March 25, 2013
Why I Don’t Teach Poetry Writing
What are we teaching when we teach the writing of poetry? Much of what we call the “teaching” of poetry is actually the teaching of contemporary conventions governing poetry. […]
March 11, 2013
The Economics of Literary Fame
This may be the nature of any widely sought desireable thing in limited supply, but in America, literary fame behaves like money. The most obvious similarity is that, like […]
March 7, 2013
A Note on Sentimentality
One of the underdiscussed aspects of literary taste is the principle of exclusion: Not what is welcomed in a work, but what is disallowed. In the world of contemporary fiction, […]
February 19, 2013
Life to the Image, Death to the Word
Sometimes a specific, historical incident has the interpretability of a parable. An example: How the cannons in Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s last play (actually a collaboration with John Fletcher), set off […]
February 13, 2013
The Abundance: OneWorld (UK) Q & A excerpt
Not to plug my own forthcoming second novel, but–aw, why the hell not? THE ABUNDANCE is coming out from Holt/Metropolitan on March 5, 2012, and from OneWorld in the UK […]
February 10, 2013
“Western” and “Modern”
It is interesting to note that among Indian Hindus, the words “Western” and “modern” are well-nigh interchangeable in usage. That is, a “modern” way of dressing, loving and marrying, […]
January 7, 2013
Shakespeare’s Mystical Rhyme: On “The Phoenix and the Turtle”
For a writer frequently claimed to represent or comprehend all of human experience, there is remarkably little theology, mysticism, or overt religiosity in Shakespeare. We have his audience to thank […]
January 5, 2013
The Alternate Bard: On Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems
Shakespeare’s narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were dedicated to an aristocrat, and full of the conceits and set-piece sequences and strict stanzas that appealed to […]
December 28, 2012
The Importance of Telling a Good Story
You would think that with scientific knowledge expanding ever so exponentially, and literalist interpretations of traditional scriptures undermined east and west by it, you would see a great popular surge […]
December 22, 2012
Language as an Artistic Medium
Visual art, language, and music fall along a spectrum whose two ends are the “representative” and the “nonrepresentative.” By “representation” I mean of the physical world. Historically, a visual art […]
December 20, 2012
To Know or not to Know: On Eating Meat
It seems to me the question of “not knowing” or “knowing” about a society-wide horror is not simple binary. It is possible to know enough to want not to […]
December 17, 2012
Why Ashbery is So Dull
Those who dislike John Ashbery’s poetry often complain that they “don’t understand it.” As any Ashbery fan will explain, while secretly thinking you a retrogressive muggle, there is nothing to […]