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

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issue 30 > nonfiction

  • Art

  • Kathy In Animal Wonderland

    by Donald Kuspit.
    Animals abound—or is it the animal unbound?—in Kathy Ruttenberg’s art, and so do plants and trees, all of whom Ruttenberg absorbs into her own identity, all of whom she identifies with, all generated by her body: she’s the mother of them all, the great Mother Goddess reincarnate, indeed, with a certain carnal, earthy quality, reminding us that the earth is the mother’s body in ancient myth, for it is the site of life. Her art—evident in drawings, etchings, watercolors, and above all numerous sculptures, mostly made of clay, that is, earth—is a veritable wonderland of nature.
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  • Literature

  • The Suicide Of Language: Paul Celan’s Poems

    by Donald Kuspit.
    Celan’s poetry is subtly pantheistic, that is, it involves, however subliminally, worship of the wonder that is nature, reminding us that he was an amateur botanist.
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  • Book Reviews

  • Review of Sarah Kennedy’s The Altarpiece

    by Courtney Watson.
    Sarah Kennedy's debut novel, The Altarpiece, is not one to be missed. The thoroughly absorbing story, as finely wrought as the missing artwork that sets the plot into motion, is rife with drama, intrigue, and thrilling historical details that echo the most riveting passages of Margaret George’s Tudor-era biographical novels (The Autobiography of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) while detailing the utter destruction of the Catholic church in England during the Protestant Reformation.
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  • David R. Slavitt: A Tribute


  • Prolific and Impish: In Tribute to David R Slavitt

    by Kelly Cherry
    Not long ago, writing about David R. Slavitt's 2011 novel The Duke's Man, I found myself saying that he composes the best sentences in America. I want to start this tribute here, with those sentences. They float, those sentences. They are so unburdened by the trivial or any kind of distraction, so transparent, that it would be too gross even to say that they are like angels in the sky. Because they don't just hang around in the sky like angels; they are the sky.

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  • A Maze of Musement

    by R.H.W. Dillard
    One has no choice but to think of Aristotle
    And the hare, or was that Archimedes,
    Or possibly Samson, keeping up
    In any case is hard to do, amid the broken
    Arts and elevated ephemera that dot the eyes
    Across the trees and into the shallows, ...

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  • David Slavitt

    by Daniel Mark Epstein
    He is one of a few writers--I can count them on one hand...well, one and a half hands--who were nearly legendary to me before I met them, men and women whose work I greatly admired whom I would eventually be proud to call my friends. The first was John Crowe Ransom, the poet, the second and third John Barth and Harry Crews, both novelists, the fourth or fifth, if I recall correctly, was David Slavitt. These writers have nothing in common but proven genius, a certain eminence, and the fact that I knew or know them as civilians as well as soldiers in the campaign for beautiful letters.

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  • Problems to Solve with Wit

    by Gail Holst-Warhaft
    It’s hard to know what to say about David Slavitt or any writer who has produced 100 books. Inevitably such prodigality arouses suspicion (maybe he works too fast, perhaps much of it is sloppy or worthless?) and envy (how slothful can one be, producing only a book every couple of years?). And yet, with the exception of the novels he wrote under a pseudonym, the quality of Slavitt’s writing and translation is remarkable. Academics have nipped at his heels over the freedom he has taken with his classical texts, but by the time they caught up with him, he is busy with the next large project – Ovid, Virgil, Aristophanes, Ariosto, Boethius. Poets might wish for a smaller corpus (poets these days are wary of abundance) but grateful for the poems they’ve gotten round to reading.

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  • David Slavitt

    by Burton Raffel
    In this era of electronic speech, friends and cooperators are often physically unknown to one another -- unless direct communication of voices can count as direct contact. David Slavitt and I have had a good many of both varieties, messages on electronic paper, voices on electronic telephones. But if he came walking down a sidewalk, I would not know who he was.

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  • A Few Notes on David R. Slavitt

    by John Ridland
    The name of David R. Slavitt may not yet be one to conjure with in literary circles, although if he were a magician, let’s say, or a juggler, his skill in keeping so many poems, novels, translations, and other works in the air would have drawn gasps of astonishment and awe, as he added title upon title until he has now tossed out for our enjoyment over 100 books.

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  • The Race is Not to the Swift

    by Mark Rudman
    Anyone who hasn't had a private performance, with David doing all the voices for the opera he wrote in collaboration with Frederick Wiseman, should immediately sign up.

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  • On Reading Slavitt's Lucretius

    by Mark Rudman
    Appearance and reality are never one in a world where nothing is certain beyond
    the secret violence that makes sure there no cessation of action

    no     break       in the one unabated occurrence we can count on,

    change, which attends the continual violence in volcanic cones
    scotches   what chance    our dreams of release

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  • To Do the Word: A Salute to an Old Friend

    by Henry Taylor
    I have been acquainted with David Slavitt’s poems for nearly fifty years, beginning on the evening of May 6, 1964, in the MacGregor Room of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, where he and Fred Chappell gave a joint reading. He has described the occasion in his collection Re: Verse (2005), acknowledging the generous effectiveness of George Garrett in arranging it. Within a year or two, George had arranged to transform one of his own reading dates into a trio by adding David and me to the program. He may have pried loose a little more money for us from the host institution, but most of what we received was probably cut out of his own honorarium

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  • David R. Slavitt, The Per Contra Interview

    by Miriam N. Kotzin
    I’m not sure whether this is a question, but it invites a comment. I am a quick writer. Stendhal was fast; Flaubert was slow. The issue isn’t speed but quality. Either way is good. The advantage of having so many books – 91, now, actually – is that this is discouraging to literary critics. So there’s less nonsense that has been written about my work than there might be if there were less of it (and less work for the would-be critic).

    Anybody who undertakes to “do” me has so much to deal with that, unless he or she likes it or is totally insane and a masochist, the chances are that he or she is an admirer.

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