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.
Barry Schwabsky
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016) and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, 2015). Imminently forthcoming is a new book of essays, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017).
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Reader’s Diary: Maurizio Lazzarato’s ‘The Making of the Indebted Man’
Debt is the crux where economics and morality intersect.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reader’s Diary: Jaimy Gordon’s ‘Lord of Misrule’
Jaimy Gordon passed through my field of vision some time in the early 1980s.
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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.
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“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 detached bits of information and cloudy rumors more than anything else.
Posted inPoetry
“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.
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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.
Posted inPoetry
Glow-in-the-Dark Jigsaw Pieces
I have a habit, when reading a good book of poetry, of looking for the places where the poet seems to be reflecting on his or her own sense of what poetry is. Arthur Sze, one of my favorite poets, writes, “If I sprinkle iron filings onto a sheet / / of paper, I make visible the magnetic lines / of the moment.”
