October 15, 2012
Albert Speer and the Berghof Omen
In Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, in a chapter detailing the autumn of 1939 as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, we find the following passage. In the course of […]
October 6, 2012
Unwriting the Books of the Dead: Anne Carson and Robert Currie on Translation, Collaboration, and History
Before Anne Carson took the odes of Gaius Valerius Catullus as cartographical tools for navigating the all-too-unmappable space of her brother Michael’s death, Louis Zukofsky translated them. In the preface to […]
September 29, 2012
The hidden substance of absence: an interview with Brian Henry
Brian Henry’s Lessness is a book that eats itself, a catalog of wounds both festering and healing—though when they do heal, they heal to be torn open again. In Lessness, […]
September 7, 2012
‘Were there but world enough and time’: Tom Phillips on A Humument
If the un-canon exists—or the alternative canon; a trove of works treasured outside of the mainstream—then it indisputably includes Tom Phillips and A Humument, his capstone project. A painter by […]
August 27, 2012
The Two Gandhis
Takes on Mahatma Gandhi tend to focus either on the Mahatma or on the Gandhi: That is, they either consider him a holy man whose politics emerged from an inner “truth” […]
August 26, 2012
Theft as art, art as theft: an interview with Austin Kleon
In a 1966 interview with The Paris Review—the same interview that would inspire artist Tom Phillips to first employ the techniques that led him to create A Humument—William S. Burroughs […]
August 16, 2012
A Century of Reviews
It’s Poetry Magazine’s 100th anniversary, and Joel Brouwer has reviewed one hundred years of Poetry’s book reviews. What can contemporary writers learn from older reviews? “Analysis purchases assertions,” Brouwer answers, […]
August 12, 2012
What is Truth?
Let us conceive of the mind as a weave of two fibers, as we consider muscle a weave of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles. The relative composition of a muscle is genetically […]
August 8, 2012
An inheritance reassembled: G.C. Waldrep on finding and keeping
G.C. Waldrep believes in paying attention, and in Disclamor, he pays a very specific kind of attention: to the psychological ambiance of place. More than just “place” in general, the […]
August 8, 2012
Secret Credos of the Godless
Notice how scientists are always talking about laws. Laws with a capital L, no less. Einstein’s Laws, Poiseuille’s Law, Hooke’s Law, Fourier’s Law, etc., etc. This endless law-giving reveals something […]
July 22, 2012
American Poetry Critics and Literary Memory
The poetry critic of the New York Times, David Orr, gives us a capsule overview of “novelist-poets” in a July 20th article: “The club of novelist-poets is distinguished but […]
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 […]