December 28, 2013
Lazy Reading: Annotation, Engagement, and The Structure of Suspense in a Novella by Chekov
Was it George Steiner who said that an intellectual is one who can’t read a book without a pen in hand? I don’t know; I didn’t write it down. I […]
December 23, 2013
Criticism as Suggestion, or, Poetry and Possible Worlds
Near the beginning of Jerome McGann’s “Poetry and the Privilege of Historical Backwardness,” an essay in his 2007 book Point Is to Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing […]
December 19, 2013
Outside Language, Looking In: Mary Jo Bang, Brandon Brown, K. Silem Mohammad, and Polly Duff Bresnick on Alternative/Radical Translation
What follows is an interview of sorts with four writers who have, in one way or another, taken the act of translation, as standardly understood, and made it their own. […]
December 16, 2013
The Fort Greene Renaissances
“I think that maybe we can’t see it now, but more time passes…they’re gonna say, “This could be Brooklyn’s equivalent to the Harlem Renaissance.” –Spike Lee In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, […]
December 10, 2013
Fiction that Occurs Word by Word: An Interview with Hilary Plum
In a recent interview about her work, fiction writer Amy Hempel says that she has never liked the term “minimalism,” often used to describe her work. “I prefer Raymond Carver’s […]
November 29, 2013
A Long Way to Reach You Here: Serendipity, Found Objects, and Chance Readings, Pt. 3
This post is a continuation of a series; read the introduction here and the prior post here. The second object is a letter, one written on orange paper in black […]
November 27, 2013
A Long Way to Reach You Here: Serendipity, Found Objects, and Chance Readings, Pt. 2
This post is a continuation of a series; read the introduction here. The first object is a faded, sky-blue paper card on which a paragraph has been written in pencil. […]
November 26, 2013
A Long Way to Reach You Here: Serendipity, Found Objects, and Chance Readings, Pt. 1
“Found” poetry—no quotation marks necessary, really; I just mean to bring out the found-ness of the word “found”—has been on my mind ever since I started seriously reading the works […]
November 25, 2013
The Poem “Rimes not”: Milton and Marvell at the Opening of Paradise Lost
It seems easy to forget that, while Paradise Lost technically begins with those immortal first lines of Book I (“Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden […]
November 23, 2013
On the Infinite, Pt. 1: Borges’s “The Book of Sand”
Borges’s “The Book of Sand” is just four pages long—or two, if you scan them onto letter-size pages—making it less of a short story and more of a photograph: a […]
November 18, 2013
Spam Poetry
Creative writing training rebuilt my eyes. One workshop leader told me to watch what the person in line ahead of you buys at the grocery store, and take note of […]
November 5, 2013
On Carl Phillips, Pt 2
I asked a number of young poets to speak to Carl Phillips’s influence on their work and selves. This is the concluding part of the two-part series. Photo by Rachel […]