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From Stephen Elliott
T. R. Hummer has a comely piece up on Slate, “The Intimacy of Walt Whitman’s ‘America,’” about the influence and pleasures of Walt Whitman, plus an alleged recording of Whitman reading lines from “America,” made by Thomas Edison:
...moreA funny thing happened on the way to President Obama’s second inauguration Monday. The president’s speech and Richard Blanco’s poem got reversed.
Broadly speaking, one’s expectations of political rhetoric is that, at its worst, it reduces complex argument to slogans and platitudes or, at its best, that it singles out constituencies and individual citizens in order to focus on the day-to-day concerns that society can address.
...moreWho isn’t a devotee of advice from writers about writing? One of my favorite books in this guilty-pleasure genre to come out lately is Dennis O’Driscoll’s collection of witticisms and one-liners, Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry.
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A modern retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Chris Adrian’s new novel The Great Night explores love and death at an evening feast in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park.“As those early days blurred into weeks, I watched my newborn son losing weight. How could it be that we did not know how to feed our son? Where was our midwife now? Why, in the middle of this enormous city, were we so isolated? We needed help. We were doomed. We’d always been doomed.”
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The stories in Mary Hamilton’s very, very short collection are vivid, surreal, experimental, funny, and emotionally devastating.
Whitman became a regular at Pfaff’s after getting fired from the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1859. The years before the Civil War were a decadent period where Whitman played the bon vivant, finding friends and lovers among the New York counterculture.
What does the internet cost around the world?
Walt Whitman’s levi’s commercial.
Architects Journal looks at the top 5 comic book cities.
Also: Paris as star map.
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How do you supersize a Rumpus Original Combo? That’s easy—just take a book review and an interview with the author, and add a Rumpus Original Poem to it!