“Reaching the end of a Babstock poem, I often felt (and still often feel) stunned into a kind of numinous awe.” Stewart Cole for Partisan on Ken Babstock and the state of Canadian poetry. Continue with confidence on your quest through the Canadian canon with the help of this guide by our very own Michael Bourne.
Melodious Sound Patterings
Book and Bed
Who’s ready for a trip to Tokyo? Sadie Stein at The Paris Review breaks the lid on a veritable Shangri-La for book lovers, a quasi-bunkhouse known as Book and Bed. Book and Bed is a bunkhouse-slash-bookstore that doesn’t actually sell books. Instead, they have a number of rather spartan beds built inside row after row of bookshelves. Their noble goal is also a simple one; to offer “an experience shared by everyone at least once: the blissful instant of falling asleep while reading.”
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Nebulous Plotlines
You’ve probably heard it before: never end a story with the phrase “it was all a dream.” Unfortunately for the person who taught you this rule, many classic stories (including Anna Karenina) take place at least partially in dreams. In the NYRB, Francine Prose investigates the trope in fiction.
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Letter to Detroit
“The city has the beckoning power of a black hole or the Italian countryside or a castle. There is no way to explain our wiring to someone whose fairytale has always ended somewhere like Florida.” Aisha Sabatini Sloan on calling Detroit home, over at The Offing. Also check out Bill Morris’s Millions piece on movies set in the city.
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DIAGRAM’s 2012 Essay Contest
The deadline for DIAGRAM’s annual essay contest is fast approaching. Past winners include Peter Jay Shippy’s “Goonies: or Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snowman’–an Essay in 7 Films” and (my all-time favorite) Cheyenne Nimes’s “SECTION 404 OF THE CLEAN WATER ACT AND THE SANTA CRUZ RIVER SAND SHARK, SUBTITLED ‘THIS TROUBLESOME REGULATORY CONSTRAINT’.”
Brow Raised
Not highbrow, not lowbrow, not even middlebrow – is American culture now dominated by the upper middle brow?
What Are the Chances?
James Tate’s final poem, which was discovered in his typewriter soon after his death, appears in the spring issue of The Paris Review. Pair with Andrew Kay’s Millions essay on the power of poetry.
Ancient Poetics
Recommended Reading: Chloe Garcia Roberts and Guangchen Chen on translating ninth century poet Li Shangyin.
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