Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0002329, Thu, 4 Sep 1997 16:16:31 -0700

Subject
Re: DARK ICE by Tom Bolt (fwd)
Date
Body
ANNOUNCEMENT

A year or so ago, Brian Boyd called the attention of NABOKV-L subscribers
to a 1001-line poem, "DARK ICE," that had appeared in the avant-garde arts
magazine BOMB. Its author, Thomas Bolt, winner of the Yale Younger Poets
Award (and much else), fashioned the poem to reflect the structure,
themes, and devices of Nabokov's "Pale Fire." Nabokov appears as a ghostly
presence in the poem which, inter alia, comments on recent Russian
history, as well as the life of Bolt himself. Although the poem is very
much Bolt's own and is accessible to any good reader, the Nabokov
specialist will read (and re-read) it at a still higher level of
appreciation.

Bolt's poem incorporates a great many anagrams, typographical devices, and
annotations that require hypertext mark-up for effective display. For this
reason, DARK ICE is being presented first and is best read on the Nabokov
Web Site ZEMBLA run by Jeff Edmunds at the Penn State libraries.

http: //www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/nsintro.htm

For those without Web access, an ASCII version will appear on NABOKV-L in
two weeks. Toward the end of the month, NABOKV-L will have an interview
with author Thomas Bolt. Please send NABOKV-L your comments and questions
for Bolt.

Lastly, the Nabokov Society, NABOKV-L, and ZEMBLA would like to express
our thanks to Tom Bolt for his brilliant poem and for permitting us to
present it.

D. Barton Johnson, Editor of NABOKV-L
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About the Author of DARK ICE

Thomas Bolt's first book of poems, *Out of the Woods*, was published in
1989 by Yale University Press. His poems have appeared in *The Paris
Review*, *BOMB*, and *Southwest Review* (where his long poem, "Wedgwood,"
won an award for the best poem the quarterly published in 1994).

His awards and fellowships include the Rome Prize for Literature of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, The
Peter I. B. Lavin Younger Poet Award of the American Academy of Poets, an
Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and a 1997 Artist's Fellowship from the New
York Foundation for the Arts. Bolt's poems are included in the anthology
*Sixty Years of American Poetry* (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1996). His
forthcoming publications include a short story, "A Cluster of Sunsets," in
the Autumn 1997 issue of *Southwest Review* and two poems in some distant
issue of *The Paris Review*.

*Dark Ice*, 1993-1997, a poem of 1,001 lines with notes and parodies of
notes, was first published in BOMB (without the notes) in the fall of
1993. Publication of the hypertext *Dark Ice* on Zembla and the ASCII
version on NABOKV-L mark the first publication of the work as a whole.