“I live in the mist beyond time and place, where imagination and dreams meet, and music is born on golden wings destined to pierce the veils of mystery. It is I who whisper from the far reaches into a mortal’s thoughts. It is I who strikes the heart chords and makes them hum with the joyous sound of creation. I am the cause to her effect and affection.”
Hold it. Wait a minute. Cut! My kid sister will …
“Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.”
This is the kind of quote which typifies Edward Abbey. It will make some people laugh out loud, and others shake their heads. The greatest thing about Abbey was that he really wouldn’t have given a damn whether you liked it or …
There is nothing more apt to write about in this political climate than the link between civilization and barbarity, beauty and violence. As a politically and ideologically motivated war breaks out about us, we can justifiably enter into the writings of W. B. Yeats - a poet who collapsed the boundary between our particular categories when he uttered a simple phrase that may be termed a paradox, an oxymoron, or an expression of absolute ambivalence - “A terrible beauty is born.”
This one refrain, the …
Andrew Lundwall: Lyn, in terms of your poetry, could you elaborate on your vision? What do you seek to accomplish as a poet, as a writer? Do you consider yourself to be an integral part of 21st century literature and why?
Lyn Lifshin: Vision is one of those rather abstract lofty words I don’t really connect with poetry. I write poems that I hope will move people, let the reader feel someone else feels as they do though they never realized that. I hope the …
“i speak without reservation from what i know and who i am. i do so with the understanding that all people should have the right to offer their voice to the chorus whether the result is harmony or dissonance, the worldsong is a colorless dirge without the differences that distinguish us, and it is that difference which should be celebrated not condemned. should any part of my music offend you, please do not close your ears to it. just take what you can use and …
What are the new circumstances - and how might we react to them?
That’s a question that the best of science fiction tackles - the best in the old genre traditions dating back to the thirties and before. And happily, last week.
Due to a chain of coincidence stretching back years, I’ve come into temporary possession of an advance copy of something called Custer’s Last Jump and other collaborations by a fellow named Howard Waldrop. This novelist and short story writer has, as is the …
It would be almost impossible to draw a caricature of Gunter Grass because his features already appear to be a caricature of someone else’s face. His drooping eyelids, the spectacles perched at end of a long nose and the omnipotent pipe in mouth make him look like a cartoon a street artist may have sketched of James Joyce.
The link between the two could have remained entirely superficial, only arising if the two were mistaken at an identity parade, were it not for some words …
Even in a life constantly teetering on the edge and possessed by moments of genius, there was no more spectacular day in the life of Hart Crane than the day he left this world.
The facts are that over 70 years ago, the poet was on the SS Orizaba, a ship traveling 275 miles north east of Havana from Mexico to New York. It was there he drank copious amounts of alcohol, and after several violent outbursts, had to be locked in his cabin. It …
History can be generous or traitorous to even the greatest, the most untouchable of writers. Time can make Nobel Prize winners redundant and can inject new life, fresh significance into the previously unknown. History has been rightly kind to the likes of Miller, Camus and Gunter Grass, it has not been so compassionate towards Kipling, Forster or Wodehouse. History doesn’t know what to do with W.B. Yeats. Doomed to be consigned to the backs of now defunct bank notes or rarely …
