Writing
Reviews
If Jackson’s slim but astonishing oeuvre thus far boasts a leitmotif, it’s the (often male) doubles who embody some iteration of the dichotomy of the radical and the bourgeois—the guy who goes all in for life and love, and the guy who hedges his bets.
Wo’s is a drag poetics, intentionally unearthing all the unexamined bits of personhood, nature, and language itself in a sizzling burst of sequins.
These languages are kin; overlapping in vocabulary and structure, but diverging in pronunciation: Ukrainian, it is said, is more melodic.
A certain kind of glamor resides not just in possessing a void like the great emptiness—which lends the person who holds it an air of depth, impenetrability, and mystery—but in one’s reaching for destructive, impulsive, or obsessive remedies to fill that void.
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?
Essays
The three looked at the king like, wait, what the heck are you saying, and then they were given seven days to deliver the very heck in question: a real container for awe.
Our ideas and definitions of awe are in many ways about an experience of something “greater” than humanness; something to be fearful of. I don’t know that I have experienced actual awe. I’m also not sure I believe that it is something to seek.
People will think what they think of Detroit. Some will take the time to explore, to hear the joyful voices and music and birdsong that twist through its streets. Some will never give it a chance.
To feel joined in a collective that knows how personal and heartbreaking a cultural betrayal can be, and to share the feeling of being met where one is, at odds with surrendering, disappointed it isn’t another way.
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.
Interviews
I’m interested in men who are struggling to communicate what they feel because they have no language for how they feel.
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.
Excerpts
Then I realized “Damn, that’s fucked up” and ruminated, chewed on grass like a lilac cow in the Alps.
chog an experience in eppy set: {x},{x} smeers to {yyyyyy}, concresscing, cryssle (CR) to cemend (CM). i positt a numbmur (n), it hings
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