The Collected Poems by Marcel Proust
Joe Winkler reviews the Collected Poems of Marcel Proust today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Posts by: Joe Winkler
“Austerity,” by Mark Blyth
“Both Flesh and Not,” by David Foster Wallace
The ferocity with which scholars, writers, fans, and cultural critics explicate the legacy of David Foster Wallace, or even that a legacy is thought to already exist at all, strikes me as a bit absurd, if inevitable.
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“Collected Poems” by Jack Kerouac
You know Jack Kerouac. Everyone knows Jack Kerouac. Father of the Beat generation, though he disliked that label, author of the free thinkers bible On the Road, culture maker, lover of the mad, and general all around badass. He receives as much posthumous love as any other dead author, perhaps more; this year saw the release of a new movie based on his On the Road, a new biography, the release of unpublished fiction, and importantly, so I would like to contend, a release of all his collected poetry.
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“Mortality,” by Christopher Hitchens
An amorphous aura resonates around authors we discover on our own. Before we hear of their fame and talent, before everyone recommends their book as a “must read” we find their book, lost, broken, beat up in a pile of forgotten paperbacks at some random flea market.
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Selected Translations by W. S. Merwin
The translation of poetry requires justification. Not necessarily for conceptual reasons, but because the experience of reading translated poetry however transcendent and beautiful always feels lacking, incomplete, like living in a body missing some essential organ. Of course, this remains true of prose as well, but poetry, which depends more on the idiosyncratic musicality, imagery, and idioms of a specific language and culture, makes it near impossible to create anything even close to a “faithful” translation.
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Dispatch From the Future by Leigh Stein
I don’t think I ever laughed with a poem. Sometimes I chuckle at a clever turn of phrase, or at a shared sentiment, or a little idiosyncrasy that I thought all my own, and though I laughed at that dirty limerick my friend wrote in fifth grade, I can still say Leigh Stein’s poetry actually elicited the kind of laughter that hurt my belly and made me want to say, “Leigh, stop, I can’t take anymore, but don’t really because, WOW!”
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The Event of Literature, by Terry Eagleton
Though prolific, the writer, cultural critic, religious apologist, and British literary theorist Terry Eagleton fights for relevance with each subsequent book. Most of us, if we know his name at all, either recognize him from the somewhat recent spat between academics and the new atheists, or from literary theory 101.
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Occupy Nation, by Todd Gitlin
What hath the OWS movement wrought? Depends on who you ask. Naysayers, including most Republicans and Rupert Murdoch’s various media organs, will tell you that OWS created nothing but trouble, violence, a disruption of the peace, and distraction from key issues. The average person—if shaken out of their apathy—will provide hazy answers, falling back on popularized slogans about Occupying this, and 99% vs.
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