December 17, 2012
Why Ashbery is So Dull
Those who dislike John Ashbery’s poetry often complain that they “don’t understand it.” As any Ashbery fan will explain, while secretly thinking you a retrogressive muggle, there is nothing to […]
November 8, 2012
Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences
At the most basic level, what’s success for a biological organism is success for a literary one—whatever survives, wins. A sequence of words has an effect on a given […]
September 16, 2012
Stitching shut the holes: on concealed erasure
I began my last post with a discussion of the multiple valences the word “erasure” has when used to describe a poetic technique. But just as there are many different […]
March 25, 2012
Masterpieces in public: on common space and common language
“…Everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as […]