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John Hawke

The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Lake Pelosi

‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom

by Marilyn Lake

This week on The ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews The Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi. The Art of Power, explains Lake, tells how Pelosi, ‘a mother of five and a housewife from California’, became the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Marilyn Lake is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Listen to Marilyn Lake’s ‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom’, published in the November issue of ABR.

 

Recent episodes:


Pitch of Poetry by Charles Bernstein

by
October 2016, no. 385

When Viktor Shklovsky, in his famous 1917 essay 'Art as Technique', asserts that the fundamental task of the poetic function is one of 'making strange' the reader's ...

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Poetry books as artefacts in their own right, regardless of commercial viability or relevance to the click-bait Zeitgeist, are currently showing sturdy signs of life, so it is a welcome development to have the online Cordite Review sensibility fixed in print, in a palpable way and on a gras ...

In one of Kenneth Slessor’s surviving notebooks now held in the National Library, there is a curious entry consisting of approximately eighty names. This appears to be a list of those people the poet counted as friends over his lifetime; many of the names are marked in pencil with the forlorn abbreviation ‘d’. What might a literary historian make of such a list? It might be evidence of a romantic sensibility, a sign of Slessor’s faith in the commemorative powers of language, arguably the precondition for writing elegiac poetry. On the other hand, the list might be held up as proof of a bleak modernism, indicative of Slessor’s existential anxiety, the names being little more than fragments shored against the ruins of time. Of course, the question of whether a particular poet should be regarded as a romantic or a modernist depends entirely on what is meant by those loaded terms. This is one of the pitfalls of literary history: its basic terms of inquiry are often equivocal.

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