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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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. … [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, … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [Read more...]
Negative Capability: Keats and Buddha
The relationship of Buddhism and the poetic process is a sublime yet unexplored topic among Western scholars. It’s about the silent space between the words, not just the word itself. The poet John Keats writes: At once it struck me what quality … [Read more...]
Secret of the Masters: An Interview with Poet Edward Field
This interview was conducted in September 2016 and first published, along with the poem "Secret of the Masters," the next month in the now-defunct Eris Magazine. The poem "Doggy Love" is published here for the first time. The last two poems are excerpted … [Read more...]
“My Friend the Censor”: Henry Miller, Huntington Cairns, and Tropic of Cancer
In September 1934 the American writer Henry Miller, age 42, had published in Paris his autobiographical novel Tropic of Cancer. In that same month, 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean in Washington, D.C., the Secretary of the Treasury appointed a young … [Read more...]
Henry and Me
I first heard of Henry Miller, perhaps fittingly, when I lived with two other guys in East Vancouver. One of the guys had a friend who was a postman, the other guy was having an affair with the postman’s wife. There were a few awkward moments when he … [Read more...]
Taking the Poet at his Word: Editing the Poems of T. S. Eliot
When T. S. Eliot summed up his life’s work in 1963, two years before he died, it was in a Collected Poems of fewer than 250 pages. But when Christopher Ricks and I published The Poems of T. S. Eliot last year, the two volumes ran to some two thousand … [Read more...]
“I am a deserter” — Marcel Duchamp
“I am a deserter” - Marcel Duchamp I looked out the window. The leaves were turning yellow… turning towards death … or turning towards resurrection … No. Death … Duchamp said when we die consciousness leaves us and we vanish ... "I came to … [Read more...]
Endgame (May you live in interesting times – Chinese Curse)
I walked out of the bookstore, grateful for fresh air. I looked up a poster announcing an upcoming reading by Karl Ove Knausgård. I turned my head and looked at The Gluten-Free Bakery next door. “I stay in the shade. It’s marvelous. Everyone else, … [Read more...]
Concealing The Light From The Lit
" … the milieu of chess players is far more sympathetic than that of artists." A man at The Remainders Table was pointing at my sketchbook. " … huh?…" "… I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all … [Read more...]