Blog

Climate Nihilism (and Charles Baudelaire)

July 18, 2022 - By Maurizio Ferraris

(Photo of Charles Baudelaire: Nadar, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
 

"A theory of true civilization.
It rests not in gas, nor in steam, nor in table-turning.
It rests in the diminution of the traces of original sin."

The table-turning ("tables tournantes") was that of spiritualist seances, and the apothegm is Charles Baudelaire’s, from My Heart Laid Bare (1897, translation by Rainer J. Hanshe, 2017). What Baudelaire intends here is a denunciation of tekhnē and the Promethean arrogance of his age,...

10 Questions for Akhim Alexis

July 12, 2022 - By Aviva Palencia

“It is the usual disposition of corners, to be polyvocal, and so, between the voices of future morbidities and past registers, I contribute my current grammar to the orchestra of echoes.”
—from “In This Small Place,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I must have been around 11 or 12 when I wrote a poem about PawPaw. It was the first time I remember actually constructing a poem line by line. I entered it into a children’s poetry competition that was hosted by the national library and surprisingly won. I actually still have the book I won, it’s called Poetry Speaks to Children and has poems by Rita Dove, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes to name a...

Recuperating a Legacy: 32 Poems/ 32 Poemas by Hyam Plutzik

July 11, 2022 - By Aitor Bouso Gavín

Hyam Plutzik's 32 Poems/ 32 Poemas (Suburbano Ediciones, 2022)

32 Poems/ 32 Poemas (2021) is a fully bilingual (Spanish and English) collection of selected poems by the twentieth-century American poet Hyam Plutzik (1911-1962). The three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents from Belarus. Plutzik, who was a Professor of English at the University of Rochester until his premature death in 1962, grew up in a non-anglophone household, where Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish were the languages spoken. Plutzik did not learn English until he attended grammar school in a schoolhouse in Connecticut. His...

Florida Beach 4-Pack #2

July 8, 2022 - By Marsha Bryant

Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach…
—Wallace Stevens, “Fabliau of Florida”

The summer is now getting hotter,
But your beach beer need not taste like water!
Here are Florida brews
I’ve selected for you
To pursue as a beach blanket squatter.

My recs make a 4-pack and flight,
So I’ve fashioned my sequence just right:
From lager to Tripel,
These sippable tipples
Will brighten your mouth with delight.

1
Let’s begin with this lager, Tates Helles.
From the Big Bend it hails to embellish
Its pale golden drops
With a kiss of the hops.
It pours clear, this crisp beer that refreshes.

2
A...

10 Questions for Rebecca Hazelton

July 7, 2022 - By Aviva Palencia

You’re dead for so long and young just a little. So why not
kiss if there’s kissing on offer? There isn’t much time
to be beautiful, and even less to know it. Even now,
you are losing your poreless luster.
—from "Middle-Aged Sonnet," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As a teenager I wrote a vampire novel—or I tried to write a vampire novel. The main character was very tortured for Mysterious Reasons and very little happened. Fortunately, it’s long lost and the world is better for that. Most of my early work was just thinly veiled recounting of my personal angst. That hasn’t really changed.

What writer(s) or works...