowing tone that pervades most poetic ruminations of war. Marked by a love of tired polemics and starved images, countless reiterations have blunted this tonal point. Dunya Mikhail's The War Works Hard thus offers something fresh and poignant to a poetic body frequently lacking either. In an ironic voice and self-defacing images, The War Works Hard places its anti-war poetics neither above nor beyond the war it criticizes, but uneasily, at its side.
Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller
War has preoccupied poets for millennia. Poets have meditated on war since Homer, and contemporary efforts scrutinize war so much as to create its own genre. Anti-war poetry sought to remove the aloof veil surrounding the poem and replace it with something hard, abject, impermissible. It was an attempt of the twentieth century post-war crowd to provide a jolt of ethics into the hearts of a crowd growing increasingly disillusioned. Regardless of how one judges the success of anti-war poetry, the project did succeed, more or less, to destabilize war's many faces. Thus, war has been examined and analyzed, glorified and justified, bemoaned and criticized; but has it ever been thanked? There is a somber, knowing tone that pervades most poetic ruminations of war. Marked by a love of tired polemics and starved images, countless reiterations have blunted this tonal point. Dunya Mikhail's The War Works Hard thus offers something fresh and poignant to a poetic body frequently lacking either. In an ironic voice and self-defacing images, The War Works Hard places its anti-war poetics neither above nor beyond the war it criticizes, but uneasily, at its side.
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