Composed On The Tongue

A book of Allen Ginsberg's literary conversations 1967-1977, including his encounters with Ezra Pound and an exposition of William Carlos Williams' poetic practice.

In this work, Janet Clare maintains that to understand dramatic and theatrical censorship in the Renaissance we need to map its terrain, not its serial changes and examine the language through which it was articulated. In tracing the development of dramatic censorship from its origins in the suppression of the medieval religious drama to the end of the Jacobean period, she shows how the system of censorship which operated under Elizabeth I and James I was dynamic, unstable and unpredictable. The author questions notions which regard censorship as either consistently repressive or as irregular and negotiable, arguing that it was governed by the contingencies of the historical moment.

The Ever-new Tongue (In Tenga Bithnua), composed in Ireland in the ninth or tenth century, purports to reveal the mysteries of the creation, of the cosmos, and of the end of the world, as related by the soul of the apostle Philip speaking in the language of the angels. Drawing on a multitude of sources, both mainstream and heterodox, it reflects the richness of early Irish learning as well as the vitality of its author's imagination. The present volume is based on the full critical edition of The Ever-new Tongue, including detailed linguistic analysis and textual notes, which appeared in 2009 in the Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum (CCSA 16). The aim here is to offer to a broader readership a translation of the oldest (and most conservative) version of the text, preserved in the Book of Lismore, together with such other parts, fully updated, of the larger study as may be of interest to non-Celticists.

Winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize (2015) No Dictionary of a Living Tongue is formidable in its explorations of art, citizenship, and life as a body amid the social, political, and electronic networks that define us, hold us together, bind us. The poems here take many forms--prose, lyric, epigram, narrative, dialogue fragment, song, musical score, fairy tale, and dictionary entry. An elegant use of sound couples with a keen and roving intelligence and a fierce commitment to social justice to create a unique and powerful collection of poems.

These essays offer new vistas on the idea of the vernacular in contexts as diverse as Ramon Llull's prefiguration of universal grammar, the orthography of Early Middle English, the struggle for linguistic purity in Early Modern Dutch, and the construction of standard Serbian and Romanian in the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian empire.