August 25, 2015
Sugimoto’s Movie Theaters
“Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?” The answer: “You get a shining screen.” […] One afternoon I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village […]
November 12, 2013
On Literature’s ‘Secondariness’: Citation, Creation, and Critical Primacy
Here’s a promise, or an imperative: if I bring any references to books, poems, poets, novelists, dramatists, theorists, or philosophers into this post, you can stop reading immediately. You should […]
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, […]
August 31, 2012
Forms of Enthusiasm: On Poetry Criticism, Book Reviews, and (yes, again) Blurbs
You may have heard something over the last week or two about William Giraldi’s review of two Alix Ohlin books in The New York Times. It’s a wildly negative review […]
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 […]
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 […]
August 22, 2011
Short Takes: Between Art and Work
Dean Rader: “Levine is a great choice for Poet Laureate, especially now. No living American poet has written more probingly or more beautifully about work than Levine. But, by no […]