Video Not Meant as Poems October 05, 2021 Rain in Plural聽is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by聽The Rumpus聽as 鈥渁 master of musicality and enlightening allusions.鈥� Read More
Interview Shelley Frisch on the work (and play) of translation September 30, 2021 Award-winning translator Shelley Frisch shares her thoughts about the principles that guide her work, rituals that she turns to as she settles in with a work, and what she enjoys most about translating texts. Read More
Essay The soft pipes September 16, 2021 As a philosopher who writes about love, I am sometimes asked what I love. I could answer in particulars: specific people, places, and objects. Read More
Essay French flowers in an English garden July 23, 2021 A summer walk through the garden of the English language reveals it sporting many a foreign flower. English has borrowed more words from French, in particular, than from any other modern foreign language. Read More
Podcast 脡migr茅s: French Words That Turned English July 16, 2021 Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared. Read More
Essay A look inside Eva Palmer Sikelianos June 15, 2021 I was myself introduced to Eva Palmer Sikelianos while leafing through books and magazines about Greece in my parents鈥� library in the 1960s and 1970s. Read More
Essay Ivor Gurney: Writing in lockdown for fifteen years June 11, 2021 Contrary, perhaps, to expectation, few of us have produced great volumes of work in lockdown. Whilst many academics might previously have craved a moment out of time, for the world to stop and for them to have time to think, it doesn鈥檛 seem to have prompted the hoped-for avalanche of creativity. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Eva Palmer Sikelianos June 08, 2021 Listen to an audio sample from Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, a new book about the American actor, director, composer, and weaver best known for reviving the Delphic Festivals. Read More
Podcast After Callimachus: Poems May 19, 2021 Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. Read More
Podcast Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton April 27, 2021 John Milton (1608鈥�1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both聽Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Read More
Essay 鈥淪ay it came from Billie鈥� April 26, 2021 Anyone who鈥檚 ever seen Sugar 鈥淜ane鈥� Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe)鈥攄ressed in a form-fitting black skirt, frilly overcoat, and flapper hat, carrying a fiddle in one hand and a small, boxy suitcase in the other鈥攎aking her grand entrance at the Chicago train station in Billy Wilder鈥檚 Some Like It Hot (1959) likely still has a relatively sharp memory of it intact. Read More
Essay The paradoxical pleasures of reading literature April 21, 2021 Reading literature is a deeply dialectical experience, one that offers a variety of paradoxical pleasures. One of the most salient of these is that in reading well we both submit to the text and resist it. Read More
Essay Crossing Medieval borders: Chaucer and Europe April 20, 2021 At the moment, almost no one is crossing borders. We aren鈥檛 allowed to travel, and many of us are separated from family, missing our international colleagues, and wishing we could go on holiday. Read More
Video After Callimachus Readings by Stephanie Burt April 19, 2021 Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. Read More
Essay To discover that which was believed lost April 13, 2021 I thought it was gone. I thought it had left me or I had left it somewhere in the street, in a cabinet, inside the grocery store, at the gas station. The arguments were depleting, had become idiotic, fantasy. Read More
