June 4, 2013
Food For Thought, Force-Fed
What is interesting about the force-feeding of inmates at Guantanamo is, first of all, that you have a bunch of supposedly radical, violent Islamists espousing a protest technique, the stubbornly […]
June 3, 2013
On the Approaching 100th Anniversary of Tagore’s Nobel Prize
To understand Tagore, we 21st-century readers must expand our notion of what a “writer” is and does. No writer, Indian or American, is to his or her country what […]
May 23, 2013
The Regression to the Primitive
Northrop Frye, discussing the arc of Shakespeare’s plays, says something very profound about Shakespeare’s late “Romances,” like A Winter’s Tale and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. …as a dramatist, […]
May 11, 2013
Neureligion
There is very little (if any) variability in the brains of human beings regarding cortical localization. That is, the motor cortex responsible for, say, left arm movement, is reliably […]
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, […]
March 4, 2013
Knox Writers’ House: A Conversation with Emily Oliver
If you haven’t visited the Knox Writers’ House—a digital archive of poets and writers reading their poems and prose, as well as the writings of others, recording in the towns […]
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 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, […]
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 […]
October 22, 2012
A metaphysic of the page, a mode of inquiry called wonder: an interview with Dan Beachy-Quick
B. K. Fischer, writing about two of Dan Beachy-Quick’s books for the Boston Review, locates what she sees as a struggle for him and his contemporaries—or for any poet born […]