RonSlate.com

on Mute Objects of Expression by Francis Ponge, tr. by Lee Fahnestock (Archipelago Books)

Ron Slate — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:08:22 -0700

The first official act of the German occupiers of France in 1940 was to move French time up by an hour to synchronize with Berlin time. My mother still remembers the sinister dark mornings of that first winter. The familiar warped by the unopposed unfamiliar, the ordinary made bizarre, the sense of feeling at home blown away.

on The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health, by Nena Baker (North Point Press)

Ron Slate — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:59:04 -0700

On August 15, the New York Times ran an AP wire story reporting that the FDA has reaffirmed its contention that “the trace amounts of bisphenol A that leach out of food containers were not a threat to infants or adults.” Had I not just completed my reading of Nena Baker’s new book, the broad

on The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões, tr. by Landeg White (Princeton University Press)

Ron Slate — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:07:46 -0700

In “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” William Wordsworth honored the great practitioners of the form: “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody / Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound; / a thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; / with it Camöens soothed an exile’s grief …” Then he added Dante, Spenser and Milton.

on Minding the Store: Great Writing About Business, edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge (The New Press)

Ron Slate — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:36:12 -0700

In 2000, The Institute of Economic Affairs, a British think tank of free-marketeers, published "The Representation of Business in English Literature," a paper covering literature from the eighteenth century to the present. The final chapter by Dr.

on Clear All the Rest of the Way, poems by Warren Woessner (The Backwaters Press)

Ron Slate — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:27:23 -0700

One of the occupational hazards of the poet is that even as one expresses with candor the feelings that inspire the poems, one’s language may begin to lag behind. Aging and the settled life seem to exact a price. The courage of one’s emotions stays potent but draws a diminishing energy from the words chosen to give those emotions shape.

on Intimacies, by Leo Bersani & Adam Phillips (University of Chicago Press)

Ron Slate — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:25:04 -0700

In Intimacies, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips argue for our complicity against what perhaps most of us think of as gratifying forms of affection.

on Why Poetry Matters, by Jay Parini (Yale University Press)

Ron Slate — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:18:35 -0700

“I would say it is not our business to defend poetry,” wrote Robert Francis, “but the business of poetry to defend us.” He had been referring to a poet who “defended poetry as he would have defended womanhood on the highway at night … I would say that a poem worth defending needs no defense and a poem needing defense is not worth defending.” I think of Francis’ remarks, quoted here

on Woman of Rome, a life of Elsa Morante, by Lily Tuck (HarperCollins)

Ron Slate — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:35:18 -0700

The novels of Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia rest side by side on the shelf of my local library. Moravia’s books are more numerous (he wrote more than 30 novels); Morante’s are thicker (she wrote four). Neither author is seeing much action. Moravia regarded his wife Elsa as the greatest novelist of their generation, and many Italian readers still agree with him.

on Theories of Falling, poems by Sandra Beasley (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

Ron Slate — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:52:04 -0700

“What we call Life is the scattered attempt to get even with those who ‘misunderstood’ us in childhood,” scribbled Ned Rorem in his diary, published as An Absolute Gift.

on Posthumous Keats, a “personal biography” by Stanley Plumly (Norton)

Ron Slate — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:12:56 -0700

“Every modern poet is obliged to have a view of Keats, as if he were part of the competition,” Clive James proclaims. Although he doesn't give us a clear reason as to why this is so, the assessment sticks.

on Metropolitan Tang, poems by Linda Bamber (Black Sparrow/David R. Godine)

Ron Slate — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:15:33 -0700

There are many attractive qualities in Linda Bamber’s first book of poems, Metropolitan Tang: conversational brio, a feel for the times, a willingness to follow her own misdirections, a raconteur’s inbred sense of timing.

on Senselessness, a novel by Horacio Castellanos Moya, tr. by Katherine Silver (New Directions)

Ron Slate — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:14:02 -0700

An unnamed writer comes to an unnamed Central American country to copyedit the oral testimonies of Indians who had witnessed atrocities committed by the military.

on A Scholar’s Tale, a memoir by Geoffrey Hartman (Fordham Univ. Press)

Ron Slate — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:05:18 -0700

The Wall Street Journal recently published Joseph Rago’s op-ed piece on Priya Venkatesan, a lecturer in English composition at Dartmouth who has “threatened to sue her students because, she claims, their ‘anti-intellectualism’ violated her civil rights … She maintains that some

On A Day Like This, a novel by Peter Stamm, tr. by Michael Hofmann (Other Press)

Ron Slate — Sun, 11 May 2008 09:09:02 -0700

The protagonist of Peter Stamm’s fifth novel, On A Day Like This, is a forty-year old Swiss named Andreas who lives alone in Paris, teaches German at a suburban high school, and carries on a series of dispassionate affairs with women.

on Peace, a novel by Richard Bausch (Knopf)

Ron Slate — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:13:27 -0700

My father served in the Army Air Force as a B-17 ball-turret gunner, flying out of the airbase at Foggia, Italy, 50 miles northeast of Naples. The city had been taken by the Allies after the landing at Salerno in September 1943. There were 8,000 Allied casualties on the beach. He tells this story.

on Selected Poems: 1970-2005, by Floyd Skloot (Tupelo Press)

Ron Slate — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:29:13 -0700

Through a stroke of good fortune, I was in Portland, Oregon on April 20 when Paulann Petersen hosted an event to celebrate the publication of Floyd Skloot’s Selected Poems.

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow (Pantheon)

Ron Slate — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:34:02 -0700

My business partner knows a man who made a pre-season $150 bet that the New England Patriots would go undefeated right through the Superbowl. I believe the odds were 40,000 to 1. The Pats won every regular season and playoff game; if they win the Superbowl, the man takes away $6,000,000. Then, the man received a call from the president of the casino. The offer: $2,000,000 to cancel the bet.

on The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir by Sarah Manguso (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Ron Slate — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:51:37 -0700

As a Harvard undergraduate in 1995, Sarah Manguso contracted a neurological disease called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy or CDIF, though her illness was initially misdiagnosed. “My disease has two steps,” she writes. “The immune system secretes antibodies into the blood. Then the blood delivers the antibodies to the peripheral neurons.

on The Importance of Music to Girls, a memoir by Lavinia Greenlaw (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Ron Slate — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:17:38 -0700

I enrolled in ROTC in September, 1968, but I don’t remember why, or what it felt like to make that decision. All I can dredge up are scattered images. But the story is notorious among my family and friends who retell it, adding nuances and imputations along the way. Their narrative constitutes my memory.

Poet’s Bookshelf II (Barnwood Press), The Music Lover’s Anthology (Persea Books), and Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath Press)

Ron Slate — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:37:19 -0700

Poets Bookshelf II: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art, edited by Peter Davis and Tom Koontz (Barnwood Press)