System Crashing Fidelity Upholder

In his thoughtful personal-reminiscence-cum-review for Underground Book Club, Michael Bryson praises Zachariah Wells's new essay collection Career Limiting Moves all the while clarifying certain misconceptions about its author: 

I have heard him called an asshole. I've heard him called right wing. I've heard him called a misogynist. In the book he notes he's been claimed and rejected by both the populists and the elites. In truth, he has always been what his letter to TDR in 2002 perhaps should have made clear: a jury of one. An iconoclast. One who rejects systems. One who seeks a genuine, unpredictable deep connection with the wildness that is existence and also, therefore, literature [...] He praises poems that press against the outer boundaries. He praises poems that pressure language until it reveals its limit. Then he asks it to go further.

For an example of Zach at his thought-provoking, counter-intuitive, and polemical best, we recommend checking out this week's #BITSblog post, in which he grapples with Goran Simić's From Sarajevo With Sorrow and the importance of journalistic fidelity when translating the poetry of witness. 

The Danforth Review interviews Douglas Glover

I must start with, what's up with the title?

The title of the book is also the title of one of the essays which is about writing sentences, especially paying attention to verbs.

I found a while ago that if I could circle all the instances of the verb to be on a page of student writing and connect them up in a spider diagram (copula spiders), then I could teach the student something concrete about improving the prose by showing him how to rewrite some of those sentences using active, interesting verbs.

I quote from some of letters to students (acerbic, comic). I think I actually manage to make writing sentences sound exciting.


For the rest of the interview, please go here.