As a young girl I hated Girl Scouts. It was yet another popularity contest that I was on the losing end of, with little payoff beyond the ability to say I’d “hiked” through another bitter Syracuse winter, or gained another badge I never learned to sew on. However, I kept signing up each year so that I could go to the Sleepover at the Museum. You could pull your sleeping bag up … [Read more...]
”Curious and Not Un-poetical Imaginings”: A Forgotten Specimen of Victorian Cannabis Writing
“Imagination is the dream of the Unconscious.” —Benjamin DeCasseres During the 19th century, even as explorers journeyed to the last dark recesses and remote wastes of the world, and as archaeologists excavated fabled kingdoms and uncovered lost epochs of human history, expeditions and excavations of another order entirely were being undertaken by individuals situated … [Read more...]
Our Ironic Conditions are Shooting Back at Us: A Conversation with Vanessa Blakeslee
Vanessa Blakeslee's latest book, Perfect Conditions: stories (Curbside Splendor, 2018), is the winner of the 2019 IPPY Silver Medal for Short Story Fiction, finalist for the Foreword Reviews’ 2018 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award (Short Story), and the Montaigne Medal, and was a Chicago Tribune "Summer Reads" Pick. Blakeslee's debut novel, Juventud (Curbside Splendor, 2015), was … [Read more...]
D.H. Lawrence’s Pansies, Nettles, and More Pansies: A Jeremiad
D.H. Lawrence is certainly most well known for his novels such as The Rainbow, Sons & Lovers, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Works such as these were important in helping to further define and refine what Modernism is; moreover, Lawrence's understanding of Freud helped him to burrow down into the deeper places in his main characters' minds. This approach includes … [Read more...]
Visions, Symbols and Intertextuality: An Overview of William Blake’s Influence on Allen Ginsberg
In a compilation of his personal journals, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice,1 Allen Ginsberg recalled a particular event, which had a strong impact on his career and on his spiritual approach to life. In July 1948, that is to say eight years before the publication of Howl, Allen Ginsberg had a dynamic impression of unification and of human understanding through visions. He … [Read more...]
Frenchness Versus Frenchiness: Laforgue’s Translations and the “Wordly” Estate of Whitman
I, too, am not a bit tamed . . . I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world. Walt Whitman, 1855 Leaves of Grass 1848 - New Orleans: this may have been when and where Walt Whitman’s career-long love affair with French was sparked; it was then and there that he began “to sprinkle his pages with French terms [. . .]”1 However, as Whitman … [Read more...]
Walt Whitman at 200: Essays and Poems
May 31, 2019 marks the 200th birthday of poetic great Walt Whitman. To commemorate the occasion, EM presents four essays and a selection of poems. Frenchness Versus Frenchiness: Laforgue’s Translations and the “Wordly” Estate of Whitman by Carla Sofia Ferreira Visionary Markings: Em Dashes and Ellipses in Walt Whitman’s “Talbot Wilson” Notebook by Tom Holmes “Only the … [Read more...]
Remembering the Truth Dentist: Heathcote Williams by Jay Jeff Jones
Heathcote Williams (1941-2017) was an English poet, playwright, actor, and visionary anarchist. He authored the bestselling, investigative book-length poems Whale Nation, Sacred Elephant, and Autogeddon, numerous idiosyncratic plays and appeared in many feature films, including The Tempest, Wish You Were Here, Little Dorrit, Orlando, The Tango Lessor, and Alegria. King’s … [Read more...]
Bespoke Books: An interview with Jason Stoneking
Celia Galey recently caught up with Jason Stoneking in Paris, to talk with him about his current series of unique, handwritten, Bespoke Books. The interview is transcribed here. Celia: So first I wanted to go back in time, to when you started thinking about the Bespoke Project. When was that? What it is that you were looking for? A new form, a new practice, a new context for … [Read more...]
A Conversation with Risa Denenberg
Risa Denenberg is a Pacific Northwest poet and publisher. We met during her launch of slight faith at Imprint Books in Port Townsend, Washington. She slipped a free copy into my hands, her asymmetrical haircut framing her sly smile. I immediately began to follow her work, discovering again and again the words of a woman unafraid to ask the hard questions. I am grateful for the … [Read more...]
At Liberation’s Heart: A (Self) Portrait of Victor Serge
“I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries and written twenty books. I own nothing . . . . Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness..” 1 – Victor Serge From the beginning of recorded time, there has been no … [Read more...]
Notes on the Uses of the New Lyric “You”
“It is helpful to change one’s habits to address a root cause” — S. Brook Corman1 Over the last few years, I have been noticing an increasing use of the pronoun “you” in lyric poems, when grammatically the pronoun of use should be “I.” When I first presented on this observation at the 2018 Gulf Coast Association of Creative Writing Teachers Conference, I proposed that this … [Read more...]
At the Intersection of Linguistics and Literary Criticism: Objectivist Methodology in the Creation of Metalanguage(s) in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie
In his essay on Robbe-Grillet, “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet,” Roland Barthes says of objectivism in practice that objects exist “without heredity, without associations, and without references, an object rigorously confined to the order of its components and refusing with all the stubbornness of its thereness to involve the reader in an elsewhere, whether … [Read more...]
Poetry as a Last Letter: Thomas James and his Influences Sylvia Plath and Georg Trakl
Buried in Joliet, Illinois, lies Thomas Edward Bojeski. He died young at the age of twenty-seven on January 7, 1974. The public and his family disagree on the cause. One says murder. The other says suicide. He was born and raised in Joliet, working varied jobs such as a night watchman and a school teacher. His parents died within ten days of each other two years before his … [Read more...]
Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure: Tradition and the Talented Individual
In 1944, Jean Stafford published her first novel, Boston Adventure, a book which became an unexpected best seller..1 From the start, it was an anomaly, "the book that Stafford wrote before one would have expected her to be able to or inclined to" (Hulbert 229). Its unusual qualities have failed to satisfy any person thoroughly, it seems. Perhaps one of Boston Adventure's … [Read more...]
Aching for Meaning: The Work of Novelist Rosamond Lehmann
I read about Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer years before I was able to locate a copy of the novel. Yet just from reading a short synopsis and critique, I was predisposed to love it, this story that critic Alfred Noyes claimed "might have been written by Keats"---if Keats had, you know, been a young, unhappily married woman living and writing in 1920s England. Devoured on first … [Read more...]
Visionary Markings: Em Dashes and Ellipses in Walt Whitman’s “Talbot Wilson” Notebook
Before the appearance of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman kept notebooks in which he wrote sketches for lines of poetry. As Andrew Higgins points out in Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman’s Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855, Whitman used these notebooks to grapple with democracy, slavery, transcendentalism, and spiritualism. Higgins also notes, “But he did not yet understand … [Read more...]
“Write What My Spirit Demands”: An Interview with Devorah Major on Writing in Multiple Genres
Writing in more than one genre can free a writer’s creativity and open up ways of interacting with the world, but writing in multiple genres means making the mental switch from one form to another. San Francisco Poet Laureate Devorah Major has published two novels, five books of poetry, numerous essays, and a symphony with Guillermo Galindo--and offers advice for writers … [Read more...]
Ian Haight in conversation with Dennis Maloney: writer, translator, editor of White Pine Press
Dennis Maloney is an award-winning poet, translator, and founding editor of White Pine Press. His works of translation include The Poet and the Sea: Poems of Juan Ramon Jimenez, The House in the Sand by Pablo Neruda, The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado and Between the Floating Mist: Poems of Ryokan. His most recent volume of poetry is Empty Cup, translated into German … [Read more...]
In Xochitl In Cuicatl: poets Nezahualcoyotl and Humberto Ak’abal
Intrigue & Scope There’s an old story of the amate tree bark (i.e. amoxtli or codices/scrolls with pictographs whose texts resemble an accordion). These were first elaborated as “most likely in the present day totonaca region of Veracruz, in the Peten region of Chiapas, in the mixteca zapoteca zone of Oaxaca, and in the maya, nicaraos, and pipil of Centroamérica, and the … [Read more...]
“Only the Lull I Like”: Walt Whitman’s Image of Silence
Introduction In his chapter on “Language” in Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that “We know more from nature than we can at will communicate” (23). It is a strange sentence. It suggests a nonverbal transference, an epistemologically freighted communication, that is yet not couched in the familiar terms of language, but is instead linked to the failures of language to … [Read more...]
Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: A Story of Influences
The well-known link between Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman comes from both Ginsberg's readers and Ginsberg himself. One of the first explicit mentions of Walt Whitman in Ginsberg's published poetry is to be found in a 1954 poem entitled “Siesta in Xbalba And Return to the States”1: […] – Returning armed with New Testament critic of horse and mule tanned and … [Read more...]
Writers on Writers on Writers II: John Colopinto, “Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and A Case of Anxiety of Influence”
In this second piece in her "Writers on Writers on Writers" series, Linda Chown comments on John Colopinto's piece which was published in The New Yorker's Cultural Comment section, September 19, 2014: “Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and A Case of Anxiety of Influence.” On or around December 1910, human character changed. -- Virginia Woolf Modern fiction really began when … [Read more...]
Susan Howe’s Federalist 10: a literary approach to colonial America
Susan Howe was born on June 10th, 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts, to the American law professor Mark De Wolfe Howe and the Irish playwright and director Mary Manning. From the very beginning of her artistic career, Howe has felt the necessity to explore history, especially both sides of her family roots, to get a place of her own and not to feel like an outsider moving between … [Read more...]
Writers on Writers on Writers I: Linda Chown on E.L. Doctorow on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
This is the first of a series of short essays. These reviews will interpret writers interpreting each other. This first one specifically addresses what I think E.L Doctorow does with Hemingway and Faulkner in his reading of Faulkner’s tremendously interpretable novel, As I Lay Dying. All writing here is my own except where otherwise quoted. I will step in parenthesis to make my … [Read more...]
An interview with Richard Kigel, author of Heav’nly Tidings From the Afric Muse: The Grace and Genius of Phillis Wheatley
Richard Kigel is a historian and educator with an interest in 18th and 19th-century American history. His first book, Becoming Abraham Lincoln: The Coming of Age of Our Greatest President, recounts Lincoln's early life using firsthand accounts. Kigel's second book, the exhaustively researched biography of African American poet Phillis Wheatley, Heav'nly Tidings from the … [Read more...]
The Glass Slipper: Deconstructing Cinderella’s Magical Accessory
In the tale by Charles Perrault published in Paris in 1697, Cinderella watches her two stepsisters depart for the ball, then bursts into tears. Her godmother, who happens to be a fairy, says, “You wish you could go to the ball, n’est-ce pas?” Together, they a change a pumpkin into a coach, six mice into horses, a rat into a coachman, and six lizards into footmen. At the touch … [Read more...]
Lemon Calls to Lemon: The Visual Poetics of D. H. Lawrence, Jack Spicer, and Robert Kroetsch
I’m intrigued by images that recur in an individual poet’s work or across several poets’ works. Rocks, for instance, have a fascinating poetic pedigree in the English language, from Wordsworth’s “Rocks and stones and trees” to Gary Snyder’s “Lay down these words / before your mind / like rocks” to Lorine Neidecker’s geologically-informed long poem, “Lake Superior.” Recently, I … [Read more...]
A Wreath for William H. Gass
William H. Gass wrote books that were saturated with signs. Even the one-word sentences, and he wrote a lot of them, seem charged with stylistic and rhetorical shaping. It was arguably overloaded and overlabored. But man, what a powerful voice. Talk about the anxiety of influence: Gass was to me as Faulkner was to Gass. Only now that he is gone, to become a ghost who can truly … [Read more...]
Five Past Noon: Reading Darkness at Noon in Trump’s America
“What a mess we have made of our golden age.” -- Nicholas Rubashov his August, a now-famous photograph began circulating online. In the original, Donald Trump is seated in the oval office with a phone wedged against his ear. With him in the room are five men, his closest allies and advisors: Vice President Mike Pence, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Chief Strategist Steve … [Read more...]
Chaucer and the Art of the Grift
"Of all the grifters, the confidence man is the aristocrat," David Maurer wrote in his linguistic study The Big Con. He dove into the world of the criminal elite, those who did not get rich by threats or violence, but by their wits alone. "It is a point of pride with him that he does not need to steal"; instead "the trusting victim literally thrusts a fat bank roll into his … [Read more...]
Realism: Just How Real Is It?
We’ve been sold a bill of goods. The original crime was committed a century and a half ago when literary romanticism was kicked to the curb by Flaubert, Tolstoy, Twain, and other disciples of a new religion: realism. I’m not claiming that I prefer romanticism to realism. I do not. But if I’m going to invest my literary capital, I want to know what I’m buying, and I think I’m a … [Read more...]
“No, this was all first person”: Revisiting Jorie Graham’s Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
Jorie Graham’s first poetry collection, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980) has a way of receding from memory despite its potency due, in part, to the great success of her second collection. Her career as we know it today began to take shape after Erosion (1983) was reviewed by Helen Vendler in the New York Times. Vendler wrote that the volume contained “a poetry of delicate … [Read more...]
I Am Nothing: Thoughts on Thoreau
I find much of Thoreau's writings a statement of decay: physical and spiritual. Even with a dead horse, Thoreau finds solace though he must cover his nose with a handkerchief. Let the vultures dig in and have their feast, we should be cheered at such avarice sport."Life—all life—is good, vultures as well as bluebirds, worms as well as butterflies, funky, phallus-shaped … [Read more...]
The Yoke of Duty: Of Caregiving and Middlemarch
As strong a force as love is, it only got me through the first time I thought my husband was dying. It turned out the motivation that really stuck, what kept me going through the rigors of caregiving, was duty. I would have like to think it would have been love, but no: Outmoded, grim, sexist duty kept me trudging back and forth to the hospital, doing laundry, taking care of … [Read more...]
Lucien Stryk: Zen in the art of translating Zen poetry
Once someone can leave aside the narrowminded attitude, a parallelism with the cultural outcome of the long-gone “counterculture”, and a few more notions considering guidelines for every-day afterglow, one can proceed step by step to the authentic study of the oriental classics, Zen or Buddhist literature, etc. To find what? Pure nothing. Only what is not there, and that … [Read more...]
Between Something and Nothing: Franz Marc’s Authorial Ether
A painter and writer who was born and lived most of his life in Bavaria, Franz Marc was one of the key protagonists in the great European debate on the nature and the goals of art at the beginning of the 20th century. Marc’s and Wassily Kandinsky’s 1911 hybrid art-book the Blaue Reiter Almanac was immediately hailed as a turning point in the practice of artists providing … [Read more...]
The Sons of Anak: Henry David Thoreau and John Brown
The Sons of Anak Concord, Massachusetts – Fall 1859 “It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.” — Journal, October 4, 1859 On September 5, 1859, Concord was seasonably cool after strong winds (those that pelted the fifty-six-year-old Emerson’s yard with unripe pears),[1] prevailed two days previous. Green urgent sprouts of corn emerged from … [Read more...]
Anything Can Happen: Bruno Sourdin in conversation with Gary Cummiskey
Bruno Sourdin is a French poet and collagist. He was born in 1950 in the Mont-Saint-Michel area. After studying journalism in Paris, he travelled in Morocco, Egypt, and India. He now lives in Normandy. His first collection of poems, Les Haillons d’Ecume, was published in 1977. His more recent titles include Hazel (2005), L’air de la route (2013), Vers les fjords de l’ouest … [Read more...]
Aldous Huxley’s Dianetic Utopia
In 1950, shortly after launching the dianetic movement that would eventually become known as Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard paid a visit to the house of noted English author, Aldous Huxley, who at that time was living in Los Angeles. To many, it would appear that Huxley was being rather generous with his time by meeting with such an obvious crackpot and conman. However, Huxley was … [Read more...]
