Genres
From the Editors' Introduction—
In 1972 CR published an issue with a shiny silver cover that reads “26 ANNIVERSARY.” This might seem eccentric at first, but anyone who has been a part of CR can surmise what happened: they planned a twenty-fifth anniversary issue but didn’t get it out in time. Perpetually underfunded and staffed entirely by overworked graduate students, it’s remarkable that CR even survived to publish issue number 3 of volume 24 as the twenty-sixth anniversary issue in 1972. (It’ s a great issue, by the way.) Characteristic, though, is the “Oh, fuck it” attitude that led the editors to just replace the “25” with “26” on the cover.
It’ s the end of 2021 as we write this introduction, seventy-five years since the first issue of CR in 1946, and this anthology of the last twenty-five years of CR’s life is going to come out in 2022. Even though 2020 was virtually eliminated because of COVID-19, we won’ t make any excuses: we’ re roundly in CR’s tradition of being late. Not that we didn’t start early enough: we began thinking about and planning this anniversary years in advance, including soliciting memorial essays from former editors and staff, now all over the world in all kinds of jobs and circumstances. (These essays can be found at chicagoreview.org.) Initially we had grand ambitions: an anthology book of a few hundred pages at least, covering the journal’ s seventy-five-year history. But, as is often the case with CR, grand ambitions had to give way to grim realities….
The anthology you hold in your hands can’ t but acknowledge CR’s past as an acoustic backdrop against which the voices of these last twenty-five years produce a sometimes dissonant chorus. Rather than shy away from it, we have pursued such dissonance in the selection and curation of these texts—we might even say that such a “dissonant chorus” is the most correct figure for CR’s sensibility, both then and now, in different ways. We have tried to provide as extensive a range of authors as the journal’ s recent history allows, aiming to amplify the contrasts in juxtapositions that even as we write this introduction still surprise us…
Table of Contents—
Srikanth Reddy, Foreword
The Editors, Introduction
Nathaniel Mackey, Song of the Andoumboulou: 31
Lisa Robertson, Palinodes
Edward Dorn, Radicals on the Great Plain
Ed Roberson, Fourth of July
Alfred Starr Hamilton, Woodcut
Tadeusz Różewicz (trans. Barbara Plebanek & Tony Howard), from Recycling
Brian Evenson, The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette
Denise Newman, from The Redesignation of Paradise
Wong May, You Would Say So
Friederike Mayröcker (trans. Donna Stonecipher), from Études
Pamela Lu, Intermusement 6
Eley Williams, Cuvier’s Feather
Lisa Jarnot, Every Body’s Bacon
A. R. Ammons, Here It Is May
W. S. Graham, [Let Us Say We Almost See Ourselves]; [There are Various Ways to Try to Speak]; [It Is Time to Go. The Harbour]; [The Truth is There is Nothing Here]
Tomaž Šalamun (trans. Michael Thomas Taren & the author), Yahweh Swallowed Three Letters, Between I and I and E
Robert Walser (trans. Susan Bernofsky), from The Robber
Ed Roberson, Tracks
C. S. Giscombe, from Camptown
Durs Grünbein (trans. Susan Bernofsky), [Later Then It Was the Streak of Luminous]
Tom Raworth, [Collages for Marseilles]
Stan Brakhage, Geometric versus Meat-Ineffable
xTx, The Baby
Adam Zagajewski (trans. Clare Cavanagh), Dead Sparrow
William Fuller, OK Jazz Funeral Services
Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (trans. John Burns), Infrarealist Manifesto
Rosa Alcalá, Offering
Rae Armantrout, Twizzle
Barbara Guest, Sensitivity
Helen DeWitt, Brutto
J. H. Prynne, Mental Ears and Poetic Work
Kent Johnson, Review of J. H. Prynne, To Pollen
No Manifesto
Harry Mathews, Journeys to Six Lands
Christopher Middleton, A Feuilleton: Reinventing the Madeleine?
Fanny Howe, [Lambs are lower to the ground]
Sara Nicholson, Arbor Vitae
Haki R. Madhubuti, Claiming Language, Claiming Art
Wisława Szymborska (trans. Joanna Trzeciak), In Abundance
Simone White, The First Day
avery r. young, from Skyscraper(s) & Erything
Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, Numbers Trouble
Jennifer Ashton, The Numbers Trouble with “Numbers Trouble”
Rae Armantrout, Up to Speed
Tyrone Williams, There is a Misery So Great it Over-
Carl Phillips, Roses
Massimo Gezzi (trans. Chris Glomski), Sundials
Juliana Spahr, We
Sterling Plumpp, Ritual
Nathaniel Mackey, from Atet A.D.
Tom Pickard, Self Abstracting Poem
Barbara Guest, Configuration
Susan Howe, Echolalia in Mrs. Piper
Dawn Lundy Martin, My Father’s Only Son
Ronald Johnson, Beam 1
C. D. Wright, from Rising, Falling, Hovering
Tom Raworth, Untitled
Roberto Bolaño (trans. John Burns), Leave It All, Once More
Amiri Baraka, Social Change & Poetic Tradition
Keston Sutherland, Hot White Andy
Garielle Lutz, The Driving Dress
John Ashbery, Sleeper Wedding
Ed Roberson, Putting Lyric to “All Blues”
Aditi Machado, Concerning Matters Culinary
Brian Blanchfield, Afterword