Anders Villani

It speaks volumes that almost a century and a half after Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen announced the modern prose poem, James Longenbach influentially defined poetry as ‘the sound of language organized in lines’. An otherness, bordering on illegitimacy, pervades what Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington argue is ‘the most important new poetic form to emerge in English-language poetry since ... (read more)

A boy appears at school earlyto lick the flagpole and speak different.Scratch the ‘g’ from ‘listening’ like the girl he watcheshang her beaded bagfrom the hook with all the grace he doesn’t know he heaps upon her.At recess, the boy eats a golden delicious,seed and stem. Each instant a northswept southerner in Nonna’s stories, losing dialect.Kids jigsaw around him; he stays stillfast ... (read more)

In 1795, Friedrich Schiller wrote: ‘So long as we were mere children of nature, we were both happy and perfect; we have become free, and have lost both.’ For Schiller, it was the poet’s task to ‘lead mankind … onward’ to a reunification with nature, and thereby with the self. Central to Romantic thought, reimaginings like Schiller’s of Christian allegory, in which (European) humans ... (read more)

‘Even if truth be drawn from the work,’ writes Maurice Blanchot, ‘the work overruns it, takes it back into itself to bury and hide it.’ This strange, poetic movement to conceal what is manifest brings to mind another statement, by the psychiatrist and author Judith Herman: ‘The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic ... (read more)