Chicago Review articles

Recent articles from Chicago Review

Stephen Rodefer's position.
January 1, 2009... Stephen Rodefer's poetry is a digest of the New American poetry and its chosen precursors. Olson and Villon, Ginsberg and Catullus, O'Hara and Baudelaire--Rodefer approaches them as colleagues, with envy and admiration. He disorders their experiments and appropriates their voices to fashion...

An interview with Stephen Rodefer: you were a student of Charles Olson's in the mid-1960s at SUNY, Buffalo. What was that like?(Interview)
January 1, 2009... Well, at the start it was altogether uncertain. I mean, at registration in the gym in the fall of '63, I didn't exactly know what to sign up for as an elective. Someone next to me said, "Myth and Literature, that guy's a poet." Well, I'd never heard of him, but I liked poets, especially...

Life in Rodefer.(Stephen Rodefer)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2009... "We all await an idiot's judgment." --Stephen Rodefer "What we need more than critics" Rodefer wrote in 1986, "is historians." The line is from one of Rodefer s few published essays in prose, but it might easily be taken for one of the many opinions in prose moments scattered...

"I lie in dawn's great faculty": Stephen Rodefer's translation of Francois Villon.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2009... First, Villon, for those who don't remember. One long poem, one only longish, and a handful of ballades, written in Middle French around 1460. "Thief, murderer, pander, bully to a whore, he is honored for a few score pages of unimaginative sincerity" in the words of a young Ezra Pound, who...

Prologue to language doubling.(Essay)
January 1, 2009... Boris Pasternak (older than Mayakovsky and alive after the Allen anthology) speaks somewhere of the necessity for writers to disregard the approval of their admirers, lest their writing be tempted to repeat itself. He speaks of the urge for perfection in a mode of writing as the mark of the...