Q&A

Our home at the University of Rochester is about ninety miles from Syracuse University, where Mike Goode is a member of the English Department. Since he’s a neighbor and he has a new book, Romantic Capabilities, coming out (October in the UK, December in the US), we asked if he’d like to chat. Many thanks to Mike for taking part. His replies have been edited ever so slightly for style.

A few months ago the Blake Quarterly got its first subscriber from Turkey (at least in my memory). Ramazan Saral is pursuing a doctoral degree in the Department of English Language and Literature at Ege University in İzmir. His review of Vahiy Kitapları [Prophetic Works], trans. Kaan H. Ökten, will appear in our summer 2019 issue. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions about his love of Blake.

This post is the second in a series of interviews by S. Yarberry—the first was with Aditi Machado. S. approached us with the idea of interviewing poets about Blake and his infuence on their work: “I’m interested in bridging contemporary poetry with the academic study of Blake—academia and creative circles sometimes sit so far apart that we forget how much common language we have.” The interview has been lightly edited for style. Bios. are at the end of the post.

Chris Hobson wrote the main article, “Blake, Paul, and Sexual Antinomianism,” in the winter 2018–19 issue of Blake. In the course of our correspondence he told me that he’d just published James Baldwin and the Heavenly City: Prophecy, Apocalypse, and Doubt, and that he sees Baldwin and Blake “as very similar figures despite the obvious differences in century, nationality, race. They share ideas of social change adapted from Revelation (for each, the central Bible text), as well as on sexuality and a rejection of false holiness.” Thus the germ of this Q&A was planted; many thanks to Chris for taking part.

This post is by S. Yarberry, who approached us with the idea of interviewing poets about Blake and his infuence on their work: “I’m interested in bridging contemporary poetry with the academic study of Blake—academia and creative circles sometimes sit so far apart that we forget how much common language we have.” It has been lightly edited for style. Bios. are at the end of the post.

This edition of our question and answer series is with Helen Bruder. The most recent of her editing collaborations with Tristanne Connolly, Beastly Blake, came out last year. Helen’s answers below are lightly edited.