Chicago Review

Founded in 1946, Chicago Review is an international journal of writing and critical exchange published quarterly in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

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Chicago Review will be tabling at 2017′s Chicago Book Expo on October 1—visit us at the free event to meet the team behind the journal, browse discounted back issues, and snag free CR giveaways. See you there!

Read more about the event at chicagobookexpo.org and about our journal at chicagoreview.org

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“What’s up with the new Infras?”

–Bruno Montané Krebs to Rubén Medina, 1977

Our latest issue, Chicago Review 60:03, is a special edition on the Infrarealist poets of Mexico City in the seventies. Learn more about the Infrarrealists and the new issue on our webpage. 

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UPCOMING ISSUE

FALL 2014 - WINTER 2015 | ISSUE 59.01/02

Available in March/April 2015

A forum on recent actions in response to sexism, misogyny, and sexual assault in literary communities

Poems by Jean Day, Tyrone Williams, Rob Halpern, Jacqueline Waters, David Hadbawnik, Joel Felix, Cole Swenson, Jacob Rakovan, Whit Griffin, and Andrea Brady

Fiction by Mika Seifert, Claire Harlan Orsi, and Lidija Dimkovska (translated by Christina E. Kramer)

Essays on documentary poetry by Jill Magi, on the lyric by George Albon, and on conceptual poetry by Kent Johnson

Stephanie Anderson’s interviews with Hettie Jones, Margaret Randall, and Maureen Owen on small-press poetry publishing

Reviews of books by Caroline Bergvall, Jose Antonio Mazzotti, Robert Fitterman, Frederick Seidel, and Lew Welch

Notes on Surrealism & War in the gallery and Native Son on stage

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                                        But fuck all that,                why run                up your debts and down your hole                —sit snug in the envy slit and a think. Near to the end of the night with the litter everywhere and empty tin sounds and smoke wallowing in the bubble bath it was only cathected negation and me left. What the fuck could we do next except learn from it. Then, the helical slash screwed-down mint at the base of the sick bag shimmers like adrenaline, and I know                             all my life is possession, and possession I know is a lie,                             the wind then feeds into the incredible flirting exhaust pipe,                             i-amb DIY dark blue vault redecorated a kind of mauve by                             0.1 percent rise in the celestial dough called News Corp.                             stick it to me you                             savvy begrimed porno caudipteryx, so much I bleed, in a sense transcending even 39.74 in a sense. He is the human appurtenance of the Neocon revolution and all the appurtenances are available for data organization choking out useable error margins in the freedom reading by any means optional in the revisionist stock uprising. Clean me. Teeth / nails add cop Exchange%2 equals obedience it are you going to get out of your sleeping bag and look left and right at the anti-mirror with your hand containing a toffee hammer or not. It is Christmas. And in any case you should get out more.

— excerpted from "Roger Ailes," by Keston Sutherland, published in Chicago Review 53:1/the British Poetry Issue (an excerpt from Simon Jarvis's essay on Sutherland follows after the break). Have a wonderful holiday season; we'll be back in January.

"The poem is mutilating itself, temporarily responding to stupefaction with stupid literalness. As Stuart Calton remarked, Sutherland's poetry consciously 'go[es] downhill' at such points. It puts its researches and faits divers into play, but then comes back to them again and again with reckless repetition, like someone banging his head against a sheet of one-way class, or considering whether or not to attack an anti-mirror with a toffee hammer.           That last futile quandary comes at the close of 'Roger Ailes.' It stands as a figure for the infinitesimally weak action currently open to political lyric. All the internal damage done to the stoic resister affects the quality of the verse itself."

— excerpted from Simon Jarvis's essay "The Poetry of Keston Sutherland," published in Chicago Review 53:1/the British Poetry Issue. 

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Constrictions, gross substantialities (the lifting of form) figure definitions: narrows govern seas: like there at Gibraltar, an enrichment,

landforms, Africa's good-sized mountain easily as if  seeing across the Straits, looking into Iberia, the  Mediterranean touching the Atlantic in a seeable

scape: that ruffling of surfaces, Atlantic weather mixing with Mediterranean, the winds of each weather buttressing, reconciling their systems: awareness frantic

with things and differences, the forces of great matters brought into concisions of resolution: the meeting of differences,, a sexual stir: (I liked it there: I

was amused and somewhat afraid:) strictures clarify: the rock, coarsened with form, has an edge, at least, like relief: the mulling ocean, au contraire, seldom

shows an island, whale, or glacier, its mounts of a watery likeness, however majestically they lift, roll, such under, and kill: get at the stone in the 

duct, though, and you know why the bladder swells: bolus in the artery, quickly damaging: but the ocean's fine, in a way, with a life of its own apart from

inlets and outlets: knots, tangles, twists draw attention, provide milieu, engrossing turn and contrariety, give circulations focus, wield greatnesses unspecific:

how can we leave the narrows firm, surveyable, and prefer undifferentiations' wider motions: how can we give up control into being controlled: the suasions.

— "Narrows," by A.R. Ammons, published in Chicago Review 24:3. (An excerpt from Harold Bloom's commentary on transcendentalism and Ammons, from the same issue, follows after the break.)

Ammons, like any strong poet, handles influence by misprision. His Emersonianism is so striking and plausible a twisting askew of that heritage as to raise again the labyrinthine issue of what poetic influence is, and how it works.

To talk about a poem by Ammons in terms of Emerson or Whitman is to invoke what one might term the Human Analogue, as opposed to Coleridge's Organic Analogue. No poem rejoices in its own solitary inscape, any more than we can do so. We have to be talked about in terms of other people, for no more than a poem is, can we be "about" ourselves. To say that a poem is about itself is killing, but to say it is about another poem is to go out into the world where we live. We idealize about ourselves when we isolate ourselves, just as poets deceive themselves by idealizing what they assert to be their poems' true subjects. The actual subjects move towards the anxiety of influence, and now frequently are that anxiety. But a deeper apparent digression begins to loom here, even as I attempt to relate the peripheries and saliences of Ammons to the great circumference of his ancestors. 

Reductively, the anxiety of influence is the fear of death, and a poet's vision of immortality includes seeing himself free of all influence. Perhaps sexual jealousy, a closely related anxiety, also reduces to the fear of death, or of the ultimate tyranny of space and time, since influence-anxiety is related to our horror of space and time as a dungeon, as the danger of domination by the Not-Me. Anxiety of influence is due then partly to fear of the natural body, yet poetry is written by the natural man who is one with the body. Blake insisted that there was also the Real Man the Imagination. Perhaps there is, but he cannot write poems, at least not yet. 

— excerpted from Harold Bloom's "The New Transcendentalism: The Visionary Strain in Merwin, Ashbery, and Ammons," published in Chicago Review 24:3. 

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This year, late in November People are fucking in the ruins of the recent past. Mercurial botanies are swiftening. Masses of women move in the distant street. I had the body of a woman as far as the hips; below sprang the foreparts of three dogs; my body ended in two curled           fish-tales. I see this from a train. I wanted to mold verbs from clacking fragments of justice. Hilarity, spite, and tenderness mingled without quite losing their splendid morphology. Here, namelessness is compatible with existence. Here are pickets, a nut tree. Girls chat in trees about the mystical value of happiness. From time to time an "I" appears among the scenery. Everything is visible, barely disguised. Clouds float, winds blow, birds fly. On the left, the remains of a fallen female figure. A girl stretches up to pick a fruit from a tree. A city is always a lost city. A pink city doesn't rise from the forest, but sometimes it does.

Two o'clock, four o'clock By form I mean the soul of course, that crumpled socket, that splendid cosmetic.

— excerpted from Lisa Robertson's "Utopia/," originally published in her chapbook Rousseau's Boat (Nomados) and reprinted in Chicago Review 51:4/52:1.

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The boonk is a new animal: with 3 eyes and 5 legs and thus altogether 31 toes. It wears boots because its feet are very tender. The ears are elongated and sinewy and covered with hair to serve as shock absorbers or sound cushions because the noises of this world are too brutal for its eardrums. Its ears are more useful serving as wings. Although the boonks fall about clumsily in the air they are seasoned fliers. They live on land or in the water. In reality they are crazy about water and when you wish to wash your hands it is not at all surprising to see one of them squelching from the faucet. They are peaceful animals and practically holy because so useless. Sometimes in the summer you can see a boonk winging or earring like an arrow straight up into the sky where it then goes to lie and snore on its back on a cloud as if in heaven. Sometimes they peer down over the edge of the clouds and call out. These sounds upset many people below because it is uncannily like uncontrollable laughter at what they observe. They live from treefish but they climb with difficulty as it is not easy to find secure footing when wearing boots. At night you hear them rustling and fumbling in the trees and when they are sated they will crow with deadly serious faces. Ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki the females (with the flat tails) giggle, and the males respond with a rocking ku-ku-kuku-ku-ku-ku. They would dearly have loved to make a more robust noise but because they wear glasses for their weak blinking eyes they are limited to the sounds that will least fog over the lenses. They like rubbing over their bellies.

- "The Boonk," by Breyten Breytenbach, published in Chicago Review 56:4. 

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- "The Right Freedom for the Right People, in the Right Place, at the Right Time," by Walt Kelly, published in Chicago Review 9:3. 

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John J. Mood on Anne Sexton

We spoke of many other poems of hers, as well as her first play, which was scheduled for production a few months later. She was understandably worried, especially about the public nature of the theater in contrast to the private relation of an individual reading a book of her poems. And of course this public dimension was also part of her worry about the reading this evening. We discussed possible selections for the reading. I wouldn't make any suggestions but she seemed not to mind. We considered, to no conclusion, why the New Yorker (with whom she has a contract) accepted so many of her un-New-Yorker-ish poems. We also spoke at length of the chamber rock music group of hers with which she usually reads. We spoke of other poets and poems. She said her two favorite poets were Rilke and Neruda. She spoke admiringly of Allen Ginsberg. She likes James Wright's work. She thinks Lord Weary's Castle is still Lowell's best. She doesn't think his Life Studies confesses very much. We talked about Ted Hughes' approaching visit to America. And of course we thought of Sylvia.

["We are bare. We are stripped to the bone"]

We spoke of madness. As with the love of death, I have little, Anne has much. It was somewhat painful for both of us to speak of this, for obvious though differing reasons. But we were both getting a bit more boozy, and we were close. I felt deficient somehow because I had rather tightly controlled the manic in me. She hadn't. She said I would like her when she was manic: she was more exciting. We circled around this by talking about drugs. I don't like pills, of any kind. She likes pills, though not speed or other amphetamines. She likes the effect, but not particularly the taste of alcohol. She said she would even like martini pills. I, on the other hand, like the taste of liquor and was certainly feeling the effect of it at that point. We both prefer pot. I told a story of a recent experience with what was supposed to be acid but turned out actually to be nine-tenths speed. She won't take acid for precisely that reason: you don't know what you're getting. We also sidled around the manic thing by talking about our psychiatrists. She has a great one. She told me, for example, that her psychiatrist—an older man, apparently a full human being—had simply held her in his arms on the day of Bob Kennedy's assassination. Mine, on the other hand, had criticized me for doing what he called "hiding" what was "really" on my mind when I tried to articulate to him the mythic sense and meaning of Kennedy's death.

["...Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones."]

— excerpted from "'A Bird Full of Bones': Anne Sexton: A Visit and a Reading," by John J. Mood, published in Chicago Review 23:4/24:1.

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When the vesselmen pour out a heat of steel, it solidifies at the lip of the converter tap—platelets of molten pig iron freezing and hardening midflow. If the tap is clogged, the solidified metal must be knocked off with a deft kick from the cinder-pit man's thick wood-soled shoes. Careful not to place his piggies under the flow of molten metal—transferred by word of mouth and with near universal agreement, this would hurt a lot, warranting even, perhaps, the phrase "god damn."

— excerpted from "Bruised in a Manner Fitting" by Matthew Nye, published in Chicago Review 58:1 (available for order now). 

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I was nine when I discovered the man in the well in an abandoned farm-lot near my home. I was with a group of friends, playing hide and go seek or something when I found the well, and then I heard the voice of the man in the well calling out for help.

I think it's important that we decided not to help him. Everyone, like myself, was probably on the verge of fetching a rope, or asking where we could find a ladder, but then we looked around at each other and it was decided. I don't remember if we told ourselves a reason why we couldn't help him, but we had decided then. Because of this, I never went very close to the lip of the well, or I only came up on my hands and knees, so that he couldn't see me; and just as we wouldn't allow him to see us, I know that none of us ever saw the man in the well--the well was too dark for that, too deep, even when the sun was high up, angling light down the stone sides like golden hair. 

I remember that we were still full of games and laughter when we called down to him. He had heard us shouting while we were playing, and he had been hollering for us to come; he was so relieved at that moment.

"God, get me out. I've been here for days." He must have known we were children because he immediately instructed us to "go get a ladder, get help."

At first afraid to disobey the voice from the man in the well, we turned around and actually began to walk toward the nearest house, which was Arthur's. But along the way we slowed down, and then we stopped, and after waiting what seemed like a good while, we quietly came back to the well.

We stood or lay around the lip, listening for maybe half an hour, and then Arthur, after some hesitation, called down, "What's your name?" This, after all, seemed like the most natural question. 

— excerpted from "The Man in the Well," by Ira Sher, published in Chicago Review 41:4. 

Alternatively, listen to the 1996 recording for WBEZ's This American Life.

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There's a chapel in Le Havre

where he saw a cortege emerge

and a woman holding a model boat

simply, among mourners

Now was it a lending, licensing

or purchasing agreement

securities transaction or reorg

sent him to Le Havre in midsummer?

C'etait mon frère du ciel

ma vie   mon or

The beveled edge of aquarium glass

vanishes into its work

Where the sunrise and sunset

are selfsame mobile

seahorses greet 

by curling lucent tails about

each other's paunches

pouts yawn

nictitating membranes recess

— "One Thinks of Due Diligence," by Ange Mlinko, published in Chicago Review 54:3. 

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Poesia visiva (visual poetry) by Lucia Marcucci, published in Chicago Review 26:3.

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My aunt was alone in her flower garden  (Roses, petunias, wealthies, foxcomb and phlox) On a Fourth-of-July that always seems fragrant with bloom, when all of her nephews crept from the north of her house (Cherries and winesaps, spearmint and red four-o'clocks) And threw their firearms round in a crackerjack boom. 

None of us looked, but Oh with what brilliance we ran  (Jellies and jonathans, peppermint, lilacs and mums) And perched on our naughtiest wits by the Bear Creek rocks  And laughed till the sun set. Then we went back to look (Thornwood, bleeding hearts, bittersweet, currants and plums), And three days later we lowered down in a box.

The old ladies patted us gently upon our heads (Laces and liniment, cosmos and hoarhounds and thyme) Where we sat alone in the shade of her northernmost doors. The old men nodded and slyly glanced at their clocks  (Oh, gardens of heartsease, rainbowing honey of time), And when we grew up we all went off to the wars. 

— "Sacrifice of Aunt Marie" by Joseph Langland, published in Chicago Review 16:1.

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Issue 58:1 is off to the printer's! Preorder now at our website! There's so much to look forward to:  A strange and wonderful INSERT on the typography of blank pages, by Laksmi Cohen-MacGregor; NEW POEMS by Lisa Jarnot, Phil Cordelli, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Eric Ellingsen, Tom Raworth, Marjorie Welish, Wong May; and Abdellatif Laâbi, translated by Andrew Zawacki; NEW FICTION by Matthew Nye; Felicitas Hoppe, translated by A. A. Srinivasan; and Sergio Pitol, translated by Cynthia Steele; NONFICTION by Nathanaël, Rob Halpern, and J. H. Prynne; A NOTE on Kirill Medvedev; and, as always, rich REVIEWS.

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A green gourd,  Scarred round

In sunlight. A monotone

Of White air Unwound;

Or mummy-sky Stuffed blue. 

— "Black Summer," by George Lee, published in Chicago Review 2:3.

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— from "Zen Poems," translated by Lucien Stryk, with calligraphy by Moira Collins. Published in Chicago Review 29:2.