Express
Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor:
In his review of Eliot Weinberger’s Oranges and Peanuts For Sale (September 2009), Michael Sandlin describes Vicente Huidobro, George Oppen and Gu Cheng as “obscure long-deceased poets.” That Sandlin finds it problematic for a writer to devote attention to poets who have the misfortune to be “obscure” and “long-deceased” is lamentable, but what’s worse is the gross inaccuracy of his characterizations. Gu Cheng died in 1993 (at the age of 37); a collection of his work in English was brought out in 1995 by George Braziller, one of the great names in U.S. publishing. As for Huidobro (d. 1948) and Oppen (d. 1984), they may be shamefully “long-deceased,” at least in Sandlin’s truncated time-frame, but anyone with even a superficial knowledge of 20th-century poetry should instantly recognize their names. Huidobro was a crucial figure in the modernist avant-garde of the teens and twenties, in Paris and his native Chile; Oppen was a central member of the Objectivists, one of the most influential movements in American poetry. For what it’s worth, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Last year New Directions published a new 425-page edition of his collected poems. Michael Sandlin might want to take a look at it.
—Raphael Rubinstein
Contributor
Raphael RubinsteinRaphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Remembering Lewis Warsh, a Planter of Poets
By Don YortyMARCH 2021 | Poetry
Don Yorty is the author of A Few Swimmers Appear, Poet Laundromat, Spring Sonnets, and What Night Forgets; his blog, an archive of current art, his own writing, and work of other poets, can be found at: donyorty.com.
Editor’s Note
By Paul MattickJULY/AUG 2023 | Field Notes
Despite constant assurances from officials that the economy is going just great, signs of trouble abound. To take a random sampling: it was just estimated that some 160,000 people are about to be evicted from their apartments in New York; defaults on junk bonds—which provide critical financing for many companies—are surging above 2021 and 2022 levels in response to rising interest rates; New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and other business centers are facing a likely collapse of the commercial real estate market, imperiling mortgage-holding regional banks while destroying local economies dependent on downtowns filled with office workers, many of whom are now working from home or recently fired; arcane indicators like the market for RVs, sensitive to downturns as an expensive discretionary purchase, are falling as before earlier recessions; while unemployment is rising significantly in over a dozen states. And that’s just the United States.
Editor’s Note
By Will ChancellorFEB 2021 | Fiction
This month we’re pleased to publish an excerpt from Vesna Maric’s The President Shop. The novel’s backdrop is an allegorical country, The Nation, steeped in tyranny, but the focus is on the human rather than the trappings of propaganda. I was struck by the young woman, Mona, decoding the timelessness that’s always present, even as we pass through moments that are consciously historic. “Symbology,” by Betsy M. Narváez, abounds in images, meanings, dreams, and visions. Here, there’s no official, waking world, little external at all. Narváez gives us resonant moments over coffee of a mother and a daughter unpuzzling the language of dreams. We’re also tremendously fortunate to have Maisy Card stepping in as co-editor of the fiction section of the Brooklyn Rail. Her debut novel, These Ghosts are Family, masterfully courses through the history of a family while communicating the texture and hunger of life as it was lived.
No Politics But Class Politics: A Review
By Adam Theron-Lee RenschMAY 2023 | Field Notes
In his recent book, Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond writes, “Poverty might consume your life, but it’s rarely embraced as an identity. It’s more socially acceptable today to disclose a mental illness than to tell someone you’re broke.” The striking thing about this statement is the degree to which it is both completely true and totally wrong.
