”The well” is selected from the collection "Europas snäcka" (The shell of Europa) from 2001. (Europa does not refer to the continent but to the Phoenician princess who was abducted by Zeus.) The book is retrospective; Söderberg remembers his youth in the 1950s, spent in Spain and on the island of Mallorca, where he met other artists and nomads. Although his poems are inspired by memories, they are seldom explicitly autobiographical. We get to know very little of the protagonist, who is often nameless, a reticent Everyman beholding the world and its wonders. “The well” is written in the “late style” of Söderberg, simple and straight forward, sharp as a razor’s edge.
Carolyn Forché on "The well" |
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On Ted Berrigan: "What Do I Say Next? Fast."
"Like O’Hara, Berrigan had a gift for saying the most important things in as offhand a way as possible: readers, guard down, are overwhelmed by the intensity of what they suddenly realize on their own. In the span of three decades, he innovated at least four new approaches to breaking his readers apart and putting them back together."
via POETRY FOUNDATION |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Eugene Ostashevsky on Vasily Kamensky's “Constantinople"
"The Cubist language of the poem imposes cuts on words, fractures them into planes by repetition and variation, and recombines parts of words to build other words. Although the poem lacks a single order of reading—nor do we have evidence that Kamensky ever performed it out loud—it pulsates with sound repetitions. Repetitions convert its word lists into the sonic counterparts of Cubist planes, with each word turning into a formal variation of the one above it." |
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