July 6, 2013
“Deeply and Irreverently”: How and What to Read
One of the usual defenses of reading widely in the Western tradition (or, say, in 20th century poetry) is that it improves your writing—that it’s the legwork necessary for the […]
February 19, 2013
Life to the Image, Death to the Word
Sometimes a specific, historical incident has the interpretability of a parable. An example: How the cannons in Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s last play (actually a collaboration with John Fletcher), set off […]
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 […]
November 16, 2012
The Literary Critic Considered as an Illuminator of Manuscripts
Of the forms literary criticism can take, the lowest asserts the critic’s taste in reading as a fact about a book; the middle attempts to draw general conclusions about […]
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 […]
October 19, 2012
Now or Never: The Writer and the Age
One thing that’s underestimated about writing is how now-or-never it is, how suddenly it crowds out of a few people. Many of the most powerful, permanent “ages” in literature have […]
September 22, 2012
Shakespeare’s body, Shakespeare’s ghost: erasure, canonicity, and the apophatic self
I’ll begin with a claim: that every text produces in its writer a sense of the self becoming unglued—that one creates, or expunges, meaning in the form of a literary […]
August 21, 2012
Parricide/Regicide/Deicide: A Few Notes on The Brothers Karamazov
First, a passage from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, regarding Comedy. “The obstacles to the hero’s desire, then, form the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them […]
August 16, 2012
Three Tendencies in English Language Poetry
A broad characterization of three tendencies in English language poetry, by no means exhaustive. The Asian tendency. Specifically, the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry. Imagery without commentary. Meaning […]
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 […]
July 16, 2012
Make it New While Keeping it Old
When it comes to translating a work that is, at once, radically different from what we are used to reading, as Greek tragedy is—both in its (multiple) tones/registers and its […]
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? […]