Setting Free the Poets
Levi Asher aka Marc Eliot Stein August 28, 2013 5 Comments
Poet Robert Pinsky has written a book about the plight of modern poets, Singing School
… Read the restTime was, a poem stood the test of time because one
Poet Robert Pinsky has written a book about the plight of modern poets, Singing School
… Read the restTime was, a poem stood the test of time because one
The odds didn’t look good for the new film version of The Great Gatsby this weekend, I thought, as I donned my plastic 3-D glasses and entered the dark theater. I wasn’t expecting to like the movie much at all.
I don’t love glitzy Hollywood spectacle, though I was willing … Read the rest
If you’re trying to analyze F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age novel The Great Gatsby and you’re not thinking about Dante’s Inferno, you’re missing an obvious connection.
The connection is easy to spot and hard to dispute, though it rarely comes up in discussion of the book. I haven’t heard … Read the rest
Because the enigmatic South African novelist J. M. Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands is out of print everywhere I’ve looked, I always figured the book must have been a weak start to a great career.
Dusklands was published in 1974, years before Coetzee started hitting his powerful stride with The Life … Read the rest
If proof is ever needed that some of our most talented creative geniuses keep a low profile, we only need to look to Richard Hell, an experimental poet, ex-punk star, novelist and now memoirist, who lives a humble but glorious life around downtown New York City and graces us with … Read the rest
Ask me to name my favorite living writer, and I just might name J. M. Coetzee, formerly of South Africa, now of Australia. I think his best novels are Disgrace
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’
Thus spake literary critic Isaiah Berlin in a famous 1951 essay about the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy
I was so totally, completely in the tank for David Shields. All he had to do was write a book I halfway liked.
David Shields is an author and teacher of creative writing who published in 2010 a collage of thoughts about modern literature called Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
I’ve been trying for years to get a firm grasp on the work of Jacques Derrida. This philosopher has never fully caught on with the general population in the United States of America (yes, we do have popular philosophers here, but unfortunately they are Aristotle, John Locke and Ayn Rand). … Read the rest