New Anthology Celebrates Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop's Enduring Legacy

With Burning Deck Press as their vehicle, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop have made an imprint on English language literature, translating works by authors like Edmond Jabés into the canon (and adding to our canon volumes of poetry and fiction of their own). Reviewing Keeping / the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions (Wave Books, 2019), edited by Ben Lerner, Barry Schwabsky writes, "precisely by revealing the scope of their activities — writing, translating, and publishing — it shows how hard it is to come to grips with their work as a whole." More: 

In her marvelously titled 1996 essay, “Thinking of Follows,” Rosmarie — I have to call them by their first names here — speaks of “writing as dialog with a whole web of previous and concurrent texts, with tradition, with the culture and language we breathe and move in and that conditions us even while we help construct it,” and a mere enumeration, more than 55 books that we would normally call “their own,” suggests how expansive their dialogs (why not say, polylogs?) have been. But Rosmarie’s assertion, “no text has one single author. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we always write on top of a palimpsest (cf. Duncan’s ‘grand collage’),” means that in this context my phrase “their own” can only be misleading — there have been some 70 works of translation from French, German, and Chinese, and more than 300 books and chapbooks published between 1961 and 2017 by their press, Burning Deck. Begun in the time of the “anthology wars,” the intention was to be a non-aligned force, neither “academic” nor experimental, though — apparently thanks to Rosmarie’s influence — it became in the long run a bastion of experiment.

Read more at Hyperallergic.