April 5, 2018
An Interview With Leslie Jamison
Caroline Hagood: In The Recovering you braid literary criticism, memoir, and cultural criticism in an innovative manner. How do you see these different strands interacting with and enriching one another? […]
December 27, 2015
An End In Itself
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. — Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho I’ve been thinking about failure all month, ever since I wrote about it in the […]
March 26, 2015
Whitman Dies, as My Daughter Would Say, “For Real Life”
“I know I am deathless,” Whitman wrote, in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. “I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, I know […]
December 23, 2014
Ruefle, Redux (Part Three)
In her lecture “On Sentimentality” (collected in Madness, Rack, and Honey), Mary Ruefle provides the full text of Hart Crane’s “Chaplinesque” and then offers Crane’s own explication of the poem’s […]
November 23, 2014
Pitching and Defense
In today’s New York Times Book Review, Adam Kirsch and Leslie Jamison address a familiar question: “How has the social role of poetry changed since Shelley?” (This question is usually […]
August 28, 2014
Meditation on Leslie Jamison’s THE EMPATHY EXAMS (and beyond…) (Part Four of Six)
(Continued from Part Three) When Jamison describes her experience of driving into the state—a moment more crucial than it might initially seem, because this essay, like The Empathy Exams as […]
August 28, 2014
Meditation on Leslie Jamison’s THE EMPATHY EXAMS (and beyond) (Part Three of Six…)
(Continued from Part Two) Ultimately, Jamison gets so much about West Virginia right: the spellbinding beauty “honeycombed” with corruption beneath its surface, and how “People with political influence and powerful […]
July 31, 2014
Meditation on Leslie Jamison’s THE EMPATHY EXAMS (Part Two of Six)
[Continued from Part One] Earlier, I almost took off on a tangent, using a fairy-tale metaphor to describe Jamison’s initial reaction to West Virginia. I loosed my mind on some […]
July 31, 2014
Meditation on Leslie Jamison’s THE EMPATHY EXAMS (Part One of Six)
In “Fog Count,” an essay in The Empathy Exams that spun out of her trip to visit a friend incarcerated in West Virginia, Leslie Jamison describes how she falls, weak-kneed, […]