Author: Jackson Mac Low File Type: pdf Jackson Mac Lows poetry and prose exceeds narrow definitions of artists by movements or poets by style. His work began with and returned to timeless subjects such as children, animals, love, war, death, and God, diverging at points into rigorously imposed structures, systems, and chance operations in an effort to suppress the ego in his art. At one point, embarrassed by his depth of feeling, Mac Low confesses to being an existential poet, a declaration that the title of the poem A Lack of Balance But Not Fatal contradicts with modest and generous humor. This is an important and often very moving anthology of Mac Lows thought, at the same time as it reflects the preoccupations of his generation and ranges over a wide variety of approaches to writing and art making. Thing of Beauty is a manifesto, the term Mac Low would use to describe expressions of personal truth and his are beautiful.--Kristine Stiles, Professor of Art History, Duke UniversityIn this generous selection of Jackson Mac Lows work, we can see, first hand, the poets profound understanding of the physics of language and his exuberant articulation of the sounds of words in unpredictable motions. The multiplicity of Mac Lows forms and his rejection of any hierarchy among the forms of poetry (objective and subjective, expository or nonrepresentational, lyric and epic), along with his refusal to identify poetic composition with a characteristic voice of the poet and his rejection of traditional aesthetic standards of beauty, are among the chief marks of his iconoclastic genius. Mac Lows magnificent and multidimensional poems open vast expanses for the imagination to inhabit.--Charles BernsteinThis is one of the great watershed events in recent publishing history. Mac Lows reputation has exploded on the poetry scene since his death.--Hannah Higgins, author of Fluxus Experience

Author: Richard L. Kagan File Type: pdf TheSpanish Craze is the compelling story of the centuries-long U.S. fascination with the history, literature, art, culture, and architecture of Spain. Richard L. Kagan offers a stunningly revisionist understanding of the origins of hispanidad in America, tracing its origins from the early republic to the New Deal. As Spanish power and influence waned in the Atlantic World by the eighteenth century, her rivals created the Black Legend, which promoted an image of Spain as a dead and lost civilization rife with innate cruelty and cultural and religious backwardness. The Black Legend and its ambivalences influenced Americans throughout the nineteenth century, reaching a high pitch in the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, the Black Legend retreated soon thereafter, and Spanish culture and heritage became attractive to Americans for its perceived authenticity and antimodernism. Although the Spanish craze infected regions where the Spanish New World presence was most feltCalifornia, the American Southwest, Texas, and Floridathere were also early, quite serious flare-ups of the craze in Chicago, New York, and New England. Kagan revisits early interest in Hispanism among elites such as the Boston book dealer Obadiah Rich, a specialist in the early history of the Americas, and the writers Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also considers later enthusiasts such as Angeleno Charles Lummis and the many writers, artists, and architects of the modern Spanish Colonial Revival in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spains political and cultural elites understood that the promotion of Spanish culture in the United States and the Western Hemisphere in general would help overcome imperial defeats while uniting Spaniards and those of Spanish descent into a singular razawhose shared characteristics and interests transcended national boundaries. With elegant prose and verve, The Spanish Craze spans centuries and provides a captivating glimpse into distinct facets of Hispanism in monuments, buildings, and private homes the visual, performing, and cinematic arts and the literature, travel journals, and letters of its enthusiasts in the United States. **