The Benefits of Tickling
Cabinet of Wonders takes an in-depth look at tickling as pain relief, and at the medical benefits it can provide. At my wedding, one of my groom’s vows was a…
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Brian Spears
912 posts
Brian Spears is Senior Poetry Editor of The Rumpus and the author of A Witness in Exile (Louisiana Literature Press, 2011). His poem “Upon Reading That Andromeda Will One Day Devour Triangulum and Come For Us Next” was featured in Season 9 of Motion Poems.
Brian’s Saturday Morning Links
Not enough sleep? Echoes of a faint hangover? Then it’s time for Saturday Morning Links. Dahlia Lithwick and Doug Kendall point out that conservative politicians who are upset about empathetic…
Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
It’s a somber weekend, for obvious reasons, but there’s a lot going on in the poetry world, and I’m here to give it to you. Derek Wolcott’s past rears its…
An Essay on Criticism–The Sequel
Normally I would save a link like this for my Poetic Lives Online column later tonight, but this deserves a story all its own. Geoff Nunberg of Language Log is…
Rediscovering the Forgotten
The drive to digitize ancient manuscripts is growing quickly, and in the process, scholars are discovering works they never realized they had. The current technology is good enough that scholars…
The Language of the Beard
As one who determined five years ago, after having shaved my beard off to remind myself what the natural contours of my face looked like, to never go without facial…
Craig Arnold: 1967-2009
Not all the details have been released yet, but the word from Japan is that poet Craig Arnold died after suffering a leg injury and falling from a cliff. From…
Brian’s Saturday Morning Links
Has it been this way since the invention of the portrait? Does every generation look back at family pictures and wonder what the hell they were thinking? Overthinking It has…
Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Congratulations to Carole Ann Duffy, Britain’s new Poet Laureate, and both the first woman and the first openly gay person to hold the position. Mayday Magazine hosts a roundtable on…
Obey the DeeJay
I hadn’t thought about it this way before, perhaps because I’m rarely in a dance club anymore, and when I was in them, I was generally too blitzed to pay…
Telling Our Stories
One of the few compensations of growing up as a member of a restrictive, some might even say cultish, religion, is that if you manage to get free of it…