John Donne and contemporary poetry : essays and poems

222 Pages·2017·1.859 MB·English

by  Donne, John, Herz, Judith Scherer

JOHN DONNE AND
CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Essays and Poems
edited by
Judith Scherer Herz
John Donne and Contemporary Poetry
Judith Scherer Herz
Editor
John Donne and
Contemporary Poetry
Essays and Poems
Editor
Judith Scherer Herz
Concordia University
Montreal, QC
Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-55299-6 ISBN 978-3-319-55300-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937709
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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To the members of the John Donne Society
“zealously my Muse doth all salute thee.”
for
“your integritie, friendship, and confidence.”
C
ontents
Introduction: Listening for, Looking for Donne 1
Judith Scherer Herz
The History of the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project 9
Heather Dubrow
On the Road with Donne: An Idiosyncratic Pilgrimage 15
Carl Phillips
Per Fretum Febris: The Diseased Body in John Donne
and Brett Foster 29
Kimberly Johnson
Seven Poems 47
Kimberly Johnson
The Plexiglass Wall and the Vital Verb 55
Molly Peacock
Reading Donne: A Sentimental Journey 61
Jonathan F.S. Post
vii
viii CONTENTS
Sonnets 1–14 75
Katie Ford
What’s Done Is Donne and How Can I Find God Now:
Poems from The Volcano Sequence 85
Alicia Ostriker
Epithalamia and Aubades 103
Heather Dubrow
Bird of Fire; The Double Death of Orpheus: Poems from
The Ground 109
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Poems: The Sunne Rising, Felinity 113
Stephen Burt
Poem: Musing 117
Stephen Yenser
Heaney, Donne, and the Boldness of Love 123
Sean H. McDowell
Quiver, Chatter, Purple Jinx: On Donne, Translation,
and the Psalms 145
Mark Dow
Donne and the Reign of Figures 171
Calvin Bedient
Turn, Return, Revolve: John Donne’s Kinetic Poetics 197
Joseph Campana
Index 217
e C
ditor and ontributors
About the Editor
Judith Scherer Herz is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Concordia
University, Montreal, Canada. She has published essays on Donne,
Milton, Shakespeare, and other early modern writers, including two on
Donne and twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry. She has also writ-
ten on Bloomsbury writers, including several books on E.M. Forster, as
well as articles on Forster and on Leonard Woolf.
Contributors
Calvin Bedient is Professor Emeritus in the English Department at the
University of California. He is the author of four collections of poetry
(Candy Necklace, The Violence of the Morning, Days of Unwilling, and
The Multiple) and of five books of criticism (Architects of the Self, Eight
Contemporary Poets, He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land
and its Protagonist, In the Heart’s Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren’s
Major Poetry, and The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion).
His reviews and essays have appeared in many magazines. He is the pub-
lisher and coeditor of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion.
Stephen Burt (also Steph or Stephanie) is Professor of English at
Harvard and the author of several books of poetry and literary criti-
cism, among them THE POEM IS YOU: Sixty Contemporary American
ix
x EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard UP, 2016), Belmont: Poems
(2013), Parallel Play (2006). A new book of poems will appear from
Graywolf in 2017.
Joseph Campana is a poet, arts critic, and scholar of Renaissance lit-
erature at Rice University. He is the author of The Pain of Reformation:
Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (2012), and two
collections of poetry, The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005) and Natural
Selections (2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize. Current pro-
jects include a study of Shakespeare’s children called The Child’s Two
Bodies and a collection of poems called The Book of Life.
Mark Dow has had poems and nonfiction in Agni, Blackbox Manifold,
Country Music Poetry, The New York Times, Paris Review, PN Review,
SLAM! Wrestling, Wave Composition, Word for/Word, and elsewhere. His
translations have appeared in Conjunctions, Exchanges, and Green Integer
Review. His 2015 chapbook “Feedback” and Other Conversation Poems is
at Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry and Poetics. He is the author
of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (California, 2004)
and coeditor with David R. Dow of Machinery of Death: The Reality of
America's Death Penalty Regime (Routledge, 2002).
Heather Dubrow is currently the John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in the Poetic
Imagination at Fordham University. Among the institutions at which she
taught previously are Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. Her publications include seven single-authored books (most
recently Deixis in Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors
Like “Here,” “This,” “Come” [Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015]), a coedited
collection of essays, and an edition of As You Like It, as well as a collec-
tion of her own poetry entitled Forms and Hollows and two chapbooks.
She also publishes essays on pedagogy and higher education.
Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and Blood Lyrics,
which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize.
Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers
Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary
Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. Her poems have appeared in The
New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Poetry
Review, and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Her fourth book is
forthcoming from Graywolf Press is 2018. Ford is Professor of Creative
EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS xi
Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the
MFA Program.
Kimberly Johnson is Professor of English at BYU, where she teaches
Renaissance literature and creative writing. Her books include the poetry
collections Uncommon Prayer and A Metaphorical God, translations
from ancient Greek and Latin poetry, and the critical study Made Flesh:
Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England. With Jay Hopler
she edited Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry.
Sean H. McDowell is Director of University Honors and Associate
Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Film Studies at Seattle
University. He has published a variety of essays on Donne, Shakespeare,
George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell,
and others, including Irish poets Tony Curtis and Seamus Heaney. A
textual editor and commentary editor for The Variorum Edition of the
Poetry of John Donne, he also serves as the Executive Director of the John
Donne Society and is the editor of John Donne Journal: Studies in the
Age of Donne. His most recent poems have appeared in Clover, a literary
rag; Vine Leaves; and Scintilla.
Alicia Ostriker is Professor Emerita, Rutgers University. She is a poet
and critic, winner of a National Jewish Book Award, twice a National
Book Award finalist, author of 15 collections of poetry, most recently
The Book of Seventy and The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog. As a
critic, she is the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of
Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible.
Molly Peacock is a widely anthologized international poet published
leading literary journals in the USA, UK, and Canada, as well as in the
Oxford Book of American Poetry. She is the author of seven collections of
poetry, including The Analyst, The Second Blush, and Cornucopia: New
and Selected Poems. Passionate about bringing poetry to a wider pub-
lic, she helped create Poetry in Motion on New York City’s subways and
buses and inaugurated The Best Canadian Poetry series. She is also the
author of the noted biography The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins
Her Life’s Work at 72, as well as the memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece.
Peacock also wrote and performed “The Shimmering Verge,” a one-
woman theater piece in poems.