Nearly three months after Colin Asher’s biography of Nelson Algren was published, and just in time for readers to take a break from serious books as they head off on vacation to escape the summer heat, our dearly beloved newspaper of record has deigned to take notice of Never a Lovely So Real. But let’s put that aside because Susan Jacoby’s review, which will appear Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times Book Review, is not only honest, clear, and well reported, it sets a judicious standard. Which gives it credibility.
Archives for June 2019
We’re Listening to Some Cool Music
This is a recording of the WHRB radio program JAZZ SPECTRUM broadcast on April 25, 1995. Olivia Herman was the deejay.
Strictly Unpaid Advertising
Your humble blogger has published a new collection of poems. Moloko will bring it out in a bilingual English-German edition in Germany. In the meantime, however, an American edition is now available without the translations but with a complement of images. ‘All That Would Ever After Not Be Said’ is composed of forty-two deformed sonnets of mine and forty-two collages by the late Norman O. Mustill.
From Mayor to Nightmare
!['Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare' by Heathcote Williams [Public Reading Rooms, 2016]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Brexit-Boris-cover351-200x200.jpg)
‘The Dark Side of Boris Johnson’: Now that he is on his way to becoming the new Prime Minister of the U.K., the staff believes this blogpost of Aug. 24, 2016 is worth reposting: Back in April, before the Brexit vote [on June 23, 2016], Heathcote Williams wrote a merciless pamphlet, subtitled “A Study in Depravity,” about the most notorious cheerleader for the British exit from the European Union.
Alchemical Poetry
LET US WRITE poems easy to read / simple to understand— / not the kind of thing / that Donne or Milton / wrote, nor the Bard’s / still greater brand, / the kind of thing / we make for children / who don’t know how / to read, for grownups / who forgot or never / learned to understand— / for the dead, perhaps, / to hear the damned.
Poems Midwifed by Cold Turkey Press
“an unknown power / the glass bell of midnight / neither sends nor tracks / whatever the hour / the quivering eye / everything human / the nearness of clouds / bright sun in blue sky” — J.H.
“Pay no heed to society. Wear the mask / of the beast over your animal face. / … Breathe through the nostrils of the dead / and witness how the evening mountains / devour the entrails of the sky.” — M.R.
Folio designed by Gerard Bellaart, with detail of a painting by Constable.