September 7, 2017
Remembering John Ashbery’s Time and Space
Vladimir Nabokov’s confession in Speak, Memory (1951) that he does not believe in time might have been more shocking if it had come earlier in literary history; by the modernist […]
August 30, 2017
On Living in the Moment
I’m sick of everybody telling me to live in the moment, but I get it. Why do we insist upon these ideals, extremes that don’t exist, a whole society built […]
August 25, 2017
The Night Charlie Chaplin and Gertrude Stein Talked Film
I just re-watched Charlie Chaplin’s film Limelight and was reminded of his relationship to Gertrude Stein. In 1934 Stein and Chaplin met at a dinner party, and both recorded their versions […]
August 18, 2017
An Interview with Poetry Teacher Extraordinaire, Marty Skoble
The extremely humble Marty Skoble has single-handedly created a new generation of poets and writers. He was my poetry teacher from fifth grade to twelfth grade at St. Ann’s School. […]
August 11, 2017
An Ode to the Essay
In his foundational 1910 work “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” Georg Lukács imagines the act of essay making as “an event of the soul,” “a conceptual reordering […]
August 4, 2017
The How to Get Your Students to Love Poetry and Sociopolitical Issues Lesson Plan
Just as I can’t ride the subway without finding iambic pentameter and social commentary in even a foot pain ad, poetry and sociopolitical issues have made their often awkward, yet […]
July 27, 2017
Writing the Great American Novel Amid Breast Augmentation Ads
There’s this breast augmentation ad on the subway where this woman’s holding oranges over her chest and looking sad in the lefthand picture and grapefruits over her chest and looking […]
July 21, 2017
On Writing at the Movie Theater
I covet the space of the in-between. This is why I see so many movies in the theater. The movie theater is a liminal space, situated between the darkened fantasy […]
July 14, 2017
Buckskin Cocaine
Erika Wurth’s lyrical short story collection Buckskin Cocaine, a compendium of voices from the Native American film scene, puts questions of seeing and identity at its center. “Robert Two-Stories,” for […]
July 13, 2017
A Short History of Weird Girls
A few weeks ago, Jill Soloway wrote about being a “weird girl” in Lenny. The piece was more battle cry of a brave soul in the wilderness than your typical […]
July 5, 2017
A Writer’s Romance with Screens
When I can’t put my finger on what I’m feeling, I want to Shazam it or press Control+F, and then I realize I’m turning into a machine. In Adrienne Rich’s […]
June 26, 2017
What Text and Image Have to Say to Each Other
I have been bewitched by the bringing together of text and image in art for as long as I can remember. A film or photograph can convey something that words […]