August 4, 2012
Notes on a gray area and a gripe
For a moment, the elliptical, discursive, and indirect debate about the state of American poetry took on a sheen at once confrontational and warm: Matvei Yankelevich, a poet, critic, and […]
August 2, 2012
Topographed: a new approach to poetic geography
Over the past few months, I’ve traveled from Hayward, California to Washington, D.C., then from D.C. to Manassas and Remington in Virginia, then to backwoods West Virginia—Hinton, Beckley, and the […]
July 27, 2012
The matter of the word: a conversation with Peter Koch
The sleepy, industrial building on Berkeley’s 4th St. in which the Codex Foundation resides belies the international significance of its residents. Were it not for one meek sign, I might’ve […]
July 24, 2012
It’s more than Greek to me: on visual translation
I’ve written in the past about typography and materiality—how the physical elements from which language is forged can influence, govern, or dictate its semantics. The relationship, though, is complex; there […]
July 22, 2012
The neo-canonicity of F. R. Leavis
My first ingestion of F. R. Leavis’s 1953 essay “The ‘Great Books’ and a Liberal Education” resulted in the British critic’s own volume being thrown across the room. What was […]
July 20, 2012
Black to green to gone: the lyric moment in Wright’s “Tattoos”
The tattoo, as a thing of memory, takes on memory’s double (or triple, or quadruple, or quintuple) life. Like a poem, it becomes prismic with the passage of time and […]
July 19, 2012
A Humument in the age of mechanical reproduction (part iii)
(This post is a continuation of a series. Italicized lines in this piece are sourced from Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and […]
July 18, 2012
A Humument in the age of mechanical reproduction (part ii)
(This post is a continuation of a series. Italicized lines in this piece are sourced from Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and […]
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 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 13, 2012
A Humument in the age of mechanical reproduction (part i)
(Italicized lines in this piece are sourced from Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and each corresponds to the section of the original […]
July 9, 2012
Black to green to gone: the tattoo as form and subject
To encode the past into one’s skin is both recursive and prophetic: recursive in that it makes the past a continual part of not just the present but the vehicle […]