August 10, 2021
From the Caves–Thea Prieto
With the Covid-19 pandemic, there have obviously been dozens of books that haven’t received the shine they might have under normal circumstances. One new release that I hope gets all […]
April 6, 2018
In Defense of “Show Don’t Tell”
Part One of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009), the now-classic history of the influence of writing programs on twentieth-century American literature, uses as its title two of the hallmark […]
July 15, 2015
Old News: The Consequences of our Cultural Obsession with Newness
There’s nothing new about our love of newness. “Men love that song which is newest on their ears”—that’s Homer, writing as early as Europe’s second epic poem. The problem […]
February 8, 2014
An Alternate Second Half of the Aeneid
A story about Virgil on his deathbed, possibly apocryphal, tells how he ordered his literary executors to destroy the Aeneid because it was imperfect; that he preferred that the poem […]
December 28, 2013
Epic Fail
The most inflated reputation in literary history came about as the result of genuine literary merit crossed with a transnational empire and language. Many people would assume I speak of […]
November 23, 2013
Turning (Back) to Performed Language
Why sit down and read quietly? Is this really the only way, or even the best way, to experience language? The three central works of Western literature were never, and […]
September 9, 2013
Human Beings Writing about Human Beings
I am, I am told, an “Indian-American” writer, and my novels are Indian-American novels. Sometimes they’re called “immigrant fiction,” even though I’ve never immigrated from or to anywhere. My […]
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. […]
February 13, 2013
The Abundance: OneWorld (UK) Q & A excerpt
Not to plug my own forthcoming second novel, but–aw, why the hell not? THE ABUNDANCE is coming out from Holt/Metropolitan on March 5, 2012, and from OneWorld in the UK […]
August 7, 2012
On “Literary Fiction” and “Genre”
If you look at Wikipedia’s list of the bestselling fiction writers of all time, you’ll notice that the majority are English-language authors of the 20th century. So Barbara Cartland’s on […]
May 20, 2012
The Reproductive Success of a Poem
There’s more than one way of conceiving of the “success” of a poem; one that’s never talked about is its biological/evolutionary success, that is: How effectively does it replicate itself? […]
May 13, 2012
The Reconquest of the Long Form
There are, by my count, only two things that can save a long poem in English. Heterogeneity (Eliot and Pound; and those polyphonic, formally quite various sustained dramatic poems of […]