Justin Clemens

I then attempt to unblock the blocked emails which, it turns out, come with attached sets of proofs marked HIGH PRIORITY as, due to outsourced publishing deadlines, the expected turnaround is prohibitively tight…

A lot of my trajectory has been determined by work. A lot of the influences that came into my work from radio, from Europe, from working in the music and sound poetry scenes in Europe, and a little bit of poetry, were also for making a living. So, I’m incredibly badly read now. And, of course, a lot of my life has been flying by the seat of my pants doing gigs.’

Despite the title, The Age of the Poets is not a dedicated treatise on poetry or its history, but a collection of occasional essays on various aspects of the literary process from Badiou’s philosophical point of view.

Walter Benjamin was born on 15 July 1892, mere hours after the commemoration of Bastille Day. It is hard to avoid making something allegorical of this insignificant contingency, given that for the rest of his relatively brief life Benjamin would almost invariably arrive a little too soon or a little too late.

It was when I turned to The Bourgeois that I really got a sense of Moretti’s epistemological superiority over most of his humanities competitors… It is not that the scientific team-man has simply trumped or supplanted the delicately tuned aesthetician. It is that Moretti has become both simultaneously, a lonely centaur or Janus-faced creature, at once historically minded and future oriented, sentimental and technicist, elegiac and plain speaking.