The UNB Reading Series has an exciting line-up for the 2016-17 academic year. Some details still TBA, so check back for details of Winter readings featuring Eden Robinson and Meags Fitzgerald.
Lee Maracle — September 15, 2016 — 8PM at Memorial Hall
Congratulations to many past Fiddlehead contributors who have been having great success. Recent announcements forThe New Quarterly's 2016 Contest and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist contain names familiar to readers of The Fiddlehead.
My obsession with persona, especially in the lyric, and with writing the self brought me to Eileen Myles' I Must Be Living Twice. The poems are resplendent with sex, humour, and reflection — a kind of inquiry that is dramatized further by the fact it's a selected works, and she employs herself as a kind of third person. On writing poetry, she writes about the discovery of "something deeply anonymous about the self."
Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution is a classic study of the French and Industrial revolutions, and their subsequent impact. I've also been rereading Nietzsche's earlier works and Walter Kaufmann's study on his thought. I'm going through the Greek Tragedies, especially Euripides, as well as David Ferry's translation of Horace's Odes. I'm also finishing Stephen Spender's memoir, World Within World, which I picked up for a dollar and which gives us a vivid sense of the preoccupations and experiences of those British poets who came of age in the 1930s.
The British art critic Laura Cumming mesmerized me this summer with her recent book The Vanishing Velazquez, which is an elegantly written cultural history, a whodunit, a meditation on portraiture, and a hymn to two of her favorite painters — Velazquez and her own late father.
