December 30, 2013
On “Beam 17, The Book of Orpheus” from Ronald Johnson’s ARK
[This post commemorates the recent republication of Johnson’s masterwork, ARK, by Flood Editions.] * That music is the art of TIME. Its work is Abstract and Mathematick, but is created […]
December 28, 2013
Lazy Reading: Annotation, Engagement, and The Structure of Suspense in a Novella by Chekov
Was it George Steiner who said that an intellectual is one who can’t read a book without a pen in hand? I don’t know; I didn’t write it down. I […]
December 23, 2013
Criticism as Suggestion, or, Poetry and Possible Worlds
Near the beginning of Jerome McGann’s “Poetry and the Privilege of Historical Backwardness,” an essay in his 2007 book Point Is to Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing […]
December 19, 2013
Outside Language, Looking In: Mary Jo Bang, Brandon Brown, K. Silem Mohammad, and Polly Duff Bresnick on Alternative/Radical Translation
What follows is an interview of sorts with four writers who have, in one way or another, taken the act of translation, as standardly understood, and made it their own. […]
November 29, 2013
A Long Way to Reach You Here: Serendipity, Found Objects, and Chance Readings, Pt. 3
This post is a continuation of a series; read the introduction here and the prior post here. The second object is a letter, one written on orange paper in black […]
November 27, 2013
A Long Way to Reach You Here: Serendipity, Found Objects, and Chance Readings, Pt. 2
This post is a continuation of a series; read the introduction here. The first object is a faded, sky-blue paper card on which a paragraph has been written in pencil. […]
November 26, 2013
A Long Way to Reach You Here: Serendipity, Found Objects, and Chance Readings, Pt. 1
“Found” poetry—no quotation marks necessary, really; I just mean to bring out the found-ness of the word “found”—has been on my mind ever since I started seriously reading the works […]
November 25, 2013
The Poem “Rimes not”: Milton and Marvell at the Opening of Paradise Lost
It seems easy to forget that, while Paradise Lost technically begins with those immortal first lines of Book I (“Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden […]
November 23, 2013
On the Infinite, Pt. 1: Borges’s “The Book of Sand”
Borges’s “The Book of Sand” is just four pages long—or two, if you scan them onto letter-size pages—making it less of a short story and more of a photograph: a […]
November 12, 2013
On Literature’s ‘Secondariness’: Citation, Creation, and Critical Primacy
Here’s a promise, or an imperative: if I bring any references to books, poems, poets, novelists, dramatists, theorists, or philosophers into this post, you can stop reading immediately. You should […]
October 31, 2013
Carl Phillips and the Post-Epic: Thoughts on Double Shadow
If someone asked me to guess what it might be like to read the translated papyri of a failed, pre-modern dystopia, I’d tell them to read Carl Phillips’s Double Shadow. […]
October 19, 2013
Betjeman’s Reverse Blazon: Assembling and Disassembling the Loved Body
John Betjeman’s “The Licorice Fields at Pontefract” is a curious thing. The first two lines go as follows: In the licorice fields at Pontefract My love and I did meet* […]