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 … [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: … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 This August, a now-famous photograph began circulating online. In the original, Donald Trump is seated in the oval office with a … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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, … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [Read more...]
Joys and Ticks: A Thank You to Joyce Carol Oates
In seventh grade, I was assigned to choose a favorite “famous old person.” As part of a cross-discipline project blending science, social studies, and art, we were to make apple-head dolls of the … [Read more...]
Remembering Federico García Lorca
Ask for lights and bells. / Learn to cross your hands, / to taste the cold air / of metals and of cliffs. A Spanish poet and playwright associated with avant-garde surrealism, Federico García Lorca … [Read more...]
Is Southern Art a Thing?: Thoughts from a Technically Southern Arts Writer
When I woke up this morning in Nashville, I checked, as I routinely do, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Times. When I went to the coffee shop next to my apartment, I encountered more people from … [Read more...]
My meeting with Paul Bowles in Tangier, 1980
In June of 1980 my manuscript submission had won me a place in the School of Visual Arts pilot program of study with writer/composer Paul Bowles in Tangier, Morocco. At the time of my acceptance … [Read more...]
The Middle Word in Life: Dennis Hopper and Rudyard Kipling’s “If”
Actor, director, and artist Dennis Hopper staged performances of British poet Rudyard Kipling's "If" throughout his career. In Kipling's original poem, the voice is that of a father offering prudent … [Read more...]
The Invitation of the Mirror: Jonathan Lethem & Me, from the Margin to the Mainstream
Words and images by Jasun Horsley I recently had a podcast discussion with the author Jonathan Lethem. This connection has probably meant more to me than previous connections. For one thing, it’s … [Read more...]
Remembering poet David Gitin
It is with a numbed sense of great personal loss that I report the passing on June 27th of David Gitin: poet, educator, and polymath. As Gloria Avner lovingly phrased it (his long-lost teenage … [Read more...]
An interview with Argentinian poet, publisher and translator, Juan Arabia
Juan Arabia (b.1983 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a poet, translator and literary critic. He studied Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and is now the director and publisher of the … [Read more...]
That Deadly Lord Douglas: Oscar Wilde and De Profundis
It is hard to read the letter published as De Profundis, with its account of Wilde’s disastrous life with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, without laughing. From his cell in Reading Gaol, Wilde … [Read more...]
Infinite Jesting: On the Unbearable Lightness of Our Time
We have, it seems, fallen into the ticklish grip of a cultural and existential order that has become virtually impossible to buck—humor. This is especially the case in literature. Rare is the work … [Read more...]
Attempt to Hear All the Voices: On the Nature of Essay
An essay is an entity in itself that moves, explores, sometimes discovers and enlightens, explains, clarifies, and attempts to relate in some way to the world outside of it. An essay moves on its own … [Read more...]
A Consideration of Borges’ Poetics
I read Jorge Luis Borges' This Craft of Verse in one sitting. It is a collection of six essays originally given as lectures at Harvard University in 1967-1968. The tone is easy and conversational. … [Read more...]
Fully Aboard the Flesh Wagon: Tin House Writers Workshop, Summer 2014
About a week before his fortieth birthday, virgin poet Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881) recorded in his journal that he had “received a woman’s favors” at last. His world was not rocked. … [Read more...]
