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Poet Of The Ordinary

Book Review

Yet the mansion of fiction has many rooms, and enough of even its greatest writers do not fit our preconceived molds. Goodman was not that streetcorner babbler, wrapped up in remembered and invented anecdote, but a thinker, an observer, a contemplator.

Mrs. Reilly And Her Little Ignatius

Book Review

A Confederacy of Dunces is most triumphantly a symphony of voices, a wonderfully wide range of authentic-sounding voices which would be distinctive even if they were never named.

The Real Work

Poetry effects change by fiddling with the archetypes and getting at people’s dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change. A poet would be, in terms of the ecology of symbols, noting the main structural connections and seeing which parts of the symbol are no longer useful or applicable, though everyone is giving them credence.

Favorite Magazines

Muckraking, infamous mergers, the Jeffersonian ideal

My Work, My Job

Advertising, writing, nursing

Sunbeams

Task: to be where I am. / Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd / role: I am still the place / where creation does some work on itself.

Tomas Tranströmer

The Poor In Spirit, And The Rich

Book Review

Dr. Fischer is a dark God who grants us favors only at the cost of our humiliation, who eggs us on with snatches of happiness only in order to degrade us. He is a greedy God, as greedy as his creatures: he is greedy for our humiliation.

An Interview With Daphne Athas

From the minute you’re born you somehow know. But the blinders that are put up by society, and by legislated rules, are what people think of as truths. They’re not truths at all. They’re lies. They are confinements compared to the cosmic knowledge that exists.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude — An Appreciation

We forget, until a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude reminds us, that a metaphor can be a glimpse into the interconnectedness of things, and as such, a large new breath of possibility to our pallid imaginings of self.

Liberté