Writing
Reviews
Whatever answers are to be found lie in the blank space around them, that looming, claustrophobic blankness. Snow. Shame. History. Monstrosity. The steaming, stinking heap of it. Carson lets it answer for itself.
To begin with “klang” is inherently onomatopoetic: you get the primary sound and also its “klang,” you get the signification and its associative resonance. So many of Tranströmer’s poems are about listening, or even living, in a kind of sonic aftermath.
It is not uncommon for love to become transactional over time, and for ideals like romance to eventually give way to revenge and hatred.
Because the question, as Joudah points out, is not repeatedly being asked: do you believe that Palestinian lives are equal to Israeli lives and Jewish lives?
Unlike these other texts of loss, he never settles on one position, the memoir reading like a “revolving door” of these roles: Pathologist, Mad Lover, Investigator, Director, Freudian Psychoanalyst, Diarist.
Can one tell Twain’s story from Jim’s perspective without creating a flimsy, second-hand imitation of Jim’s voice which dooms the experiment from the start?
Perhaps, newly attuned to her own insatiable desire to create, she would reach her own form of understanding from the drafts that she would copy out eleven times by hand.
It was not so much a “dreaminess” as a wakefulness, an increasingly desperate one of the more-than-human, the more-than-now, which modern history throttled and tried to deny.
As a midwesterner, my life has been saturated with Alberta’s oil. My first car, a used Ford F-150 with a bench seat stained brown from the plumber who owned it before me, had dual fuel tanks that held over thirty gallons of gasoline. Much of that gas came from Alberta oil.
Ishchenko argues that the burden of the post-Soviet left is debatably its greatest asset: that people remember how it felt to be part of communism’s utopian project, and that before today’s war, a strong plurality of Ukrainians felt ambivalent about, not hostile to, its cause.
Essays
A kind of reading that doesn’t just describe what happened in a story, but actually performs it. The only way to read the story is to play it, and the only way to play the story is to do it, to completely embody it.
Awe is a kind of surprise that resists pity or cynicism. It is not relative or subjective. It’s an active and dynamic process that cannot be separated from its twin concept, wonder.
I am taken by the unique vibration his work strikes deep in my organs, how different these internal resonances are from how DeLillo is regularly discussed in the contemporary landscape—how his work makes me feel, to be blunt about it.
I suspect that everything I do or say after 11 pm is lunatic. Panic about it at 5 am. In real life a police officer shoots a man twenty times in his own backyard. Is there someplace else to stand? No. (Shaved pubes.)
Since a certain amount of funding is potentially coming from grants, donors, and (hopefully) the press’s Board of Directors, there are more variables to consider.
I cry a little, too, because it all feels so cliché. That I should look at my mother and realize she’ll die one day. That she should notice my tears becoming heavenly–sorry, heavy–and approach me, open-armed.
Because the place we’re standing now matters so much less than the ingenious and idiotic ways we managed to get there.
The pieces in this series find ways to speak into and around awe—often figured as speechlessness, to be dumbfounded—and how its overwhelming facts can run through our lives.
We have to do so much for you, don’t you see? You play all day while we work so hard.
It can’t all be true, or as bad as they make it. But there’s no plumb, exactly, for these things.
Interviews
Because this issue has been overlooked from a political and cultural and intellectual standpoint, partially because of its association with girls, I wanted to give it a really serious treatment.
The new view of intelligence work is all about creating information, spreading and disrupting narratives. It’s no longer about keeping accurate records or models of the world; it’s about creating a world.
Denying fame, or incarnation as a public figure, does not necessitate abandoning pose.
I find labels like “spiritual but not religious” fall short for me. It’s a label that misses the tension behind this relationship to faith, doubt, and questioning the institution.
And there’s manufactured insecurity, which is the kind of insecurity that facilitates the concentration of power and profit, the kind of insecurity imposed on us by our economic and political system.
To be a poet in the Anthropocene means trying to incorporate the structures we use in poetry or the kinds of imaginative, weirdo thinking we enact into our other modes of coping and relating.
Poetry is, or should be, a kind of thinking; it’s nothingness’s kingdom, where everything is possible. I use poetry to find out what I think.
And maybe that brings us to the myth of chronology: linear time equals progression. No. There is no linear progression and we’re reproducing subjection again and again.
As long as you have things to say, you don’t have to package or repackage things in a very intellectual way. If the thought is forceful enough, it will find a way to convey itself, even if it’s in a broken language, even in broken English.
I guess it is labeled as a story collection. So they’re all—for the sake of categorization—they’re short stories, but I don’t know. Some of them were published as prose poems, and I think that letting them both be categorized and also evasive of categorization is kind of cool.
Excerpts
I’d like the work I do to matter somehow, which is all the proof I need that it doesn’t.
& that someone asked the blushed face father will he see him again & he said absolutely absolutely & I thought we are the same
Each center describes what happens in another center
I’m not a cynic, I’m here
Watercolor in dream phoneme I hope this reaches you up like where.
as melt, magnolia, test cricket, and breath
manta, sway, Cairngorms, slow spinning
paper cranes on the mantel hampered
by symbolic nature but why not
be more is it justice to want and want
You make up
the better part
of an expression
to What are you susceptible by description
the there there, when it repeats