This item is taken from PN Review 283, Volume 51 Number 5, May - June 2025.
News & Notes
Forty-six years of Parnassus• PN Review was sad to miss the public tribute honouring forty-six years of the magazine Parnassus: Poetry in Review and its exemplary editor Herb Leibowitz on 30 April at Poets House, New York. Parnassus, though slightly junior to PNR, always had a bracingly mature feel given the classic format, physical and intellectual weight, variety and style that Herb Leibowitz brought to it, and his minute love and attention, properties of a brilliant and concentrated editor.
Born in 1935, Leibowitz worked as a lecturer and instructor all over New York, including City University, Hunter College and New York University. In 2007, he received the Poetry Foundation’s Randall Jarrell Prize for Criticism. He wrote brilliantly on Hart Crane (subject of his doctoral dissertation), William Carlos Williams, and on autobiography. His book Fabricating Lives: Autobiographical Studies (published by New Directions) explores the craft and craftiness of the autobiographer, the disclosure and projection, the settling of scores, the invention entailed in telling selective versions of the truth. It starts with Benjamin Franklin, and further quarries include Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright and Emma Goldman. Leibowitz is the kindest and most enabling editor I ever encountered, and I raise a grateful glass to him regularly. I was sorry to miss the physical celebration.
Time like a gilded clock • Jena Schmitt writes: French poet, essayist and translator Claire Malroux died on 4 February, seven months before her 100th birthday. Born in the Albigeois region, in southwestern France, she spent most of her life in Paris and Cabourg. Malroux was born after the turmoil of the First World War and lived through the Second. Her father died fighting in the Résistance. Describing her writing, Malroux said she ‘needed to leave a witness, a witness of my youth and my passage in this world. For people to eventually read after me.’ She wrote over a dozen collections of poetry, La Femme sans paroles (2006), Eros (2006), Ni si lointain (2004), Soleil de jadis (1998), Météo Miroir (2020) and Reverdir (2000) among them. Two innovative hybrid texts appeared in 2009 and 2015, Traces, sillons and Chambre avec vue sur l’éternité, the latter an imagined dialogue with Emily Dickinson, a poet with whom she felt ‘a personal affinity’. She translated Dickinson’s and Wallace Stevens’s complete poems into French, and English-language writers such as Marilyn Hacker, Henri Cole, Derek Walcott, Saul Bellow, H.D., Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Elizabeth Bishop and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, receiving prestigious translation awards such as the Prix Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, the Prix Laure Bataillon and the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. In 2020 NYRB Poets published Daybreak: New and Selected Poems, translated by Marilyn Hacker. Malroux’s poems are as bright and vivid as paintings, and often speak of her family, of past and present overlapping, of mortality, light, loss, gardens, art, music, desire, ageing, History with a capital H, and the silent persistence of time that clicks like a gilded clock in the Musée d’Orsay. ‘I want to wrench myself out of time’s ballast’, she wrote in the poem ‘Octet Before Winter’, which she did again and again through her writing. The American poet Henri Cole, noting her passing, wrote of his friend: ‘She promised me she would live to 100, because her work would then be done’.
Playing Bottom • Michael Schmidt writes: Clive Wilmer, who died suddenly on 13 March as the result of a stroke, was one of the key contributors to PN Review and a defining presence in the magazine from its early issues through 2014. He contributed a series of crucial interviews with poets between 1989 and 1992, several broadcast on Radio 3 and then collected in Poets Talking (Carcanet, 1994), including Czesław Miłosz, Charles Causley, Tony Harrison, Les Murray, Donald Davie, Ted Hughes, Patricia Beer, John Heath-Stubbs, P.J. Kavanagh, Michael Longley and John Peck. He was himself interviewed by Kevin Jackson in 1996. Among his almost 100 contributions were selections of his own poetry, reviews and major essays on figures key to his own writing, including John Ruskin, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie, and brilliant obituary celebrations of Tony Tanner, Alan Stephens, Edgar Bowers and others. He was also a significant translator mainly from the Hungarian in collaboration with his friend George Gömöri.
In the Guardian Peter Carpenter celebrated his championing (as editor and lecturer) of Ruskin’s work and abiding value. From 2009 he was master of the Guild of St George, ‘a national charity “for arts, craft and the rural economy” founded by Ruskin in 1871’. He also stressed his affinities with Thom Gunn, a friend for forty years whose essays and later letters he edited with great tact. He was also deeply engaged by the poetry and prose of Ezra Pound – and Donald Davie. Carpenter reminds us that when he was very young he was a member of the National Youth Theatre, ‘playing Bottom alongside Helen Mirren’.
His poems, starting with Devotions (1991), were published for many years by Carcanet Press, including a New and Collected Poems in 2012. His final book, Architecture & Other Poems, will be published by Worple Press later this year.
National Endowment • Donald Trump, the Washington Post reported on 3 May, has proposed cancelling the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, ‘reviving his failed first-term attempts to scrap the grantmaking agencies as he moves to reshape the nation’s artistic and cultural landscape’. The NEA and NEH have already cancelled grants and reduced staff in compliance with executive directives. ‘The tentative budget plan also targets the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.’ The NEA was established in 1965, twenty-one years after the British Arts Council. It supports museums, libraries, universities, and public television and radio stations. The 2026 budget proposals require Congressional approval before they can be implemented but anticipation is a powerful censor, as those who live in fear of other kinds of cancellation have learned in recent years. Soon after Trump’s plans were published, ‘the NEA reportedly rescinded grants for several theatres, citing Trump’s artistic priorities’, the American Theatre magazine reported. At least 1,200 NEH grants have also been discontinued and the NEH has reduced its staffing levels. Money saved is to be spent instead on Trump’s plans to create a National Garden of American Heroes for the 2026 Declaration of Independence 250th anniversary celebrations. Congress made sure of the NEA’s and NEH’s survival last time round. This time their future is less certain.
Born in 1935, Leibowitz worked as a lecturer and instructor all over New York, including City University, Hunter College and New York University. In 2007, he received the Poetry Foundation’s Randall Jarrell Prize for Criticism. He wrote brilliantly on Hart Crane (subject of his doctoral dissertation), William Carlos Williams, and on autobiography. His book Fabricating Lives: Autobiographical Studies (published by New Directions) explores the craft and craftiness of the autobiographer, the disclosure and projection, the settling of scores, the invention entailed in telling selective versions of the truth. It starts with Benjamin Franklin, and further quarries include Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright and Emma Goldman. Leibowitz is the kindest and most enabling editor I ever encountered, and I raise a grateful glass to him regularly. I was sorry to miss the physical celebration.
Time like a gilded clock • Jena Schmitt writes: French poet, essayist and translator Claire Malroux died on 4 February, seven months before her 100th birthday. Born in the Albigeois region, in southwestern France, she spent most of her life in Paris and Cabourg. Malroux was born after the turmoil of the First World War and lived through the Second. Her father died fighting in the Résistance. Describing her writing, Malroux said she ‘needed to leave a witness, a witness of my youth and my passage in this world. For people to eventually read after me.’ She wrote over a dozen collections of poetry, La Femme sans paroles (2006), Eros (2006), Ni si lointain (2004), Soleil de jadis (1998), Météo Miroir (2020) and Reverdir (2000) among them. Two innovative hybrid texts appeared in 2009 and 2015, Traces, sillons and Chambre avec vue sur l’éternité, the latter an imagined dialogue with Emily Dickinson, a poet with whom she felt ‘a personal affinity’. She translated Dickinson’s and Wallace Stevens’s complete poems into French, and English-language writers such as Marilyn Hacker, Henri Cole, Derek Walcott, Saul Bellow, H.D., Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Elizabeth Bishop and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, receiving prestigious translation awards such as the Prix Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, the Prix Laure Bataillon and the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. In 2020 NYRB Poets published Daybreak: New and Selected Poems, translated by Marilyn Hacker. Malroux’s poems are as bright and vivid as paintings, and often speak of her family, of past and present overlapping, of mortality, light, loss, gardens, art, music, desire, ageing, History with a capital H, and the silent persistence of time that clicks like a gilded clock in the Musée d’Orsay. ‘I want to wrench myself out of time’s ballast’, she wrote in the poem ‘Octet Before Winter’, which she did again and again through her writing. The American poet Henri Cole, noting her passing, wrote of his friend: ‘She promised me she would live to 100, because her work would then be done’.
Playing Bottom • Michael Schmidt writes: Clive Wilmer, who died suddenly on 13 March as the result of a stroke, was one of the key contributors to PN Review and a defining presence in the magazine from its early issues through 2014. He contributed a series of crucial interviews with poets between 1989 and 1992, several broadcast on Radio 3 and then collected in Poets Talking (Carcanet, 1994), including Czesław Miłosz, Charles Causley, Tony Harrison, Les Murray, Donald Davie, Ted Hughes, Patricia Beer, John Heath-Stubbs, P.J. Kavanagh, Michael Longley and John Peck. He was himself interviewed by Kevin Jackson in 1996. Among his almost 100 contributions were selections of his own poetry, reviews and major essays on figures key to his own writing, including John Ruskin, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie, and brilliant obituary celebrations of Tony Tanner, Alan Stephens, Edgar Bowers and others. He was also a significant translator mainly from the Hungarian in collaboration with his friend George Gömöri.
In the Guardian Peter Carpenter celebrated his championing (as editor and lecturer) of Ruskin’s work and abiding value. From 2009 he was master of the Guild of St George, ‘a national charity “for arts, craft and the rural economy” founded by Ruskin in 1871’. He also stressed his affinities with Thom Gunn, a friend for forty years whose essays and later letters he edited with great tact. He was also deeply engaged by the poetry and prose of Ezra Pound – and Donald Davie. Carpenter reminds us that when he was very young he was a member of the National Youth Theatre, ‘playing Bottom alongside Helen Mirren’.
His poems, starting with Devotions (1991), were published for many years by Carcanet Press, including a New and Collected Poems in 2012. His final book, Architecture & Other Poems, will be published by Worple Press later this year.
National Endowment • Donald Trump, the Washington Post reported on 3 May, has proposed cancelling the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, ‘reviving his failed first-term attempts to scrap the grantmaking agencies as he moves to reshape the nation’s artistic and cultural landscape’. The NEA and NEH have already cancelled grants and reduced staff in compliance with executive directives. ‘The tentative budget plan also targets the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.’ The NEA was established in 1965, twenty-one years after the British Arts Council. It supports museums, libraries, universities, and public television and radio stations. The 2026 budget proposals require Congressional approval before they can be implemented but anticipation is a powerful censor, as those who live in fear of other kinds of cancellation have learned in recent years. Soon after Trump’s plans were published, ‘the NEA reportedly rescinded grants for several theatres, citing Trump’s artistic priorities’, the American Theatre magazine reported. At least 1,200 NEH grants have also been discontinued and the NEH has reduced its staffing levels. Money saved is to be spent instead on Trump’s plans to create a National Garden of American Heroes for the 2026 Declaration of Independence 250th anniversary celebrations. Congress made sure of the NEA’s and NEH’s survival last time round. This time their future is less certain.
This item is taken from PN Review 283, Volume 51 Number 5, May - June 2025.