April 28, 2019
“Can’t You Rest Now?”: Nightwood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Madness
I have a theory: the ending of Season 7, Episode 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Beneath You”) was inspired by Djuna Barnes’s queer modernist novel Nightwood (1936). I know it sounds […]
January 30, 2019
On Elisa Gabbert’s Lydia Davis and Completeness
I like to finish things, which is a failure; as James Richardson maintains in one of his (amazing) aphorisms, all stones are broken stones and to pretend otherwise is willful folly. I’ve […]
January 19, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XI: Insistence)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part X: Box, Box, Boxes, Boxes In)”] In addition to the overlapping concerns of form and content I began to consider in the previous post, Stein’s […]
September 7, 2017
Remembering John Ashbery’s Time and Space
Vladimir Nabokov’s confession in Speak, Memory (1951) that he does not believe in time might have been more shocking if it had come earlier in literary history; by the modernist […]
May 5, 2016
Why I’m Still Not Convinced that Meter is Physiological
I sparked a small feud last month when I wrote in this blog that “Iambic Pentameter Has Nothing to Do with Your Heart.” My essay took issue with a “pulse […]
September 23, 2013
Futurism Revisited: An Interview with Marjorie Perloff, Part I
[This interview, which will be published in parts, was preceded by an introduction; you can read that here.] The Kenyon Review: I was interested to learn that F. T. Marinetti was […]
June 30, 2012
“The real world we think we inhabit”
“We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit” is the old line by Feyerabend, discovered sometime in college, that often […]