Campion, on Song

Literature & Fiction

Ratcliffe, Stephen

Poetry

Routledge& Kegan Paul

Contends that "experimental" writing--from Mallarme, Stein, and Cage to contemporary poets of the eighties and nineties--can teach us much about how we write and read both poetry and criticism. Listening to Reading presents two different kinds of writing about poetry―“critical analysis” and “performance”―both of which pay particular attention to sound, shape, and the relation of sound/shape to meaning. It offers a critical and performative presentation of experimental writing, also known as avant garde, postmodern, innovative, and language writing. Less concerned with labels than with asking how this writing works, it invites us to read from earlier works by Mallarme, Stein, and Cage to books published in the eighties and nineties by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, David Bromige, Clark Coolidge, Beverly Dahlen, Michael Davidson, Larry Eigner, Robert Grenier, Lyn Hejinian, Paul Hoover, Susan Howe, Ron Padgett, Michael Palmer, and Leslie Scalapino―writers whose work is viewed as difficult, and who have as yet been largely ignored by criticism.

Listening to Reading

History & Criticism

State University of New York Press

Poetry. Stephen Ratcliffe's new collection is a rift of poems which pluck a few words from Shakespeare's sonnets and on that absent space create their own space and shape: "to still all one note."

[where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG

O-Books

Poetry. Things happen fast and abundantly as perceived in the present tense. Not that the present isn't "selected" as much as the past is, but being less a function of memory and more of attention to the sights and sounds and textual material before the writer, any truly responsible present tense seems less constructed than received; it is both littered with specificity and cumulatively abstract. Two constants in Ratcliffe's scanner, as this long poem in twelve sections hums by, among the legible many, are the sudden recognitions of music intimately heard in ear and mind, and the remarkable articulations of the sense-around sunstruck plenitude of natural phenomena that literally radiates outwards from his person, in all directions, a not always pleasant but inescapably full creation whose principle of order is always change. And then he asks: "why not learn to read the right way, monosyllabically," as if to slow himself, and us, down to the actual moments that yield sensory delight and knowledge of the world. To be precise, and yet as continuous as attention is particular, is to harness the "presentational immediacy" of this work's operative poetic muscle. As we read, we listen to the language speak, but we also hear it streak, fly, mope, glance, loaf, seduce, & dance. In these stanzaically subtle sections, Ratcliffe's performative pen scores a possible creation, one filled with all manner of unpredictable noticings, dislocations, mortal acknowledgments. "blink the vines cover the house"

Present Tense

The Figures

Spaces in the Light Said to Be Where One/Comes from

Potes & Poets Pr

Poetry. Last copies of an early chapbook.

New York Notes

Tombouctou Books

Poetry. In DISTANCE, Stephen Ratcliffe has written a series of one hundred long-lined poems using words and phrases drawn from the language of literature, science, etymology, history, geology, geography, art, as well as everyday life. Originally composed as daily "entries" during the course of a hundred consecutive days, these poems discover how suddenly the syntax of the everyday world becomes exotic, and how much subjectivity comes to inform the objective, only apparently haphazard schemes of word and world: "Even the simplest sentence, for example, throwing stones, one time devoted to one subject as if to be by a book on a table, a hat on a hook." Distance here represents the space between language and world across which attention projects the range of its precarious and constantly shifting dynamics--a space in which, as Clark Coolidge writes, "each paragraph just keeps going farther OUT, wild." The abstraction of its surfaces as fluidly textured as a canvas by de Kooning, this writing bring us to the point where thought and perception first enters a language which makes them real: "sometimes rosey, the broad flat tints of ink are parked between two celestial spheres."

Distance

United States

Avenue B

Poetry. REAL, a long poem composed of 474 "frames" written in 474 consecutive days, continues the project Ratcliffe began in Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002): to write down/"transcribe" perception of "real things" in the world as directly as possible, as they happen, before "conceptualization/ takes over." Attuned both to the presence and all-too-soon disappearance of "things" as such ("physicist noting/the pulse of light left the chamber before it even entered"), each 17-line page "frames and supports," as Juliana Spahr writes, "the poem's celebration of intimacy with both the natural and human world and its quiet, patient attentiveness to how luminous it all can be to those who just sit still and notice."

Real

Mobile/Mobile

Echo Park

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Books by Ratcliffe, Stephen