The fire on the American mountainside was dying down. My thought was that horror cannot be cheated if hope is to become believable.
The fire on the American mountainside was dying down. My thought was that horror cannot be cheated if hope is to become believable.
There must be thousands of us non-Southerners with similar secret histories, people who profited from the crime of slavery and continue to do so.
Because he wanted all the attention at the funeral, all the condolences, all the pity. The big man in sorrow. Jakob weeping.
They are women who want to look into the mirror and be satisfied with their reflection. Envy is born when you look into the mirror and don’t like what you see there. Everything about this sin begins with the eyes.
Andrew J. Moorhouse of Fine Press Poetry talks about what brought him to the life-changing decision to establish the press.
You either believe Kent Johnson exists or he doesn’t. Neither is true. In his poems, translations, conceptual acts anchored on the page, Kent Johnson is there and not there.
“There is little financial reward in publishing poetry but a great deal of satisfaction” – Rob A. Mackenzie on the origins and history of Blue Diode Press
Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous writers of the 20th century. Read about why his short story, “The Pedestrian”, is still so important today.
This Marinetti on his second and final trip to Russia was less like one of the early figures of punk than a bloated 70s rock dinosaur living on past glory and greed. Instead of cocaine he had fascism, and just like the rock megastars with their producers and managers he had the backing of a bald, fat megalomaniac.
Waking in the middle of the night, I down a glass of water then plod off to pee, which seems funny enough to laugh about,
On December 13, 1963, approximately three weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, the twenty-two-year-old folksinger Bob Dylan received the
APPARITIONS I. Once upon a time, there was a woman who lost her son. She sent him off, in the care of some men
Christopher Fahey Nurtured Forms November 9 to December 7 Java Project Greenpoint, Brooklyn Nature and nurture, nebulous forces that shape us. Christopher Fahey’s biomorphic sculptures
SEX AND THE HOLOCAUST I’ve been masturbating for as long as I can remember. Sometimes it seems that I came out of the womb
Fiends Fell by Tom Pickard Flood Editions, 2017 224 pages Reviewed by Joshua Weiner Tom Pickard’s reputation as a poet of the
Prose Poetry and the City by Donna Stonecipher Parlor Press, 2017 182 pages Reviewed by Kate Singer I once asked Donna Stonecipher
LIFE INUNDATING ART: KNAUSGÅRD BRINGS HIS LENGHTY STRUGGLE TO AN END WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, so the famous edict goes. And read?
Is it possible to thrive while sick? To live large not in spite of one’s illness but because of it? Japanese artist Kusama Yayoi voluntarily
GERMANS There are eleven of them. Why I remember the exact number is uncertain, perhaps because it’s enough to field a football team. They arrive
PRAGUE AND MEMORY Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in a three-part series of a new work by American poet and critic
PRAGUE AND MEMORY, 2018 Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part series of a new work by American poet and
PRAGUE AND MEMORY Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in a three-part series of a new work by American poet and critic
HARD WAX I pull into the Elizabeth Wende Breast Care facility in Brighton, shut off my car and walk in the doors. This
CLEARING THE THROAT I used to cox. Hours on the water calling cadence and strokes. Guiding the boat’s body, guiding the rudder, guiding
Would it be possible to take a poem by Richard Wilbur, adjust its spelling and some of its references and insert it unobtrusively in
TOWARD THE END OF HIS LIFE the Czech poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek published a poem that was uncharacteristic in two respects. Its last
I DIDN’T KNOW the late Bill Knott very well. By the time I arrived in Boston in 1987, Bill was firmly ensconced by his
The following essay is an excerpt from Joshua Weiner’s Berlin Notebook (available on Amazon) out now from the Los Angeles Review of Books _______________________________________________________________________
It was the great Russian thinker, Alexander Herzen, who railed against the power of abstractions, of any of the isms in our lives, to
By Robert Archambeau If one were to shout the question “who is a literary genius?” in the general direction of a gaggle of young
THE BLACK SWAN — Translated from the Danish by Michael Goldman Red at the bottom, a green stripe,
HANS, THAT HANS He has to get off at Fredericksburg Hill, right before the city of Copenhagen, a so-called freeloader on the postal
I met Thomas McGrath in the summer of 1987. I was writing a master’s thesis on him, and had traveled by train to Minneapolis with a six-pack of Buckhorn beer — godawful beer favored by McGrath — to meet him for an interview.
IT’S NOT A POEM Phil Levine died on Saturday. While the newspaper obituaries discussed his position as a “poet of the common man,”
Editor’s Note: This is a condensation of sections from James Walling’s upcoming biography of the suspense novelist John D. MacDonald, to be published by Schaffner
By Andrew Field In two letters written to the visual artist Loren MacIver, dating from 1949 and 1953, respectively, Elizabeth Bishop sums up, through
_______________________________________________________________________ Read Roddy Doyle’s “Bullfighting” here. _______________________________________________________________________ I’d always disliked family life. Even as a kid, I felt that the most pleasant moments had
“Not balances that we achieve but balances that happen” — Wallace Stevens Some time
____________________________________________________________________ Read Jack Kerouac’s 11th Chorus of Desolation Blues. ____________________________________________________________________ I first encountered Jack Kerouac’s 11th Chorus of Desolation Blues
CITIES AND CITY PEOPLE (an excerpt) Cities and City People: Berlin, 1919 Essays by Arthur Eloesser Translated from the German by
Short story short: A young man has sex with his girlfriend on the floor of her parents’ apartment. They are discovered by her
FOUR DAYS IN ILLINOIS WITH MY OLD MAN My dad got lost on the way to the airport the weekend we flew to
____________________________________________________________________ Read Marvin Bell’s Wednesday ____________________________________________________________________ Marvin Bell’s poem “Wednesday” is the anthem of every working poet. It first appeared in the
____________________________________________________________________ Read Mark Levine’s “Then for the Seventh Night” (Follow the “Read an Excerpt” link”) ____________________________________________________________________ At some point during the last
____________________________________________________________________ Read Bob Hicok’s Bottom of the Ocean. ____________________________________________________________________ Some poems come along at the right time. They come along,
It was the year I became a fool and moved to Prague. That’s when I first read Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “The Spinoza of
The Cultural Revolution officially ended in 1976. Yet over thirty years later the shadow of this so-called Cultural Revolution has not disappeared. Among Chinese artists, at least, it has become ever deeper.
from A PREFACE TO SADNESS AT LEAVING Erje Ayden is the traditional “foreigner,” perhaps no more foreign to our language and ways than
the thing i love most is his strange relation to the reader. he speaks in a way no other narrator, or author’s voice, does, that
WHO IS A CONTEMPORARY POET? What does it mean to be a contemporary poet? It’s a trickier question than it seems, and not
LIKABLE? WHO CARES! Two years ago, after suffering a string of losses, the most devastating of which was the death of my beloved father,
By Siegfried Mortkowitz I first came across Frank O’Hara’s poetry in a small, square-format Grove Press paperback titled Meditations in an Emergency (the
THE CAGE DOOR IS ALWAYS OPEN – by Tom Bass Editor’s Note: This essay by Tom Bass celebrates and explores the Tangier of Paul
by Michael Stein Anton Webern was killed on September 15, 1945 in Mittersill, Austria. For a long time no one knew the exact
[Read Derek Mahon’s “The Snow Party“] The Snow Party’ is the title poem of a collection Derek Mahon published in 1975. As a
Drawing of Arthur Rimbaud by Paul Verlaine By Jon Stone [Read “Au Cabaret-Vert, cinq heures du soir”] Sometimes I think Rimbaud’s writings should be banned.
Elizabeth Bishop once wrote in a letter that “undoubtedly gender does play an important part in the making of any art, but art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art.”
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