In his survey of the rise of the American university and its relationship to the simultaneous development of literary criticism and theory, Professing Literature, Gerald Graff recounts an incident involving literary critic I. A. Richards’ attempt to "demonstrate" to an English literature class the pedagogical power of "practical criticism," his applied variation on New Criticism. […]

Red Morning Press (ISBN # 0-9764439-1-0); 57 pages. $12.00.         One of the greatest pleasures in poetry is when a poet can, within a single volume, emply a broad range of forms, and do it well. Such is Jen Tynes’s accomplishment in The End of Rude Handles, a book-length poem, which is graciously divided into […]

            Immense jostling in East Fourteenth Street to be traversed, something in the mode of jackhammers, truck horns, people skipping past automobiles, to enter the high cool interior of the post office, but changed that day because it was the first day of the most recent rise in postage rates, and the place was in complete […]

“a naked spectacle laid bare” Joseph Guglielmi Rough colors — nauseating rhythms. These sounds and visions. A passage in blue light toward a wall. Something unbearable. Something fixed and bursting — like shrapnel — or water sprayed over skin. Remainders of the sun in cords — against coterminous surfaces. I wait out boredom as I […]

Lyrical Interference, essays by Norman Finkelstein Spuyten Duyvil  (ISBN# 0-9720662-2-5); 145 pages. $12.00.      Let’s talk about voice, a redundant activity, perhaps, but since we are on the page or, more properly on the screen, the task takes on a different dimension. The critic’s voice and the poet’s are by nature distinct. Tone, texture, and analysis […]

Depth Theology, poems by Peter O’Leary. University of Georgia Press (ISBN# 0-8203280-6-5); 72pages. $16.95.           In the exhaustive Notes and Acknowledgements of this volume, Peter O’Leary instructs that his crib from Jung’s colleague Eugen Bleuler’s term "depth psychology" is venting its purposes towards an altogether different league of meanings: "I take depth theology, then, to be […]

Radi Os, by Ronald Johnson Flood Editions \ 107pp. \ $14.95 \ 0-9746902-4-4      The reissue of Ronald Johnson’s 1976 volume Radi Os is a partial event and a full accomplishment. Not so much based on the first four books of Paradise Lost as a radical excision of Milton’s original text, it is part of its […]

The copyright page of my new book from the UK states, “the right of Michael Heller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him.” I’m afraid those words are not exactly true. Not only did I not assert anything, neither the name “Michael Heller” nor the words “right” and […]

Budapest Postcard 4/Berwyn Postscript Pathopatridalgia Homesickness hit me on April 26 around 8.30 in the morning. It emerged from my sinus cavity & my salivary glands, tasting like a blend of minerals & Novocain. Thoughts that moments ago coursed on what felt like normal trajectories suddenly felt tethered, held to some invisible center in my […]