There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. —Oscar Wilde I’ve found it true in personal experience that being a target of … [Read more...]
Raskolnikov and the Peanut: Mirror Neurons & the Arcane Art of Writing – Jasun Horsley
“Don’t scorn the word: Poets, the world is noisy and silent, only God speaks.” —Antonio Machado Pornography, Shamanic Healing, & Language-Based Reality “Writing is a socially acceptable form … [Read more...]
“Said God, Scratching His Naked Belly in a Kitchen”: Charles Bukowski to Robert Bly
Unlike any other time in U.S. history, the 1950s and ‘60s saw the emergence of multiple literary movements stoked by a flourishing small-press culture. Popular magazines of the time included the New … [Read more...]
Nature As Muse: The World of Fine Writing
The world is never “too much with us,” said Wordsworth, but not the wild glories, which he treasured, too. Natural gifts reflecting the gifts of the gods, or of Darwin’s insights and those of the … [Read more...]
The Necessity of Tragedy—How What Goethe Played with is Still Entirely Relevant
One may say that the benefit of tragedy is that one gets to witness man self-destruct without having to self-destruct on one’s own. Lessons learned without having to go through the actual act of the … [Read more...]
Yannis Livadas: A double interview
These interviews were conducted for Quorum Magazine, which is based in Croatia. This is their first appearance in English. Interview No. 1 Tomica Bajsic interviewed the poet Yannis Livadas for … [Read more...]
Is Andy Kaufman Still Alive? The Evidence
My name is Jack Bristow -- AKA, the guy who was interviewed by the Huffington Post about Andy Kaufman being alive and well in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Though the interview took place 2013, May 15, I … [Read more...]
Was Roosevelt Reciting Poetry?: The Need for a New Prosody
In the last ten years, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James Tate, Stephen Dunn, Franz Wright and Naomi Shihab Nye have published books of prose poetry. Before them, Rilke, Baudelaire, Poe, Whitman, … [Read more...]
Aural Dialectics: On Allen Ginsberg’s Musical Rendition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789) is a collection of illuminated poems separated into two groupings, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, that engage with their … [Read more...]
Charles Reznikoff’s “During the Second World War…” as Objectivist Ars Poetica
This essay is dedicated to Charles Bernstein A poem I keep coming back to again and again is Charles Reznikoff’s “During the Second World War, I Was Going Home One Night,”1 first published in … [Read more...]
The Opening Line – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." And so begins the first sentence to Hunter S. Thompson's seminal 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las … [Read more...]
Joints
One of San Pedro’s most appealing qualities is that it’s not very popular. When I first decided to move here from Venice my neighbor, a realtor, suggested why. “It’s so working class, just a lot … [Read more...]
Opacity: Liminal Landmine-Bodies – the foreword to Liberty Limited by Károly Sándor Pallai
Liberty Limited by Károly Sándor Pallai / Éditions Arthée / 2013 / ISBN: 9789993184638 One of my most despondent memories relates to my first encounter with “Mother Country” France, where it … [Read more...]
Dylan Thomas reads “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”
Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is one of the best known Chirstmas poems. "This recording was digitized from the LP, "Dylan Thomas Reading Volume 1," issued on the Caedmon label in … [Read more...]
David Handley’s interview with Author Alex Preston
Alex Preston was born in Worthing, West Sussex in 1979. He is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, 2010's This Bleeding City, and The Revelations which was released in 2012. As well as his … [Read more...]
Cry, Exploration, Ceremony
Oppositional postmodernist literature is associated with the Beat movement and came about after the terrible, unforeseen destruction of World War II. While the modernists were positive about the human … [Read more...]
Love in the no-land space between two cultures: an interview with Zlatko Anguelov
Jasmina Tacheva talks with Bulgarian-American author Zlatko Anguelov about his newest book, Erotic Memories (2012), and the ideas of love, devotion, harmony and memory on the border between two … [Read more...]
Typewriter Experiment #1: Getting to Know You
A few months ago I bought an Olivetti typewriter with the goal of experimenting with the way the creative process changes when writing on a typewriter versus writing on a computer. This image is a … [Read more...]
Wankers, Burds, and Skag: Heteroglossia in Trainspotting
Mikhail Bakhtin, a twentieth century Russian philosopher and semiotician, was a theorist who worked heavily in literary theory, as well as the philosophy of language. One of his major concepts … [Read more...]
An Interview with Poet Jack Leaf Willetts
Jack, your new poetry collection, The Beauty of being Hated, has just been published. What can you tell us about it? It was hard to live and hard to write. It was written out of a series of … [Read more...]