Books
The Good Life
We want things to be simple, but we know they aren’t, probably never were, and chances are will get only more messy with time. What’s a young poet to do, but try and take some control?
Weekend
Art
The Party We Are All Invited To
Jessica Stockholder lives in a contingent domain, which means it is very much like the one where most of us live.
Art
Disconnected Realities: The Art of David Barnett
Perhaps it was the joy of seeing contemporary art that could have fit comfortably within the Dadaglobe Reconstructed exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that opened my eyes so widely to Barnett's magic.
Music
Prince's 'Sign o’ the Times,' Part II (The Law of Genre)
Since genre is a perceived, externally imposed category rather than an intrinsic musical element, the job of assigning genre usually falls to the critic.
Music
Prince's 'Sign o’ the Times,' Part I (A Solitary Genius)
For an ostensible masterpiece, Prince’s Sign o’ the Times (1987) is suspiciously lacking in overt concept.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, the new African American museum, the troubles of nonprofit workers, Norton Museum's Cranach diptych, the Qatari art scene, colonial nostalgia, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Soft
"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
Books
Reader’s Diary: Frank Lima's ‘Incidents of Travel in Poetry’
“There are several Puerto / Ricans on the avenue today, which / makes it beautiful and warm,” wrote Frank O’Hara in “A Step Away from Them.” It was 1956, the day after Jackson Pollock’s funeral.
Books
Foreign Sounds or Sounds Foreign
Brandon Som’s first book of poems, The Tribute Horse, won the 2012 Nightboat Poetry Prize.
Art
Is It a Trojan Horse?
In 1989, after a protracted litigation, a jury of five voted four to one in favor of removing Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” (1981) from Federal Plaza in Manhattan, where it had stood for nearly a decade.
Art
Seymour Krim to William Saroyan: A Letter
You're surrounded by jerks, ass-kissers, sycophants.
Books
The Poetics of Embodiment: Elaine Kahn's 'Women in Public'
The poems in Elaine Kahn’s Women in Public are highly self-aware. They’re porous, riven with gaps and fragmentation; at the same time, they’re unquestionably "lyrical" in their concision and fluidity