December 12, 2012
The Lessons of Objects: An Interview with Mark Doty
More than anything, Mark Doty seems to me an investigator of objects—of the things and beings that clutter the world, the microcosms inside microcosms inside our macrocosm. In his work […]
November 28, 2012
Reading a Legible Reality: Barthes and the Infinite Text
While perusing the KR blog archives this past week, I came across a great post by Hilary Plum about the Occupy movement, social vicissitudes, and the trouble with the “us” […]
November 15, 2012
In Which the Classics are Canvases: Matt Kish on Illustrating Melville and Conrad
Matt Kish’s project to create one image for every page of Moby-Dick takes its place in a long pantheon of artworks as veritably obsessed with Melville as Ahab was with […]
November 6, 2012
The Weight of What’s Left [Out]: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft
The choice to use erasure as a poetic technique is not, strictly speaking, a new one: in 1969, for instance, Marcel Broodthaers erased Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le […]
July 20, 2012
Black to green to gone: the lyric moment in Wright’s “Tattoos”
The tattoo, as a thing of memory, takes on memory’s double (or triple, or quadruple, or quintuple) life. Like a poem, it becomes prismic with the passage of time and […]
July 9, 2012
Black to green to gone: the tattoo as form and subject
To encode the past into one’s skin is both recursive and prophetic: recursive in that it makes the past a continual part of not just the present but the vehicle […]
June 11, 2012
A Humument: a lesson in un-reading (i)
(This post is the first segment in a series on Tom Phillips’s A Humument. The others—including an interview with Phillips—will appear later this month.) Though billed as “a treated Victorian […]
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 […]
February 28, 2012
Of ideogrammar
Just the other day a professor and mentor of mine gave me a copy of Volume III of the late Larry Eigner’s recently-released Collected Poems. What demarcates this collection most […]
January 19, 2012
A thousand words, a single elegy
I expected only dust when I opened the old photo album, but inside its plastic sleeves were the faces of a family. I flipped through the pages; they depicted a […]