Books
Reader's Diary: Franklin Bruno's 'Armed Forces’
I keep wondering whether it’s really possible to write at length and in depth about this kind of music.
Barry Schwabsky
Books
Reader's Diary: Daniel Hoffman's ‘Next to Last Words’
On its last day of existence — or, more particularly, on a day after its last day, when it reopened just for this purpose — the St. Mark’s Bookshop sold off all of its remaining stock at $2 a copy.
Books
Reader's Diary: Maurizio Lazzarato's ‘The Making of the Indebted Man’
Debt is the crux where economics and morality intersect.
Books
Reader's Diary: Mary Mothersill's ‘Beauty Restored’
Last summer I found this copy of a book I’d long been curious about on the “discard” shelves of the East Hampton Library.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Juliana Spahr’s ‘That Winter the Wolf Came’
Poetry not always but periodically seeks its upper limit — music, as readers of Louis Zukofsky know — and that includes Juliana Spahr’s.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘The Long Road of Sand’
Sometimes you get to know writers best in their minor works; a commissioned text can disclose more than an obsessively personal project.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Bernadette Mayer’s 'Sonnets'
My editors asked me for notes on books I’d been reading — about three hundred words. I’ve already figured out that it’s not in me to be quite that concise.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Jaimy Gordon’s 'Lord of Misrule'
Jaimy Gordon passed through my field of vision some time in the early 1980s.
Books
A Superior Notebook: Richard Hell’s ‘Massive Pissed Love’
When Richard Hell’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp was published two years ago, it got a lot of favorable notice, but I never really thought the book — an account of the writer’s life up to about 1984 — was properly understood.
Books
“We Need a New Skin Color”: The Racial Imagination of Dada
The centenary of Dada is almost upon us. If the movement had an identifiable beginning, it was certainly at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, where Richard Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Hans Arp and others gathered for events that have come down to us in d
Poetry
“Quirky Things That Happen to Me”: More Notes on Recent Poetry Publications
I never set out to be a critic of poetry, and still refuse the label. Actually writing poems is already thankless enough.
Books
Language as Maternal
George Oppen published his first book, Discrete Series, in 1934; his second, The Materials, emerged 28 years later, in 1962. But even Oppen and Bunting were raring to go in comparison to Wong May, whose third collection of poems, Superstitions, came out in 1978.