James Wagner (born 1969) is an American poet. The poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney wrote that the poems in his first collection, the false sun recordings, "form a semi-coherent push-me/pull-you-type dialogue about stability and wholeness, by turns humorous... and serious.[1] In recent works such as The Idiocy and Query/Xombies, Wagner focuses on the searching qualities of human existence, whether through logical argument (and its attendant pitfalls), or through the medium of the search engine, nominally the modern oracle. His third and most recent collection of poetry, Thrown, poems to paintings by Bracha L. Ettinger, was cited by poet Eileen Tabios for its imaginative intensity, ambition and lyrical prowess.[2]
The quality of Wagner’s own poetry reflect the profound cognitive turn caused by homophonic translations, and reflect Wagner’s translinguistic sensibility—his way of thinking his own language from the vantage point of other languages and other cultures. Thus Wagner’s writing often seems to call us—and demands our attention—from a region close, but not too familiar, a region dislocated in time and languages—a region of radical dislocation.[5]
Further, the poet and critic Rachel Galvin[6] has written: “Wagner’s Trilce stakes out its ludic freedom somewhat in the spirit of Vallejo and emphasizes above all its indifference to questions of “fidelity” in translation.”[7] And Michael Smith (poet) and Valentino Gianuzzi,[8] editors and translators of a 2012 edition of Vallejo's poems, call Wagner's Trilce, "the latest homage to Vallejo’s most difficult book."[9]
The poet and critic Laura Sims[10] has written of his first book, the false sun recordings:
James Wagner’s debut collection strikes the reader instantly as a highly musical, humorous and playful chaos …This varied blend of elements supports the inquiry Wagner conducts, via poetry, into how language relates (and does not relate) to meaning and human existence. He prefaces his entire collection, in fact, with a quote from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, ‘Can I say ‘bububu’ and mean ‘If it doesn’t rain I shall go for a walk’?,’ which sets the stage perfectly. Instead of feeding us an easy answer, Wagner grapples in plain sight with this and other questions. We, in turn, are inspired to struggle with the ambiguities ourselves, and this greatly enriches our reading experience.[11]
In addition, Wagner has written two books of stories, Work Book and Geisttraum—Tales from the Germans, which focuses on a rural community in Wisconsin haunted, in part, by a priest. The poet and critic Vanessa Place has said of Geisttraum: “Language as solid and fearsome as the religious American Middle West: plain, transparent and similarly constituent of its own allegorical surface. A sussurating surface that threatens always to slip under itself and away.”[12]
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. He was always a step ahead of literary currents, and each of his books was distinct from the others, and, in its own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante". The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, a leading authority on world literature, called Vallejo "the greatest twentieth-century poet in any language." He was a member of the intellectual community called North Group formed in the Peruvian north coastal city of Trujillo.
"The British Poetry Revival" is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry. The poets included an older generation - Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire, Tom Raworth, Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, Andrew Crozier, Lee Harwood, Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair—and a younger generation: Paul Buck, Bill Griffiths, John Hall, John James, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Ulli Freer, Ken Edwards, Robert Gavin Hampson, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke, Clive Fencott, Maggie O'Sullivan, Cris Cheek, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley.
Roy Fisher was an English poet and jazz pianist. His poetry shows an openness to both European and American modernist influences, while remaining grounded in the experience of living in the English Midlands. Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war British poetry. He has been admired by poets and critics as diverse as Donald Davie, Eric Mottram, Marjorie Perloff, and Sean O’Brien.
Gerard Joseph Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, actor, curator and archivist.
Clayton Eshleman was an American poet, translator, and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets (twice), a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors.
Peter Robinson is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire.
Pamela Jane Barclay Brown is an Australian poet.
Kent Johnson is an American poet, translator, critic, and anthologist. His work, much of it meta-fictional and/or satirical in approach, has provoked a notable measure of controversy and debate within English-language poetry circles.
Oliverio Girondo was an Argentine poet. He was born in Buenos Aires to a relatively wealthy family, enabling him from a young age to travel to Europe, where he studied in both Paris and England. He is perhaps most famous for his participation in the magazines, which ushered in the arrival of ultraism, the first of the vanguardist movements to settle in Argentina.
Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Salamandrine: 8 gothics (2013) and Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007), both from Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as Percussion Grenade (2012), Flet (2007), The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004), and The Red Bird (2001), the latter four published by Fence Books. Her reviews appear at The Constant Critic and elsewhere, and her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Poetry magazine, Octopus Magazine,GultCult, and Tarpaulin Sky, among many other places. Along with her husband Johannes Goransson, she is the founder of Action Books which has published a number of contemporary authors including Lara Glenum, Tao Lin, Arielle Greenburg, and Hiromi Itō. She recently added to The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing by &NOW Books, which released in May 2013. She graduated from Harvard College as well as MPhil, Oxford University; MFA University of Iowa Writers Workshop
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is an Israeli-born French and Israeli artist, painter and writer, visual analyst, psychoanalyst and philosopher, living between Paris and Tel Aviv and considered as major French feminist theorist and artist. Ettinger is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and at GCAS, Dublin.
James Galvin is the author of seven volumes of poetry, and two novels. He teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa.
Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest Thomson was a poet and a critical theorist brought up in Scotland. Her 1978 critical study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was reissued in 2016.
Rebecca Seiferle is an American poet.
Eurydice was a character in Greek mythology and the wife of Orpheus, who tried to bring her back from the dead with his enchanting music.
Peter Boyle, is an Australian poet and translator. Peter lived in Mosman, Sydney with his family, he is the second of 9 children. 7 boys and 2 girls.
Tony Lopez is an English poet who first began to be published in the 1970s. His writing was at once recognised for its attention to language, and for his ability to compose a coherent book, rather than a number of poems accidentally printed together. He is best known for his book False Memory, first published in the United States and much anthologised.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Susan Connolly is an Irish poet.
Colin Simms is a British biologist, curator and poet.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
