Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics – Coming Soon!

We are delighted to announce that next year we will be launching a flagship new book series that aims to become the home for the best and most exciting scholarship in modern and contemporary poetry criticism. Edited by Daniel Katz, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, the Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics series seeks to explore the ways in which modern poetry has intersected with philosophy, psychoanalysis, political protest and liberation movements, economic theory and any of the most urgent and important debates of our time.

You can find more details on the series and our future plans here. The first books in the series will publish in 2018 and include:

Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry: This Feeling of Exaltation by John Steen (Galloway School, USA) draws on affect theory and contemporary psychoanalysis to examine negative emotions – anxiety, grief, rage and shame – in a range of modern poets from Wallace Stevens and Robert Creeley to Aaron Kunin and Claudia Rankine. Through this study, the book outlines a new idea of poetic value based not on ‘closure’ but on more open notions of permeability, social intimacy  and attachment.

City Poems and American Urban Crisis by Nate Mickelson (Stella and Charles Guttman Community College, USA) charts the ways in which post-War poetry has responded to the ever-changing experiences of America’s cities and neighborhoods, including Chicago’s Bronzeville, New York’s Losaida, and Los Angeles. Mickelson brings the work of major mid-century poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, and Charles Olson into conversation with contemporary urban theory and planning history and more recent work from poets like Wanda Coleman, Lewis MacAdams and Nuyorican writers of the New York area.

In A Black Arts Poetry Machine, David Grundy (University of Cambridge, UK) brings together new archival discoveries and insightful close reading in an important new study of the work of Amiri Baraka, the Umbra Workshop and the African American poetic avant-garde. Along the way the book shows the ways in which the innovative poetic forms of writers such as Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas and Calvin Hernton engaged with radical poetic responses to state violence and urban insurrection.

Samuel Solomon (University of Sussex, UK) constructs an alternative history of Marxist Feminist British poetry in Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism. Focusing on the theoretical question of social reproduction and turning to an often overlooked tradition of British poetry that includes Denise Riley, J.H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, John James, and Wendy Mulford, Solomon explores new answers to the question of poetry’s political potential in the modern age and the value of literary education today.

If you think you have a monograph that might fit with the series, do get in touch with Series Editor Daniel Katz at [email protected].

Series Editorial Board:

Hélène Aji (University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre, France); Vincent Broqua (University of Paris 8 - Vincennes/Saint Denis, France); Olivier Brossard (University of Paris Est-Créteil, France); Daniel Kane (University of Sussex, UK); Miriam Nichols (University of the Fraser Valley, Canada); Peter Middleton (University of Southampton, UK); Cristanne Miller (SUNY Buffalo, USA); Aldon Nielsen (Pennsylvania State University, USA); Stephen Ross, (Concordia University, Canada); Richard Sieburth (New York University, USA); Daniel Tiffany (University of Southern California, USA).

Q&A with Willard Bohn

Willard Bohn answered some questions for us about editing the new anthology Surrealist Poetry.

Tell us a bit about a significant piece in the collection and why you selected it.

I selected “When I Sleep I See Clearly,” by J. V. Foix, for two reasons. Since Barcelona was, and continues to be, a hotbed of artistic experimentation, I wanted to include works by someone from Catalonia. Although Spanish is the dominant language spoken in Spain, it is not the only language. Foix was not only the most talented poet writing in Catalan but also one of the finest Surrealist poets in any language. The whimsical play of his imagination is both immensely entertaining and totally original. Since the poem attempts to describe the nature of Surrealist inspiration, it constitutes an important theoretical statement as well as a delightful lyrical exercize.

What made you realize this kind of collection was missing from the field?

Historically anthologies of Surrealist poetry have been few and far between. In general, they consist of texts in the original language or translations into English. Although bilingual anthologies present a rare opportunity to compare the original poems with their English versions, they are exceedingly rare. Bilingual translations of Surrealist poems taken from more than one language do not exist at all. Combining texts translated from French, Spanish, and Catalan, the present volume attempts to partially remedy this situation. Readers are able to compare texts composed in different languages and to note the various ways they exemplify Surrealism.             

Did you begin compiling the anthology with a certain piece or pieces in mind?

The volume was initially conceived as a companion to an earlier anthology entitled The Dada Market. As such, it represents a further investigation into the twentieth century avant-garde. Since André Breton was the leader of the French Surrealists, who were the first to experiment with automatic procedures, I began by choosing a selection of his poems. The names of other prominent Surrealists came to mind as well but not particular works. My goal was to present a broad selection of the most significant members of the French and Spanish groups. The twenty-three writers chosen for comparison are not limited to just France and Spain, but also come from Belgium, Egypt, Martinique, Mauritius, Mexico, Chile, and Peru.

What do you think is the most unusual piece in the collection?

Among the most unusual works are those composed by three individuals simultaneously. In “Out for a Stroll,” for example, André Breton, Paul Eluard, and René Char describe an imaginary walk through mysterious city streets, where they encounter an anonymous woman singing in a deserted public square, a group of gypsies, and a paralyzed train. Framed by images of a crumbling coral pharmacy, the poem contains numerous examples of the Surrealist marvelous (le merveilleux). Although the latter includes such notions as the uncanny and the peculiar, it may be defined essentially as exacerbated beauty.    

What are the benefits and challenges of editing a collection?

Editing an anthology is a challenging task and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Most of the problems encountered by anyone seeking to publish a collection of poems are associated with copyright law, which sorely needs to be overhauled and standardized from one nation to the next. That an author deserves to reap the fruits of his or her labor is indisputable. That his grand-nephew deserves to reap the same fruits is not. In general, the sums involved are modest, and most of the authors’ heirs or rights holders are usually cooperative. However, the present project was delayed for years by the incompetent editorial staff of a prominent French publisher. My initial contact person took a leave of absence after one year to have a baby, ushering in a series of inept (or worse) replacements with some very strange ideas. Two or three years later, she returned, resumed the permissions process, and left a year later to have a second baby. Ironically, in a few years the poems will all be in the public domain, and anyone will be able to quote them without permission!       

Given unlimited space, what would you have added to the collection?

As it stands, I believe the anthology is a well-balanced and representative example of Surrealist poetry. For one thing, the contributions in Spanish are about as numerous as those in French. For another, the principal genres and styles are illustrated by a number of different works. Thus adding more poets and more examples of Surrealist poetry would not have substantially improved the volume.   

Tell us one new thing you learned from editing this volume.

I learned to be incredibly patient as the years passed. The copyright process doesn’t have to be cumbersome and unpleasant, but it certainly can be. As my case illustrates, permissions that should only require two or three months to obtain can drag on forever.

What do you hope readers will take away from this collection?

I hope my readers will gain a better understanding of Surrealism, of its principal methods, goals, and accomplishments. I also hope they will gain a new appreciation for the poets who appear in this volume, who were incredibly inventive and creative. More than anything, perhaps, I hope I have succeeded in conveying the tremendous excitement that accompanied the Surrealist adventure. André Breton and his colleagues were basically engaged in a voyage of discovery. They sought to shed new light not only on the workings of the Freudian unconscious but also on the creative act itself.  

 

Willard Bohn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Illinois State University, USA. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including The Avant-Garde Imperative (2013); Marvelous Encounters: Surrealist Responses to Film, Art, Poetry and Architecture (2005), Italian Futurist Poetry (2005), The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry (1993), and The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928 (1993). He is the editor of the new collection Surrealist Poetry: An Anthology, now available from Bloomsbury.

On Writing a Guide to Poetry (Part II)

Guest Post by Mark Yakich

What is one to think of the following picture?

Is it a bit shocking? A bit adorable? Is it shockingly adorable? Whatever it is, it is the image I had initially envisioned for my book’s cover. As someone who’s been interested in design and art for a long time, I’d even made mock-up:

I’d found the image of the dead baby deer by chance on Flickr, and felt immediately that it captured a certain feeling that I have about poetry—that beauty is sometimes best displayed in the ostensibly sorrowful or awful. It’s an overly sentimental notion, perhaps, and one I associate with a famous line from Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies): Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang... (For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of a terror…).

As my book’s title employs the words “survivor” and “guide,” the image also brought forth the idea of the book as being somehow helpful when entering dark woods. I liked that notion both literally—one might take the book on a hike or a camping trip—and figuratively, in the sense of reading and writing a poem as an adventure into an unknown territory.

Apparently, however, the art director or designer had other ideas, most of them involving the vanishing point of a road or highway with something askew:

In the end, I am pleased with the cover we finally settled on:

And as an object, the book itself is lovely. The Rilkean aspect of the cover, for me, does not reside in the red-orange emergency cones. Rather, it’s what those cones point to: the word “poetry” and the misty white space intimating oblivion—an unknown beyond both dark woods and dark words.

 

Mark Yakich is Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, Editor of New Orleans Review, and a poet and novelist. He is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008). His latest book, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, is now available from Bloomsbury.

On Writing a Guide to Poetry (Part I)

Guest Post by Mark Yakich

I’d wanted to call my book Poetry: A Guide for the Perplexed—not only because Bloomsbury has a series called “Guides for the Perplexed,” riffing off Maimonides’ 12th-century The Guide for the Perplexed, but because so many poems leave so many readers nonplussed—myself included.

I am not someone who devoured books as a child. In fact, I disliked books, did not enjoy reading, and found poetry to be especially irrelevant to my life...all the way up until my late twenties. But that’s not exactly why I first began writing Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide—as a means of getting people interested in poems. I wrote it chiefly for my students.

To be frank, over fifteen years of teaching poetry I’d gotten tired of repeating myself. For example, whenever my students and I would investigate certain figurative language, a question would invariably arise: What’s the difference between a metaphor and a simile? Someone would provide this answer: “A metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things. And a simile is a comparison that uses like or as.” I’d been taught this same reply in formative schooling and had learned nothing from it besides that it was a definition to memorize for a quiz. That is, simply identifying a metaphor or a simile helped me not one bit in understanding a poem. So, as a teacher of poems now, I ask a follow-up question: So why use a simile instead of a metaphor? If there’s an answer from a student, more often than not, it is: “Hell if I know.”

Here is where I employ one of my bromides:

Set aside the definitions you were given long ago, and think of a metaphor as a substitution, as in an equation: Bill is a bear this morning. In mathematical terms, “is” is “equals.” So: Bill = bear. But a simile functions a little differently. Bill is like a bear this morning. Bill ≃ bear. The substitution, or the transference, isn’t a full one.

While it may take another example or two to get across the notion of metaphor as nothing more than substitution (metaphor doesn’t necessarily have to compare “two unlike things”), students will begin to engage poetry from an angle they are unaccustomed to.

And as soon as they think they have a handle on it, I might offer the following:

If one accepts that metaphor is substitution, then what is one to do with T. S. Eliot’s proposition that “Nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else”? Metaphor, that is, becomes only a pseudo-substitution. Even two identical eggs aren’t actually identical: one sits next to the other in the carton and they can be switched around, but the one is never materially the other. Metaphor is a kind of necessary deception that we accept mostly unthinkingly.

And that is precisely what reading and writing poems can help us avoid: going throughout our daily business without thinking. Because after I collected all these little strategies and personal bromides about reading and writing poems, I realized that the book I wrote wasn’t only about how to view poetry, but how to view day-to-day living. And last year while on sabbatical (away from teaching) I was able to explore and hone these thoughts into a book—a book I wish I’d had long ago when I had my first (dis)taste of poetry.

 

Visit our blog next Tuesday for Part II 

Mark Yakich is Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, Editor of New Orleans Review, and a poet and novelist. He is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008). His latest book, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, is now available from Bloomsbury.

What the Dickens shall we do about Chaucer?

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of Chaucer's death. Gail Ashton, author of the forthcoming Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture discusses Chaucer in this latest post!

What the Dickens shall we do about Chaucer?

Ever wondered why no one in the UK seems to read Chaucer anymore? Why Gail Ashton sees a ‘residual affection for Chaucer’ compromised at every turn? Read on…

It is the tap end of one of the hardest winters for decades.  I am sitting in a steamy café talking to a former senior examiner about Chaucer’s shrinking presence in a UK school system.  I recognised him from the scarf he said he’d be wearing; his bobble hat threw me for a while, but we joke about blind dates and strangers on a train and I forget for a moment why we’re meeting in this way. It’s all rather reminiscent of a spy movie and this makes me laugh as much as it concerns me.

My ‘date’ – let’s call him Geoffrey, Mr G for the craic -  tells me how he’s taught Chaucer extensively, all the usual ‘culprits’: the Miller’s, Wife’s, Pardoner’s, Knight’s, Nun’s Priest’s tales—, his interest in Chaucer’s narrative and story-making matching my own.  His eyes light as he recalls reading the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ aloud to kids, their delight in the humour of it.  He likes the ‘Merchant’s Tale’ too its ‘cynicism’ which can ‘make it modern,’ fresh.

Later he will say ‘as you shut the door on Chaucer it very quickly stays shut.’ And I will walk back along the road against the fading light and press of commuters hurrying home, just as earlier I wandered around the museum, and took tea with a professor I taught with, in a former life. It seems apt.

Driving in, I was tuned to Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 lunchtime show which was debating a recent parliamentary call to ensure all school children will have read Dickens by the time they are ten. The phone-in celebrates National Dickens Day (2012), each caller someone of a certain age extolling Dickens’ humanistic impulses, universal values, a mordant social commentary made to speak for our economically depressed contemporary times. On this day Dickens is both fully alive (in films, TV series) and long-gone, a ‘classic’ author whom nostalgic readers quote at length. Claire Tomalin’s recent Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) shares air space with Prince Charles’ rally to get children reading again. I am already depressed.

I share with Mr G my concerns about children being force fed a diet of classics, recount how I’ve just heard an academic warn against reading Dickens too early on the grounds he’s a ‘mature read’. Mr G responds with an anecdote about how at one presentation he gave in Newcastle, someone demanded to know ‘why are you not teaching my child Dryden?’  Education in the UK has, Mr G says, an ultra-conservative agenda that ‘cuts across all parties’ and where English usually takes the brunt of reform—as in 2000, under Labour, when ‘a wholesale root and branch renewal gave us more of the same.’ The watchword, he believes, is always ‘rigour,’ something seemingly achieved only by teaching and examining canonical, pre-20th Century authors, often, specifically, those our political leaders studied at school and university.

At the same time, it seems, no-one wants to invest in Geoffrey Chaucer. Mr G speaks of a ‘residual affection for Chaucer’ yet I hear it compromised at every turn.  He invites me to contemplate my suspicions about educational idealogy in the UK, and then triple the worst of them. Dominated by inspections, assessment and examination league tables—which are, he suggests, ‘more pernicious than I’ll ever know’ — teachers are ‘scared witless.’ No teacher, he says, is going to take a risk with Chaucer who is perceived as less accessible to today’s students with his ‘weird language’ and as one of those authors available ‘only for the best. I wonder if this is why those schools already at the top of the table (grammar or independent schools) will teach Chaucer when, Mr G tells me, ‘few comprehensive schools dare risk it.’ And just to compound the inequity, most teachers ‘go to default,’ teaching only the texts and authors they were taught at A level.

Is it then that no-one reads Chaucer today? Or that no-one reads anything very much at all?

Mr G insists that, contrary to popular belief, kids today do read, are, in fact, highly text-literate; the problem comes from the gulf between what and how they read, and what the UK examination system assesses. We are, he says, asking technical questions about how Chaucer constructs his narratives for instance, even as no-one is teaching the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how he does it; ‘the technical repertoire isn’t there.’ Here, of course, we too fall into the honey-trap of nostalgia, reminiscing about how we read aloud in our old-school classrooms, something no-one does anymore, so that ‘the sound’s gone.’  Instead Chaucer’s work becomes ‘a story you had to decode’ he’s ‘written about as though he’s a novelist.’  So, all sense of Chaucer as a poet seems to have gone.

If we no longer recognise Chaucer as a poet, in what sense do we read him, then, if at all? Oddly enough in the recent past, Chaucer has appeared on examination syllabi in sections on Poetry.  Surely this was good?  Mr G thinks not, telling me that the pressure to impose on English Literature a grid of tick box, quantitative criteria—‘the right buttons’ —leads to many compromises and ‘mile-off thinking.’  The result: a relatively random choice of texts which, inadvertently, ‘gave Chaucer more chance.’ Michael Gove’s (former Education Minister) more recent ruthless so-called radicalisation of UK curricula – more of the same – means ‘now Chaucer fits less easily into the new comparative model.’ And where once Chaucer might have been an option for coursework, government reforms have ensured that final end of course examination is currently the only acceptable mode of assessment.

Or is it? Chaucer’s face, it seems, simply doesn’t fit.

As ever, nothing is quite as it appears.  Even if Chaucer was formerly available for coursework, in Mr G’s long experience as an examiner not a single school ever took this up, which raises further questions: about accessibility (again) , innovation, ways of teaching.  So, too, despite Mr G’s earlier comments about a lack of technical vocabulary with which to discuss Chaucer’s text, he feels ‘and anyway that’s not crucial.’ What about, he asks, exploring Chaucer’s work through issues, contexts and ideologies, thinking about, say sex and sexuality? ‘The moral pornography of, say, the ‘Merchant’s Tale’… that’s glossed over…that’s got lost in the way we ask the questions.’  

In Mr G’s view, ‘The really interesting questions are not the ones being asked,’ of any writers. The best thing on one of the new A level papers (2014), he says, is the section on narrative ‘which is where Chaucer should be and isn’t … Chaucer could  be there and be really fascinating’—if only we were free to ask ‘what interesting narratives can we do’ rather than ‘how does the question correlate to the assessment criteria we’re given.’

Yet even if ‘how sad (it is) that he doesn’t fit,’ —and we do—I am forced to concede that perhaps I am barking up the wrong tree.  I’ve already been told that it’s the specifics that matter—which is why the exam questions hardly change—and not the broader issues, or the place of narrative, or genre in our culture. I persist: should we teach a ‘modernised’ Chaucer? Incorporate his afterlives, the web, TV adaptations? Hit those text-literate, media savvy kids right where they most hurt?

The town clock strikes. Day draws to a close. Mr G demands, ‘who’s to say who we should read?’ I agree. Then, ‘what’s the point of every kid reading Chaucer if you stop as soon as you can?’ I admit I don’t read him for pleasure.  We both confess (sheepish? defiant?) we rarely go to the theatre. And I wander home, thinking on Mr G’s quick look, that comment said not at the end, but which may be the final word after all: ‘who says I’d teach him at all?’
Here’s the thing. I still would.


Read more...Gail Ashton, ‘Silence in the Library?- Medievalist Poetry Shout-Out,’ in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture

Read more...Gail Ashton in Conversation with Gwyneth Lewis and Patience Agbabi, this website.
Gwyneth Lewis, former Welsh Poet Laureate, says, ‘If you don’t have help to read Chaucer at school, then you’re never going to venture into that world.’ Likewise, we have to show students how to access the Bible, ‘the biggest source for literature until now; ’otherwise we give ‘our children roots into their culture which are more shallow...it’s like being cut off from the water table.’

Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales (2014), is currently working with The Full English to produce a teaching pack on Chaucer for use in UK schools. She says,

There’s a freshness to Chaucer’s language that makes it timeless. That’s what I first fell in love with as an A Level student. I was astonished at how accessible and irreverent he was...

Everyone I’ve met who studied Chaucer at A’ Level loved it yet it has dipped in the popularity stakes. I hope my book, and the proposed Teaching Pack, will in a small way change that trend. The pack will give teachers several pedagogic approaches so they feel more equipped to take Chaucer into the classroom. Clearly a whole generation have missed out on studying Chaucer themselves so it’s especially daunting for them to teach it.

I presentedTelling Tales as a seminar, workshop and keynote performance at the NATE conferences in 2013 and 2014. Everyone agreed that Chaucer should have a higher profile on the National Curriculum. I suspect our results-led society has frightened secondary school teachers into going for the easier options. Yes, the language is challenging but in some ways, easier than Shakespeare’s in-jokes to the groundlings. If A’ level students experienced the electrifying live version of The Reeve’s Tale as I did at Cheltenham Literature Festival, they’d love Chaucer. This was performed by Trevor Eaton ‘The Chaucer Man’. (Actually, there was an A’ Level class in attendance and they did love Chaucer). I perceive there’s also a move away from poetry in general and Chaucer is seen as the most difficult.

Forthcoming this Spring! Recommend Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture to your librarian!

On Modern Poetry and Writing the Self named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles 2013

Continuing a mulit-year streak, two Literary Studies books have been named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Congratulations to On Modern Poetry by Robert Rowland Smith and Writing the Self by Peter Heehs.

More about Choice Outstanding Academic Titles:

Every year, Choice subject editors single out for recognition the most significant print and electronic works reviewed in Choice during the previous calendar year. Appearing annually in Choice’s January issue, this prestigious list of publications reflects the best in scholarly titles and attracts extraordinary attention from the academic library community. The 2013 feature includes 663 titles in 54 disciplines and subsections. In awarding Outstanding Academic Title status, the editors apply several criteria to reviewed titles:

•     Overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
•     Importance relative to other literature in the field
•     Distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
•     Originality or uniqueness of treatment
•     Value to undergraduate students
•     Importance in building undergraduate library collections

Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self traces the history of the idea of the self, in diaries, memoirs and other first-person writings, from the Iron Age to the age of the Internet.

Start reading it here:

More information


On Modern Poetry: From Theory to Total Criticism explores the divide between practical criticism and theory in 20th century criticism to propose a new way of reading poetry.

Start reading it here:

More information
   

Book Launch and Poetry Reading for The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry

BOOK LAUNCH AND POETRY READING:  Anthology of Jewish American Poets

Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013, 8:00 p.m.

Oseh Shalom Congregation, 7515 Olive Branch Way, Laurel, MD. http://www.oseh-shalom.org/

Reading by poets featured in the just-released The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry: Deborah Ager (co-editor), Nancy Naomi Carlson, Rachel Malis, Yvette Neisser Moreno, and Pia Taavila-Borsheim. Followed by wine and cheese reception. Free and open to the public.

Nancy Naomi Carlson, Ph.D., is an associate editor for Tupelo Press and Translations Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, she has published two award-winning chapbooks, as well as Kings Highway and a book of translations, Stone Lyre: Poems of Rene Char. Her work has appeared in print over 200 times, including such journals as AGNI, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Phoebe, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and is forthcoming in The Georgia Review. She is a recipient of grants from the NEA, the Maryland Arts Council, and the Montgomery County Arts and Humanities Council.

Rachel Malis earned her MFA from ASU in 2010. Rachel has been published in Oberon Poetry, Modoc Forum, Willows Wept Review, Damselfly Press and the New Mexico Poetry Review. She currently lives in Washington, DC, where she is working on a novel.

Deborah Ager is an author, editor of books, and founder of a magazine. She’s author of Midnight Voices (2009) and co-editor of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (2013) and Old Flame: Ten Years of 32 Poems Magazine (2012). Ager is a founding board member of 32 Poems Magazine, on the editorial board of Redux and a director of the Miller Cabin Poetry Reading Series in Washington, DC. Find out more: http://www.deborahager.com.

Yvette Neisser Moreno is the author of Grip, winner of the 2011 Gival Press Poetry Award, and an avid translator of Spanish poetry. Her poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Foreign Policy in Focus, Palestine-Israel Journal, and Virginia Quarterly Review. In addition to her day job, she coordinates the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT), serves on Split This Rock’s Program Committee, and teaches at The Writer’s Center. Her website is: www.yneissermoreno.com

Pia Taavila-Borsheim, Ph.D., is the author of Moon on the Meadow (Gallaudet University Press, 2008) and Two Winters (Finishing Line Press 2011). She is Professor of English at Gallaudet, teaching classes in literature and creative writing.

Start reading The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry below

Late Walter Benjamin and On Modern Poetry - "Highly Recommended"

We were delighted to see a bumper crop of Bloomsbury titles reviewed in the latest issue of Choice, the review journal of the Association for College & Research Libraries. We were particularly delighted to receive the coveted "highly recommended" rating for not one but two of our books.

Describing the book as "at once inventive and conceptually rich", Michael Uebel of the University of Texas writes of John Schad's The Late Walter Benjamin: "This is a witty, smart novel that combines literary criticism with philosophy and local history... [It] will delight and challenge readers and admirers of Benjamin and it will intrigue anyone interested in intellectual and social history."

In a similarly glowing review of another of our recent books, On Modern Poetry by Robert Rowland Smith, R.T. Prus of Southeastern Oklahoma State University writes: "[Smith] presents a lucid, delightful approach to reading modern poetry... He brings an intense clarity to the issues, supporting his discussion with close readings of poems by Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Tennyson, Symons, Larkin and Prynne."

Obviously we all thought these we were great books already, but it's always nice when other people think so too. Do check out the links above if you want to find out more about either of these books.

The Greatest Literary Moustaches!

It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set a trend.

Mark Twain

‘There has been nothing as good since’ said Ernest Hemingway about Mark Twain’s legendary book Huckleberry Finn. But, he could just as well have been talking about Twain’s famous moustache.

Mark Twain wasn’t without opinion when it came to facial hair, directing the following vitriol towards the beard: ‘it performs no useful function; it is a nuisance and a discomfort; all nations hate it; all nations persecute it with the razor’. Must have been why he plumped for this rather impressive looking moustache. And with matching eyebrows too.

Read our Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair guide to Mark Twain. It reveals all sorts of fantastic facts about this intriguing writer... did you know that he started smoking at 7 and often smoked 40 cigars a day? Nope, me neither. Pretty impressive shocking.

Rudyard Kipling

‘Being kissed by a man who didn’t wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt’. We couldn't agree more Rudyard Kipling.

This 'tash is so impressive that we've opted for a side portrait shot so you can really see the full depth of this impressive literary bush. Look out for our new book on Rudyard Kipling and Japan - no other leading English literary figure of his day spent so long in that country or wrote so fully about it.

George Orwell

George Orwell said, in his famous 6 Rules for Writing, ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’. It would seem he had the same approach to moustaches. I’m calling this one... modest yet confident.

George Orwell also wrote an essay in the Evening Standard in 1946 about his rules for drinking tea. Whilst not related in any way to moustaches, I still think it deserves a special mention. Orwell employed the essay as a tool to entertain, illuminate and provoke readers as well as help him fashion his distinctive 'literary' voice. George Orwell the Essayist by Peter Marks gives these compelling pieces the critical attention they merit.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What can we say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s moustache? It’s a wonder he had any time to write considering the hours he must have put in taming and trimming this sublime example of facial topiary.  I know what you must be thinking, ‘I WISH I could get my hands on some of his moustache trimmings’. Well, I’m afraid the opportunity has been and passed, with one moustache & ACD fan purchasing his moustache trimmings. They came neatly packaged up in the original envelope they were kept in for so many years with the following inscription: ‘My beloved moustache hairs’. I'm sure the new owner feels the same.

Walt Whitman

Is it a moustache or a beard? Are there side-burns in there? We can't quite figure it out. And that's what makes Walt Whitman's contributions to facial topiary so impressive.

In Whitman’s Queer Children, Catherine Davies looks at 'the anxious relationship between the homosexual and his American home'  in the work of four gay twentieth-century poets - Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill and John Ashbery. Dwelling on the nurturing adaptable heritage of Walt Whitman, she considers Whitman’s renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche sports the unique looking walrus-handlebar moustache. Otherwise known as the moustache that launched a thousand philosophical arguments (and its own facebook page). 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche posits the Übermensch as a goal that humanity can set for itself. Did he set this goal for his own facial hair? There is one thing we can be sure of – he set the philosophical world alight with this revolutionary 'tash.

Still a bit confused? Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed will tell you everything you need to know.

Edgar Allen Poe

It's fair to say that EAP employed his moustache in a rather gothic manner. An article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1878 reveals that 'He wore a dark mustache, scrupulously kept, but not entirely concealing a slightly contracted expression of the mouth and an occasional twitching of the upper lip, resembling a sneer. This sneer, indeed, was easily excited — a motion of the lip, scarcely perceptible, and yet intensely expressive. There was in it nothing of ill-nature, but much of sarcasm … '

So impressive was his moustache that is spawned this imaginative looking t-shirt. If anyone could let me know where to buy it, I’d really appreciate it.

An inescapable black pit, an innocent buried alive, and the deranged hallucinations of a murderer all haunt Tales of Mystery and Imagination - a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's most celebrated chilling stories.

Ernest Hemingway

All hail Ernest Hemingway's contribution to the moustache world! We know that he loved hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, deep-sea fishing in Florida and this is the perfect moustache to match. Hemingway married four times, often falling for one woman while still married to another. With this dashing moustache I think we can see why he was so irresistible to women.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez once characterised common European perceptions of Latin America as ‘a man with a moustache and a guitar and a revolver’. He might have kept the moustache, but he certainly broke other pre-existing stereotypes by putting Latin American writing on the literary map.

If a moustache could ever be described as ‘friendly’ then this is certainly it. You can find out more about this compelling man by reading our biography by Gerald Martin and literary guide to Love in the Time of Cholera by Tom Fahy.

Stefan Zweig

Born in Vienna in 1881, Stefan Zweig was one of the most respected authors of his time. And not just for his epic looking moustache. The Economist hailed him as a 'Secret Superstar' and the New Yorker called him an 'Escape Artist' earlier this year.

Foreseeing Nazi Germany's domination of Europe, Zweig and his wife left Austria in 1933. Despairing at Europe's future and feeling increasingly isolated, they committed suicide together in 1942. As Zweig's correspondence all but ceased with the outbreak of World War II, little is known about his final years. Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters, edited by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall, reproduces personal letters written by the couple during this time and creates a fascinating picture of the last years of this famed author, cast adrift by the rise of Nazism and enforced exile.

Joseph Conrad

Some critics have commented that Joseph Conrad was known for his pessimistic writing style and stark presentation of the human condition. I don’t think he helped matters with this harsh looking moustache. There is one thing that the critics certainly agree upon - Heart of Darkness is a landmark text of 20th century literature that continues to resonate to this day. We certainly love it. One of our latest books, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Contemporary Thought by Nidesh Lawtoo brings this book into philosophical dialogue and includes the first publication in English of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, 'The Horror of the West', described by J. Hillis Miller as 'a major essay on Conrad's novel, one of the best ever written'.

That's it for our literary moustache round up! Of course we couldn't include everyone - Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert... the list could go on and on. It would also be impossible to choose a favourite. But we want to hear from you -  who would get your vote for the most impressive literary moustache? Who can't you believe that we have left out? Is there any obscure Russian writer with a more impressive offering than Nietzsche (probably)?  Let us know so we can add it to our literary moustache hall of fame.

In the meantime, good luck to anyone still plugging away at their Movember efforts. The crowd above would be very proud.

Jenny Tighe

Ewan Fernie discusses The Faerie Queen

Ewan Fernie is the editor of our new book Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today's World – a new form of liturgy based on Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queen. In the following extract from the Introduction to the book, Ewan talks about how powerful The Faerie Queen is today, and how Spenser's early modern story can still speak to us if read with imaginative intensity and engagement.

'Spenser was born around 1552, his life contemporaneous with what has been called the Elizabethan settlement. Indeed, he dedicated The Faerie Queene to Elizabeth: ‘To the most high, mightie and magnificent empresse renovvmed for pietie, vertve and all gratiovs government Elizabeth by the grace of God Qveene of England Fravnce and Ireland and of Virginia, Defendovr of the Faith.’ Et cetra, et cetra: the Queen paid him a pension, and some centuries later Karl Marx called him her ‘arse-licking poet’. We might more positively see Spenser as the epic poet of Anglicanism. And if the Church of England is now all too often associated with fetes, conventional weddings and backward sexual politics, under Elizabeth the First it was a new church militant, hard-won and sometimes bloodily maintained. Everything was at stake. Church and state were united in the supremacy of the monarch. Spenser, for his part, believed that under Elizabeth a new form of poetry could be attempted which aimed at nothing less than forging a new mode of human existence. He expressly wrote The Faerie Queene to fashion a new man.

His own life was fomented in violence. Its salient and (at least in recent years) most notorious feature was his involvement in a brutal chapter of English colonialism. He arrived in Dublin in 1580, in the wake of the suppressed Desmond rebellion. Ninety per cent of the male inhabitants of Munster had died and the survivors, Spenser observed, looked like ‘anatomies of death’. And yet, in A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser actually recommended starvation as a way of bringing them to heel more permanently. Nor is his poetry any refuge from such shocking violence. In 1586, Spenser acquired the manor of Kilcoman, former seat of the Desmonds. But by 1598 his Irish enemies had burnt him out and, according to Ben Jonson, he lost an infant son in the blaze. Spenser returned, destitute, to England in 1599. He is buried in Westminster Abbey and his fellow poets paid tributes at his grave.

But if death thereby installed Spenser in England’s Parnassus, his star has somewhat waned in recent years. The Faerie Queene is typically seen as too big, incoherent and remote to be read or taught effectively, and Spenser’s establishment affiliations and Irish record have been major turn-offs. He’s an epitome of vanishing English literature, of literature which is going from courses and becoming a more or less exclusively antiquarian interest.

Yes this poem is still so relevant. Spenser invented his own stanza: it has nine iambic lines which rhyme ababbcbcc, the first eight being pentameters while the final, ninth line is a hexameter. It is intricate and capable of elaborate emblematic effects, which are often exquisitely beautiful but equally extend to impressively ugly moments. And yet, the Spenserian stanza also moves with limpid fluency and authority, partly as it tips from a and b to c and spills into its long last line, which also marks a break and pause before the next stanza. In other words, Spenser’s stanza fuses lyric intensity with mesmerising story-telling momentum. It seems to be discovering its own story as it goes along. For all their seriousness and ambition, Spenser’s lines are at the same time poetry disporting in and as itself. And that makes for an exciting indeterminacy. You’re never really sure what the new life and self Spenser is aiming at is actually going to be like. The Faerie Queene is a truly and profoundly experimental poem. In the end, it does seem to reveal some kind of potential for poetry to remake life.

So this superannuated English poet actually presents the present with a tremendous and exciting aesthetic, ethical, political and religious challenge. And since we wanted to create a challenging rather than a conservative and self-securing liturgy, a questing liturgy, Spenser was a perfect fit.

Allegory has been a particular problem for Spenser in the recent, wilderness years, when, in his own country, his poetry has slipped into all but terminal obscurity – Salley Vickers and Sarah Apetrei testify in this book as to how difficult they found it actually to buy a copy of The Faerie Queene – but even allegory didn’t phase us. We moderns tend to think ourselves too sophisticated for allegory. It’s at the same time too fanciful and too earnest and judgmental, too cut and dried. But Spenser expressly calls his allegory a ‘dark conceit’, a thing shaded in mystery and perhaps irony which veils as much as it reveals. The modern British poet Elizabeth Jennings describes the expressive potential of just such allegorical mysteriousness in ‘The Counterpart’: ‘The intellect no crystal is but swarming/Darkness on darkness’.10 If a formal image, far from being too clear and neat, keeps best faith with such darkness, because it is not excessively realised and so remains permeable to fundamental obscurity and mystery, then there may yet be life – even a life that we neglect to our own impoverishment and peril – in the knight with the symbol on his shield. Allegory, in the end, seemed promising to us because it communicates with mystery; and, given our liturgical purposes, because it is abstract enough to be co-owned by a large group of people – by anybody and everybody willing to go on a quest. Especially because such abstraction in The Faerie Queene is richly communicative with life as we know it. For Spenser’s legend of The Redcrosse Knight is not an escapist fairy tale; it really gets into the vein of things: into sexuality, extending to erotic dreams, infidelity, even the threat of gang rape; into depression (which Spenser calls despair), going so far as an extended representation of suicide, which it later provocatively relates to the temptations of transcendence. So The Faerie Queene seemed to us to offer exciting potential for retelling the story of St George, now, for today’s world. Much of this is to do with ambiguity, but much of it is also due to the mysteriousness of allegory married with a kind of ordinariness.

Allegory in Spenser operates in a flickering, intermittent, multifarious fashion of what is always ultimately a dark conceit, one which is elegantly resonant with and expressive of just such an unsecured and experimental – now anguished, now joyously creative – spirituality as ours might be in our own doubtful, globalised and diverse present.

Spenser’s Redcrosse is pellucidly etched as the Redcrosse Knight or Holiness. But he is a Christian, hopefully fighting his own demons; he is equally an insufficiently mortified man under the sign of the cross which may be morbidly scored into his very breast; a sinner whose every breath and deed stains him further with sin. He is also a gallant knight in the service of the Faerie Queene; and he is the (renegade) lover of the semi-divine Una and the (renegade) lover of the very profane Duessa. And he is St George! an avatar of specifically English saintliness; and he is a crusader. And even the returned Christ who defeats Satan and regains paradise. He is various as any human person in short, and the various things he is arise from the number of different quests he is embarked on. And these are but aspects of or turns within the ONE quest which is the deeper, hungry thing that drives him. Because sometimes he is looking for a woman. But for love or for sex? The sacred Una or the profane Duessa? And then, suddenly, all the life force just drains out of him or turns against itself. Is it that, in his restlessness, he was really always just looking for death? Or then again is death just the necessary door to transcendence, with the New Jerusalem gleaming in its aperture? Or is it finally some more wordly, some specifically English apotheosis that Redcrosse is after? We find out as we go and the answers are contradictory and unexpected and, as a result, engaging to the extent that the experience of the quest may provoke us into our own analogous, necessarily treacherous search for meaning and value.

What I have been trying to do in the introduction to this book is convey something of the richly ambiguous material Spenser contributed to our project of creating a new poetic liturgy for St George’s Day, and how powerfully his early modern story can still speak to us, if we read it with sufficient imaginative intensity and engagement.  Spenser’s poem reconceives the meaning and purpose of the red cross and St George in a questing narrative where a repentant Redcrosse only realises, and in a sense becomes, England’s patron saint, after a whole series of errors and failures of a notably unheroic character.'

- by Ewan Fernie, editor of Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today's World.

On the evening of Saturday the 17th of November the RSC will be performing Redcrosse at Coventry Cathedral - the new poetic liturgy talked about above which Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare Institute) wrote with the major poets Jo Shapcott, Michael Symmons Roberts and Andrew Motion, and the theologian Andrew Shanks, as part of a multi-grant-winning Religion and Society project. You can find out more here or visit the website to buy tickets here. We will also be launching the book after this performance and you are invited! Click on the image below to view the invitation.