Has Chance a Choice? On Novel Coronavirus, Poetry, and the Pastmodern David Rosenberg Perhaps we can now call evolution a poem. Most often it has been portrayed as a meta-narrative, the Tree of Life story. Darwin had left it open and latecomers until recently have attempted to close – that is, shape – the tree as it overgrows itself, visually unwieldy.

Poets, however, have thought for some time that evolution is more of a rhizome. In Christian Bok’s review of Darren Wershler-Henry’s Nicholodeon (London, Ont.: Open Letter, 1998) he describes that book as ‘performing a radical autopsy upon the corpus of bpNichol, dissecting the ganglia of his influence, “the rhizome of an author-function in mourning”’. Nichol himself was reading Deleuze and Guattari, ‘for whom the rhizome was a metaphor of the complexity of the world in general’.

Of course, this was not long after the death of authorship’s heyday, if not the death of history’s. We have since learned somewhat more: the rhizome of evolution carries human history along with the literary version. There is no building on Chaucer and the Bible, as if they were lower branches. And now we are reminded there is no leaving the viruses behind:

Viruses are actually the most abundant biological entities on the planet. There are at least one and probably two orders of magnitude more virile particles on Earth than there are any kinds of cells. Further, at least half of our human DNA genomes consists of sequences derived from virus-like elements. Actually, the entire history of life is a history of virus-host interactions.
          (Eugene Koonin, designnews.com, 3/23/2020)

Suddenly, the viral ... read more

Gabriel Josipovici Elly Miller, the last of the great emigré publishers, died on 8 August at the age of ninety-two, leaving behind, apart from a large family, three books she was readying for publication and a host of projects in the offing. The daughter of the legendary Viennese founder of the Phaidon Press, Béla Horovitz, she arrived in this country in 1938 at the age of ten, with not a word of English, but that proved to be no obstacle, and she soon fitted in with the high achievers of Oxford High School for Girls, where she was sent. The story goes that her father, always keen to find books that would be at once popular and learned, asked Ernst Gombrich, a family friend, to write a history of art for Phaidon. When Gombrich handed in the typescript he explained that he had written it to appeal to an ... read more

Du Fu Visiting a Nephew

To rinse rice
        Draw less
Water
    Drawing much,
    You muddy the well,
Cutting down wild ferns for food,
    Don’t let go your hand
    Let go your hand,

    You hurt the root.



Not Seeing Li Bai

Not seeing  Li Bai
For a time
I begin to fear for him.

My friend
... read more