Amit Majmudar
The Reconquest of the Long Form
There are, by my count, only two things that can save a long poem in English. Heterogeneity (Eliot and Pound; and those polyphonic, formally quite various sustained dramatic poems of Shakespeare) and/or Rhyme (Chaucer, Golding’s Ovid, Chapman’s Homer, Marlowe’s Hero…
Victor Hugo and the Two Tolstoys
One of the keys to Tolstoy is his early admiration of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. The young Tolstoy visited Hugo during a trip to Europe; the young Russian Count read and admired Les Miserables before he wrote War and Peace. This…
On Conceptual Poetry
No Conceptualist Poet has yet come up with a concept as mind-bogglingly difficult as mine: Create a poetry that exploits existing grammatical and syntactical paradigms (sometimes as deceptively simple as subject-verb-predicate, but potentially incorporating numerous subordinate clauses) simultaneously with…
James Bond and the Insufficiency of the World
On her Majesty’s Secret Service is one of the best of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, in spite of the fact that he gets married at the end, which is genre-sacrilege, kind of like having Sherlock Holmes not solve…
The Two Unsurpassable Poems in the English Language
Every successful poem is unsurpassable in its own way. Even a brief rhyme, like— John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone. —cannot be improved upon, repeated, or replicated. It is a closed system. It serves as a lodestone rock that shipwrecks…
