Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 3, #13]
BOOKS AND CULTURE reviews
Dominic Erdozain’s
The Problem of Pleasure:
Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion.
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/april/larson040809.html
Although he does not cite Neil Postman, Dominic Erdozain’s thesis is that the churches in late 19th-century Britain amused themselves to death. The background is the earlier evangelical war on pleasure. Evangelicals disproved of most forms of recreation—even sports were censured as unbecoming to the earnestness of a Christian man.
Evangelicals therefore gained a reputation for being killjoys, and eventually even they came to feel that some of their flat bans were untenable. Erdozain’s real story is about the disastrous overcorrection. With remarkable rapidity, evangelicals went from lifting the prohibition on sports to facilitating recreation through official church programs to replacing the real work of the church with entertainment.
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Read the full review:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/april/larson040809.html
The Problem of Pleasure:
Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion.
Dominic Erdozain.
Hardback: Boydell Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
A Review of
The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets
From FIRST THINGS
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/review-of-the-swallow-anthology-of-new-american-poets
In his introduction, editor and contributor David Yezzi suggests that this collection reconciles the traditional division in the poetry world between those who prefer classical forms and those who favor free verse. According to Yezzi, these thirty-five new poets (although many of the authors included here stretch the meaning of newcomer) have accomplished that balance within a “climate of extremes,” as they choose to write their poems utilizing a variety of forms.
“The old battle lines,” as he calls them, between the old and the new, the classic and the contemporary, have become entrenched. Arbitrary divisions lead to dogmatism, and from there, he says, there can be no forward movement.
Yezzi makes a good point about entrenchment. For many free-verse poets, the strictures of traditional form—the seemingly arbitrary and rigid adherence to line length, syllable counts, and end rhymes—often seem forced instead of found. Conversely, traditionalists bemoan the seeming “anything goes” milieu of the free-verse writers as sloppy, syntactically confused, loose lines.
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Read the full review:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/review-of-the-swallow-anthology-of-new-american-poets
The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets.
David Yezzi, ed.
Paperback: Swallow Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
