July 18, 2012
Constantly Protean: or, On Polytheism
The upside to getting published is getting read. The downside to getting published is getting misread. I recently found an interesting statement about my work (and myself) from a critic-blogger […]
July 16, 2012
Make it New While Keeping it Old
When it comes to translating a work that is, at once, radically different from what we are used to reading, as Greek tragedy is—both in its (multiple) tones/registers and its […]
July 15, 2012
Life Alone Lives Forever: Quest Stories and the Principle of Irreplaceability
I’ve read somewhere (in more than one place, I think) that all stories, or almost all stories, are variations on one story, treasured across cultures and eras, the Quest. The […]
July 7, 2012
On Laurent Binet’s HHhH
I sought out with immense eagerness the English translation of Laurent Binet’s Prix-Goncourt-winning novel, HHhH. This book concerns Operation Anthropoid, the plot to assassinate the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. I had […]
July 5, 2012
Public Confession: I Covet Terza Rima
Of all the rhyme schemes out there, the one I covet is terza rima, verse’s triple-double, the braided tercet. I suspect I love its interlock, its trinities that couple […]
July 2, 2012
The Jack of All Modes
When you publish a novel, there’s often a flurry of interviews over the ensuing months. The interviewers repeat questions independently of one another. It’s an interesting indicator of what people […]
June 24, 2012
Riff on Goethe
Versatility is the least of poetic virtues. It may seem an impressive sign of poetic prowess to be able to turn out a poem on any subject, in any of […]
June 12, 2012
Reason Not the Need
I do not need religion. I can plug that hole with anything: family, literature, music, medicine. I can distract myself and go along and never look up and die quite […]
June 8, 2012
Poetry and Entropy
It’s not often that the nuclear radiologist in me shows up on this blog, but Dr. Majmudar—reader of medical images created by measuring positron annihilations and differential tissue attenuation—would like […]
May 20, 2012
The Reproductive Success of a Poem
There’s more than one way of conceiving of the “success” of a poem; one that’s never talked about is its biological/evolutionary success, that is: How effectively does it replicate itself? […]
May 13, 2012
The Reconquest of the Long Form
There are, by my count, only two things that can save a long poem in English. Heterogeneity (Eliot and Pound; and those polyphonic, formally quite various sustained dramatic poems of […]
May 10, 2012
Victor Hugo and the Two Tolstoys
One of the keys to Tolstoy is his early admiration of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. The young Tolstoy visited Hugo during a trip to Europe; the young Russian Count read and […]