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Rebecca Tamás
REBECCA TAMÁS is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Her pamphlet Savage was published by Clinic, and was a LRB Bookshop pamphlet of the year, and a Poetry School book of the year. Rebecca’s first full-length poetry collection, WITCH, was published by Penned in the Margins in March 2019. She is editor, together with Sarah Shin, of Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry, published by Ignota Books. Her collection Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman was published by Makina Books in October 2020.  

Articles Available Online


Interview with Ariana Reines

Interview

July 2019

Rebecca Tamás

Interview

July 2019

I first became aware of Ariana Reines’s work through her early poetry collection The Cow (2006), which went on to win the prestigious Alberta Prize. I...

Essay

Issue No. 24

The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult

Rebecca Tamás

Essay

Issue No. 24

  I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have...

In his 1992 essay ‘In Search of the Centaur’, the writer and critic Phillip Lopate described the essay-film as ‘a cinematic genre that barely exists’ He had a point: essay-films were scarce But Lopate made them seem even rarer than they were by his self-confessed fastidiousness as to what may rightly be called an essay-film, arguing that he finds the term, as others use it, too inclusive By his own admission, he sets the bar high, and recognises the difficulty of making ‘his idea of’ an essay-film But what is that?   All are agreed that the essay-film is a variant of documentary It uses original or existing footage, or both, in combination with a narrative voice that may be spoken or takes the shape of intertitles Cross-examination of the visual material by the voice and vice-versa is the distinguishing mark of the essay-film Like the written essay, it pursues a line of argument, a thought or idea; tests it, tries it on for size The essay-film interests itself in this process; is as much concerned with the manner of finding out as with the thing discovered – if anything is discovered Where the conventional documentary tilts at detachment or fashions its illusion, the essay-film has no business with impartiality: the spectator is made the film-maker’s familiar, and is given partial responsibility for fleshing out the interface between commentary and image   Lopate cannot conceive of an essay-film that does not deploy text in some form or other (written or spoken) Others ardently waive the genre’s debt to its literary senior These latter are adamant that the essay-film has outgrown its writerly heredity, that images may interrogate images as well as any words might The question with which Lopate closes his seminal essay is predicated on the adverse persuasion that text and picture must play equal part in the essay-film: ‘Will there ever be a way to join word and image together on screen so that they accurately reflect their initial participation in the arrival of a thought, instead of merely seeming mechanically linked, with one predominating over or fetched to illustrate the other?’   Lopate’s essay was by no means the last word

Contributor

July 2015

Rebecca Tamás

Contributor

July 2015

REBECCA TAMÁS is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Her pamphlet Savage was published by Clinic, and...

Interrogations

poetry

Issue No. 14

Rebecca Tamás

poetry

Issue No. 14

INTERROGATION (1)     Are you a witch?   Are you   Have you had relations with the devil?   Have you   Have...

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poetry

May 2012

Monopoly (after Ashbery)

Sarah Howe

poetry

May 2012

I keep everything until the moment it’s needed. I am the glint in your bank manager’s eye. I never...

Interview

July 2015

Interview with Sarah Manguso

Catherine Carberry

Interview

July 2015

There’s a certain barometer of a writer’s achievement that urban readers know well: did this book cause me to...

feature

March 2013

Celan Reads Japanese

Yoko Tawada

TR. Susan Bernofsky

feature

March 2013

There are some who claim that ‘good’ literature is actually untranslatable.  Before I could read German, I found this...

 

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