These essays engage with poetry, culture, power, and language, written over time and (where mine) revised as necessary.
Alejandra Pizarnik: Between Silence and the Chorus of the Dead
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) was an Argentine poet whose technical innovation transformed brevity from a limitation into an art form, using sparse language to evoke powerful emotional and existential depths. Her minimalist approach concentrated meaning, where each word—and the silences between them—carried immense weight. Through her fragmentary forms, Pizarnik gave voice to collective experience, delving into themes of death, silence, and the unconscious with remarkable intensity.
In her most notable collection, Diana’s Tree, she synthesized vivid, sparse imagery with a polyvocal structure, where the dead and the living, the conscious and the unconscious, intertwine. Pizarnik's lyrical exploration of these realms establishes her as one of Latin American literature’s most important voices.
..More..
Tristan Corbière (1845-1875) - Remembering a Poetic Revolutionary
March 1, 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Tristan Corbière, one of the most innovative French poets of the 19th century. Born Édouard-Joachim Corbière in Morlaix, Brittany, in 1845, he lived just 29 years but his voice continues to resonate a century and a half later.
Corbière's only published collection, "Les Amours jaunes" (1873), initially went largely unnoticed. It wasn't until Paul Verlaine included him in "Les Poètes maudits" (1884) that his work began to receive the recognition it deserved. Today, he is recognized as a precursor to modernism and surrealism, influencing poets from T.S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg.
William Wall Essay - Riding Against The Lizard – On The Need For Anger Now
(© William Wall 2009)
“Anger is the political sentiment par excellence. It brings out the qualities of the inadmissible, the intolerable. It is a refusal and a resistance that with one step goes beyond all that can be accomplished reasonably in order to open possible paths for a new negotiation of the reasonable but also paths of an uncompromising vigilance.
