Everything

AND THEN WE SAW THE DAUGHTER OF THE MINOTAUR Poet, comma. It is thus the delay, which is also a beginning. That we can link eyes across her time-space continuum is another hyena. The female elongates, bares fangs, and a trash compactor recycles. Hyena gives in the recycling fashion. Phoenix, no more false flight from [...]

The assertion that “Contemplations” is primarily concerned with the ascension of the soul may bump against prevailing notions. Some critics have said Bradstreet was more in love with the earth than heaven since the lines that directly address the idea of heaven often fall short: “too often merely traditionally rendered passages pale before some of [...]

When I was 4 or 5, my grandmother loved to ask me where I was from: “Pittsfield, Massachewits” I’d say. Like a sneeze. She took a special delight in my inability to grasp and order all the necessary phonemes. We moved from Massachusetts before I turned 10, before I really appreciated the important literary contributions [...]

Mother puts on my lipstick standing behind me, dragging the lipstick across my lips as if they were her own. Her free hand steadies my face. It is the red of her nails I want on my mouth, the nails so lacquered they catch the flash of my camera and hold it. Mother puts on [...]

Primalism: the testing for all aesthetic value wagered on the energies of the primal, the root, the raw, the atavistic, the unconscious, with a corresponding mistrust of the social conventions, the art of the decorative and contrived, and, above all, a dismissal of the thinking faculty save in its aspect as “process of ongoing revery.” [...]

1. So what are some other major facets of Ashbery’s relationship to American pragmatism? How would we characterize pragmatism, and in what ways does Ashbery’s work suggest our characterization? Does Ashbery ever explicitly mention James, Dewey, or Rorty? (I know of only one place currently where Rorty mentions Ashbery; it is in his introduction to [...]

Exile: an invitation to a struggle (from My Rice tastes like the lake. Berkeley, CA: Apogee Press, 2011) Mother tells me to eat well. Mother who knows best, asks, how are you? She has asked this all of my life. There are only two answers to this question. Two answers keep us mother and son, [...]