An Inflamed Curiosity
Five of my ghazals appear in Common Knowledge (Volume 16, Issue 3, Fall 2010), a journal published three times a year by Duke University Press, in association with Bar-Ilan University, in Ramat Gan, Israel. The poetry editor Belle Randall read my "Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet" in PN Review , and contacted me. The journal editor Jeffrey M. Perl also liked the ghazals enough to publish them. I was sent a couple of months ago an earlier volume (Volume 11, Issue 3, Fall 2005), and I started reading it this week. Conducted within its pages is Part 2 of a symposium called "Imperial Trauma: The Powerlessness of the Powerful." I enjoyed David Cannadine's paper ""Big Tent" Historiography" in which he reflects on the implications of the growing American dominance of the study of the British empire. He points out the Americans' inability or unwillingness to acknowledge that the USA is an empire, that it has been an empire since its earl...