Category Archives: Poetry

Arts & Culture: Sisyphus Magazine – Spring 2023

Democracy Issue Cover

SISYPHUS MAGAZINE (SPRING 2023) – This issue explores the theories in society that subjectify truth, the influence of social media, philosophical pragmatism, the generational representations of societal ideals, the environmental impact of governmental and private sector choices, the factions of progressive arguments, and the evolution of Sisyphus. 

In modern society, it’s difficult to discern what’s real and what’s not in news media’s contemporary platforms and discussions.

Truth is difficult to define but having a correct theory or definition is not the problem. We all know many truths and untruths, without knowing what philosophers have said, and without knowing that many still disagree with each other. 

The Principles of Quantum Mechanics

by Jaime Woolery

 
Once lost, the laws might be derived again 
When necessary, or so you’ve been told. 
You’re half asleep in January sun. 
Just out of sight, someone starts bugging you 
And Steller’s jays. Green hills, blue weather, — noon 
To bring out Panpipes, but it’s too damn cold.

The Progressive Impasse

by Demian Entrekin

Why the progressive movement has stalled.

I. Nominal and Material Progressivism 

Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx believed in progress.

The question, therefore, is what do we mean by progress? How do we understand it? How does it operate? How does progress correspond with progressivism? These questions have become important because progressivism has encountered an internal impasse. It has become mired in internal conflict.

Museum Stories: ‘Japanese Plate With Kintsugi Repair’

Ashmolean Museum (June 7, 2023): Here, animator Charlie Black brings the poetic story behind this beautifully broken 17th-century Japanese plate to life.

JAPAN COLLECTION

Ashmolean Museum – Oxford University

The Japanese collection is now best known for its ceramics, in particular the collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century export porcelain which is one of the most comprehensive collections in the world. Ceramics for the Japanese market are also well represented, including fine examples of Arita, Nabeshima and Hirado porcelain, tea ceremony wares and Kyoto earthenwares.

Literary Arts: Zyzzyva Magazine – Spring 2023

ZYZZYVA Magazine Spring 2023:

Fiction

  • The Mysteries of the Universe by Anna Badkhen:
    “I see now what this is about. I’m a professor and author in America, she’s in a war zone: to her, I’m rich and happy. How is she supposed to know about the cancer, the medical debt, Ksyusha’s student loans? So, I try to deflect.”
  • Encyclopedia of Botany by Jane Marchant:
    A daughter’s closely observed catalog of the flora around her Bay Area home, and of her family’s complex history of identity.
  • Glint of Sport by Angie Sijun Lou:
    “I don’t know if this story is true. You can’t divide truth from kitsch in this place…”
  • Eulogy by William Hawkins:
    In the wake of a funeral, a dead father’s legacy hangs over his surviving adult sons as they trudge into the lukewarm waters of the lake by the family pier.
  • The Eye by Elodie Saint-Louis:
    “When Theo spoke, she thought, you could see all of these places on his body. Vyros, Hymettus, Loutro, Parnitha. The land was in him. It was the river running out of his mouth. The words that bumped into each other gently but never spilled over, petering out into a gentle sway.”
  • Plus more fiction by Perry Janes, David Hayden (there be strange happenings in a dilapidated insurance building in Chicago), and Wendy Elizabeth Wallace.

Nonfiction

  • Jane Marchant on the flora around her Bay Area home—and her family’s complex history of identity.

Poetry

  • Jason Allen-Paisant, Dan Alter, Allison Benis White, Ricardo Cázares, E.G. Cunningham, Peter LaBerge, Joyce Mansour, Maria Zoccola

Art

  • Sofia Bonati

Exhibitions: ‘Dia al-Azzawi- Painting Poetry’ At The Ashmolean Museum, UK

Ashmolean Museum (April 26, 2023): ‘The Arab world’s most influential living artist’, Dia al-Azzawi is best known for monumental and colourful canvasses. His work spans many genres, including a type of artist books known in Arabic as ‘dafatir’.

DIA AL-AZZAWI

PAINTING POETRY

Here Francesca Leoni, curator of Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry at the Ashmolean, introduces us to the work of this important contemporary artist and takes us through the exhibition currently on display at the Ashmolean Museum.

Dia Al-Azzawi is an Iraqi painter and sculptor, now living and working in London, and one of the pioneers of modern Arab art. He is noted for incorporating Arabic script into his paintings. 

Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is open and free to visit until 10 June 2023.

Preview: Banshee Literary Journal – Spring 2023

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Banshee Literary Journal – Spring/Summer 2023:

Issue 15 features poetry from @el_fodongo, Elizabeth McGeown, @JamieOHallo108, @MNSghost, @AnneTannam, @hmorganvl, @crownofpetals, @dogwithoutlegs, @yopopodawn and Derek JG Williams.

Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Spring 2023

Kenyon Review – Spring 2023 issue includes a folio of literature in translation guest edited by award-winning translators Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, and Jeremy Tiang. The issue also includes poetry by Kwame Dawes, Timothy Donnelly, K. Iver, and Danusha Lameris; fiction by Sam J. Miller, Michael Tod Powers, J. T. Sutlive, and Lindsay Turner; nonfiction by A. J. Bermudez; and the winner of the 2022 Short Fiction Contest, judged by Karen Russell. The cover art is by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum.

“A Field Guide to the Bear-Men of Leningrad” : a rare non-speculative thing from me, about boyhood & masculinity & human monstrosity in 1930s Russi… https://instagr.am/p/CqDkW1jsCI5/

Literary Arts: The London Magazine – April/May 2023

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The London Magazine – April/May 2023

Manet, Mandarins and Me


Chloë Ashby

My husband doesn’t enjoy peeling oranges. He doesn’t like the little white webs of pith or the way the juice trickles between his fingers and soaks and stains the skin. He’s not a fan of pips. The citrus-sweet taste he could take or leave. If I had to choose between him and my favourite fruit, I like to think I’d stick with him.

On this episode of The London Magazine Podcast, we speak with Max Wilkinson.Max is a playwright and screenwriter whose award-winning play, Rainer, about a voyeuristic delivery rider riding around London, played at the Arcola Theatre last summer and is being produced for BBC Radio Four’s Afternoon play slot.

The Uses of Beauty

Hugh Dunkerley

When Clare wakes, the car is moving along a wide valley between fields of grazing cattle. She shifts in her seat, her side sweaty where her brother Robbie has been leaning against her. The last thing she remembers is crossing into Austria at a high pass, a young border guard peering in at them through the drizzle. Now the sun is out, and the tarmac is steaming in the heat. At a junction, her father slows down. ‘This is it,’ he says, turning the car. They pass through a village, all whitewashed houses with large overhanging roofs. In the deserted square is a small inn, Der Jäger painted across one wall in beautiful gothic script. Next to the lettering is a twenty-foot-high figure of a hunter in Tyrolean leather trousers and green hat, striding across a mountain side. Clare notices that he has the same jaw as John Travolta in Grease.

Literary Preview: The Paris Review – Winter 2022 – 2023

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The Paris Review – December/Winter 2022:

Colm Tóibín on the Art of Fiction: “No matter what you do in a novel there’s a secret DNA of whatever it is that you’ve suffered.” N. Scott Momaday on the Art of Poetry: “I was writing lines that looked like lines of poetry, recollecting my early days on the reservation, but I didn’t know the difference between a spondee and a dactyl.”

FICTION

Mieko Kanai – Tap Water

Addie E. Citchens – A Good Samaritan

Sophie Madeline Dess – Zalmanovs

Tom Drury – Where Does This Live?

Isabella Hammad – Gertrude

Lucas Hnathfrom –  Old Actress

Kate Riley – L. R.

Avigayl Sharp – Uncontrollable, Irrelevant

Prose by Avigayl Sharp, Lucas Hnath, and Mieko Kanai.

Poetry by William IX of Aquitaine, Cynthia Cruz, and Peter Mishler.

Art by Mary Manning and Lily van der Stokker.

Cover by Uman.

Shakespeare & Company: Poets Richard Barnett & Luke Kennard (Podcast)