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Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida

Tom Holmes

Native Guard and Bellocq's Opheli by Natasha Trethewey

Not much has been written about Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia or Native Guard, and what has been written is mostly about the racial content of the poems. Quite a bit, however, has been written … [Read more...]

Readability Versus Creativity: On Susan Howe and Reading Poetry

Leticia del Toro

Contemporary writing demands originality from the artists, and it requires they develop their creativity employing other means and materials in their works. With the written works, it is quite … [Read more...]

Moving Towards the Light: The Triumph of Spirituality in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg

Jessica Clark

Moving Towards the Light: the Triumph of Spirituality in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg

Note: Chapter three was previously published in Beatdom. ∘∘∘ Pre-emptive of 1960s counter-culture, in which exploded artistic self-expression and a freer way of relating to … [Read more...]

Robin Coste Lewis and A New Kind of New York

Alexa Doran

Robin Coste Lewis - The Voyage of the Sable Venus

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 … [Read more...]

Visions, Symbols and Intertextuality: An Overview of William Blake’s Influence on Allen Ginsberg

Alexandre Ferrere

Visions, Symbols and Intertextuality: An Overview of William Blake's Influence on Allen Ginsberg by Alexandre Ferrere

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 … [Read more...]

Notes on the Uses of the New Lyric “You”

Tom Holmes

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 … [Read more...]

Now What’s Wrong? Reflections on Allen Ginsberg’s Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992

Doren Robbins

Cosmopolitan Greetings by Allen Ginsberg

After the accomplishments of late nineteenth and early twentieth century experimentalists Whitman, Dickinson, Rimbaud, and the Modernist poets Apollinaire, Cendrars, Mayakovsky, Stevens, Williams, … [Read more...]

Visionary Markings: Em Dashes and Ellipses in Walt Whitman’s “Talbot Wilson” Notebook

Tom Holmes

Walt Whitman's Talbot Wilson Notebook page

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 … [Read more...]

In Xochitl In Cuicatl: Poets Nezahualcoyotl and Humberto Ak’abal

Jose Trejo Maya

In Xochitl In Cuicatl: Poets Nezahualcoyotl and Humberto Ak’abal by Jose Trejo Maya

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 … [Read more...]

“Only the Lull I Like”: Walt Whitman’s Image of Silence

Andrew Field

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass 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 … [Read more...]

Lemon Calls to Lemon: The Visual Poetics of D. H. Lawrence, Jack Spicer, and Robert Kroetsch

Ty Clever

(detail) Bottle, Carafe, Jug and Lemons

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 Consideration of Borges’ Poetics

Michael Julian

Jorge Luis Borges - This Craft of Verse

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...]

Revenge of the Imagist Socialist Poetry

Serkan Engin

REVENGE OF THE IMAGIST SOCIALIST POETRY

We are the revenge of all oppressed, despised, ignored, exploited, beaten, insulted, neglected, abused, molested humans in the world as being fighters for their rights with our poems and essays. We … [Read more...]

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Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

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Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

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