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How to Tell a True Origin Story of a Novel
By Nina Schuyler
“My novel is about a female mathematician, Virginia, who uses artificial intelligence to bring back her dead lover. The two anecdotes I just told you might seem like the origin story of my novel. If someone tells you an origin story like this, don’t believe it.”
Hidden Mischief: Some Thoughts on Tate and Edson
By Robin Arble
“The mischief in Tate and Edson’s poems plays with form as much as content. Already bored with the subversion inherent in the ‘the prose poem’—an oxymoron, a floating stone—their poems straddle the line between verse and prose.”
Notes on a Poem: Nathan McClain’s Labor Day: Brighton Beach
By Robin Arble
“Nathan is skeptical of the prose poem because he thinks, like many, but not all poets, that the line break is a fundamental element of successful poetry, and any poem that abandons the line break must replace it with something that succeeds in doing everything the line break does.”
This Powerful Rhyme: A Helplessly Wandering Essay on a Willfully Meandering Poem
By Art Beck
In our neo-Orwellian world, is it adage, cliche’, or just hypothesis to say “the pen is mightier than the sword”? Does “the pen” equate with “the truth”? Or, since we’re talking about sword fights, aren’t the feints and parries of “alternative facts” every bit as much a weaponized pen as the sincerity of a straightforward lunge?
I Really Hate You, Doctor Fell, But Love’s Funny That Way
By Art Beck
In October 2016, I was honored to be a panelist at the annual American Literary Translators Conference. The panel title was “Crossing the Line,” and the topic description was as follows: “What happens when a translation gets adopted as an original in its target culture?”
Believing in the Sense of the Miraculous: Clarence Wolfshohl and the Art of Poetry as Fine Letterpress
By Wally Swist
I want to offer my appreciation of Clarence Wolfshohl’s Coal Mine Landscape and Armadillos & Groundhogs and a few other of my neighbors, both lovely letterpress books bearing his master craftsman’s stamp of quality.
Letter from Paris
By Katy Masuga
Salut au monde! As expected this time of year and this time of evening and this place in the world, the sky is an incredible ivory blue and, yes, the clouds themselves are a luminescent pink strung across the vast yet controlled open space, encapsulated on the edges by centuries- and even millennia-old neighborhoods, like cotton candy pulled between sticky fingers or even just stretched cotton itself, in the way that it floats whimsically atop fields drifting with the breeze falling and rising and leaving parts of its body behind, spreading itself interminably among the numerous dark, dry stems and burnt, crackling leaves.
Letter from Hong Kong
By Lucas Klein
Reviewing exiled Chinese poet Bei Dao’s first full-length collection The August Sleepwalker in English in 1990, a professor quipped, “These could just as easily be translations from a Slovak or an Estonian or a Philippine poet. It could even be a kind of American poetry….”
Carta desde Montreal/Letter from Montreal
By Francisco García González, English translation by Mary G. Berg
Amigos, disculpen, pero escribir es menos original que lo que uno se imagina. Solo se trata de un acto de registro que unos hacen mejores que otros. Debe ser el talento. Tarde más de treinta años para darme cuenta que todos poseemos una mente literaria y que dicha cosa no para de generar narrativa. Eso es biología. Fascinante, además.