Paul Celan’s truest homeland, paradoxically, was the German language — the language of the Nazis who imprisoned him in a forced labor camp and murdered his parents.
Author Archives: Mark Scroggins
Mark Scroggins is a poet, biographer, and critic. His recent books include the poetry collection Pressure Dressing, the essay collection The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry, and a selection of the erotic poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, and Manhattan.
A New, Feminist Translation of Beowulf
Maria Dahvana Headley’s breathtakingly audacious and idiomatically rich Beowulf: A New Translation is a breath of iconoclastically fresh air blowing through the old tale’s stuffy mead-hall atmosphere.
Marcella Durand’s Apocalyptic Pastoral
Durand’s urban environment in The Prospect is a source not of solace but of anxiety.
The Monumental and Human Poetry of Paul Valéry
The beauty and power of Valéry’s best writing is undeniable, and the human dilemmas his work addresses remain with us.
Poetry With a Painterly Eye
The latest poetry collections by Lawrence Giffin and Lesle Lewis use the vocabulary of visual arts to extend poetry’s reach.
Susan Howe’s Feminist Poetics
Throughout her work and in her latest volume, Concordance, Howe confronts the plight of the female writer in a masculine literary culture.
Two Poets Search for Home
In their latest volumes, poets Youmna Chlala and Chris Nealon confront the notion of home and the emotional challenges of our own tentative, pre- or post-apocalyptic moment.
Poetry as a Blowtorch of Protest
While despondency and madness appear aplenty in Sean Bonney’s writing, its keynote is pure, hard rage.
An Evolution of Style in Three Poets
I love discovering new voices, but there’s much to be said for following poets over the course of their careers, watching their styles evolve, their attentions shift.
The Polymathic Mind of John Ruskin
Ruskin was captivated with more than just art and architecture. He wrote at some length on geology, mythology, crystallography, ornithology, herpetology — and who knows what else.
Testosterone Rules at the Metropolitan Museum’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Show
Will rock music ever be able entirely to extricate itself from a profoundly gendered symbolism?