Hugh Nicoll's Blog

The latest issue of Rattapallax, Rattapallax21, has just been released as a free iPad app. It’s great! So, if you’ve got an iPad and are interested in poetics and new writing, in new modalities, check it out. (The link points to the US iTunes store, but the magazine should be available through iTunes everywhere, as […]

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Robin Tremblay-McGaw has a great little review of Aífe Murray’s Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language (2010). The review includes a generous selection of extended quotes from Murray’s text, giving readers a good sense of the pleasures in Ms. Murray’s prose. Murray has made the working poor of nineteenth century […]

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On March 6, Bill Moyers’s Journal celebrated poetry. The elegy for the Dodge Poetry Festival, cancelled for 2010, was excerpted from Fooling With Words produced in 2000. The segment features readings shorter and longer, including Kurtis Lamkin, Sharon Olds, W.S. Merwin and Coleman Barks. Lamkin performs with the kora, while Barks’s concluding reading features a […]

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In Hurrah for Euphony!, Mark Scroggins shares his delight upon taking delivery of Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, just published by the National Poetry Foundation in Orono, ME. Scroggins describes the volume as containing 700 plus pages of critical cool. Hope I can steal some time for it later this summer.

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Jacket 36, the late 2008 issue, is taking form. It includes a discussion between Rachel Blau DuPlessis and William Watkin on “Draft 33: Deixis” and Watkin’s essay “Though we keep company with cats and dogs”: Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia and Happiness in the work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben. I am not familiar with W. Watkin’s […]

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Reading Jerome McGann on Clark Coolidge : wandering Copenhagen, journeying to Manchester via Frankfurt… The twinned experiences of reading and thinking about poetry and poetics within the multilingual flow of heard languages in travel has got me thinking about language, language use, and language learning and teaching in new ways. It also has me wondering […]

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One of the unexpected benefits of my short stay in Copenhagen is having discovered the work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, a Finnish video artist and photographer, awarded the Artes Mundi prize in 2006. Ahtila describes herself as a slow worker, and shows new works at longish intervals. Her current exhibition at Copenhagen’s GL Strand, runs through […]

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Stephen Vincent published Tenderly #6 or The Gertrude Improvs on March 8. Its mysterious music captured my attention almost immediately, and I’ve gone back to his blog on daily basis to re-read. I could of course copy and paste the text of the whole poem onto my computer and re-read at my private leisure, but […]

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