Reading Ferlinghetti in the Age of Trump
This lesson feels especially relevant to our moment: that it’s possible to be both a frustrated activist and also a present and joyful human being.
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Posts Tagged: Letters to a Young Poet
The House of Fiction Has Many Rooms: Talking with Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez discusses her seventh novel, The Friend, her fondness for writing about animals, and the ways the literary world has changed.
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Gayle Brandeis’s The Art of Misdiagnosis
After my mom hangs herself, I become Nancy Drew. I am looking for clues, for evidence. Answers.
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The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos discusses Abandon Me, confessional writing, Billie Holiday, reenacting trauma, cataloguing narratives, and searching for identity.
...morePoets in Place
Poet Ange Mlinko responds to a challenge from FSG’s Works in Progress series, to “tackle a question—or invent a new one—that lies within [Rilke’s] Letters to a Young Poet.” Mlinko muses on poets and places: do writers of beautiful lines need to be in beautiful places? Her answer, not surprisingly, pivots on the power of language.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Be Wise, Drink the Wine
Be it Latin or poetry, or whatever it was—I was feeling woozy by then. If I couldn’t love what I was reading, I took it, it was better to have never read at all.
...moreThe Middle of Things
Amending Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Andrew Solomon offered advice to young writers at this year’s Whiting Writers’ Awards. An adaptation of the speech appears in the New Yorker.
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