Abigail Lang’s La conversation transatlantique: Les échanges franco-américains en poésie depuis 1968 [Transatlantic Conversation: Franco-American Exchanges in Poetry Since 1968] is a book that needed to be written. Anyone reading and studying French and/or American poetry of the mid- to late twentieth century was keenly aware of the fruitfulness of the exchanges between French and American poets. This book archives, records, and documents the challenging theoretical, national, and literary questions that both French and American poetries of this period address. Lang’s (...) book is composed of an approximately thirty-page introduction, followed by chapters dedicated to Objectivist poetry, the “community of poets,” and... (shrink)

The word “prolific” does not suffice when describing the work of Jacques Roubaud. Born in 1932, he is the author of numerous scholarly articles and a three-book series of mysteries with a female protagonist, Hortense. He has written other novels (Nous, les moins-que-rien, fils ainés de personne, multiroman [2006] and La Dernière balle perdue [1997]), books of poetry and children’s poetry, an anthology of troubadorian poetry, a collection of French sonnets from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a philosophical treatise, books (...) on poetics (La vieillesse d’Alexandre [1978], Poésie, etcetera, ménage [1995]), as well as a seven-volume (and “six-branch”) “récit autobiographique,” which David Bellos has compared to .. (shrink)

When poetry and photography begin a discussion, even a polite one, what role does the reader/viewer play? Does he or she take the event into account, is the discussion read or watched, or is it the interactivity between the two media that draws attention? Taking the event into account might be the only honest choice when, paradoxically, the reader’s eyes are at first listening to the words that the mind is configuring based on the visual form of the letters appearing (...) on the page and then attempting to link those images to the photos. The least that can be asked of readers is to keep an open mind when opening La Lecture by Jan Baetens and Milan Chlumsky.Baetens and Chlumsky address two paintings by Henri... (shrink)