Per Contra An International Journal of the Arts, Literature, and Ideas

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issue 31 > nonfiction

  • The Per Contra Interview with John Ridland

    by Miriam N. Kotzin
    As translators I feel we are obliged to step into the original poet’s footsteps in the snow, even if our feet are like a child’s by comparison.

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  • Free Verse

    by Lewis Turco
    Poetry wannabees, and even poets that I respect, complain to me constantly about my definition of “verse” in The Book of Forms as “metered language”; of “prose” as “unmetered language,” and of “free verse” as prose.

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  • Art

  • Making The Best Of Castration Anxiety: Robert Motherwell’s Abstraction

    by Donald Kuspit
    Robert Motherwell's abstract painting oscillates between two grandly contrasting poles. One is represented by the Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, the other by the Opens series. The former is boldly black and white, sometimes with bits of color thrown in, as though leavening the gloom with blood. They are expressionistic masterpieces, politically angry and passionately gestural. The latter is a kind of minimalist field painting, conveying Motherwell's concern with the flat plane, de rigueur in modernist painting, as Clement Greenberg argued, more particularly "the stark beauty of dividing a flat solid plane," as Motherwell said.(1)

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  • Book Reviews

  • Back East by Michele Leavitt

    review by Midge Goldberg
    Forget about back east—"Poisonous and beautiful," a phrase from Leavitt's villanelle "Datura," should be the title of this new collection. The poems are an exquisite balance of pain and beauty, starkness and art, chaos and control. And what is most amazing about Leavitt's poetry is that she captures this dichotomy not just from poem to poem but within each poem itself, revealing grief, pain, danger, and even the dinginess of life as well as its beauty within finely crafted lines of poetry.

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  • Wave by Andrew Sofer

    review by A.M. Juster
    Andrew Sofer’s first book of poems, Wave, at first evokes the troubled ghost of Philip Larkin. You see the same fluency with form, the same love of wordplay, and a similar sense of relief at having survived British education.

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