Hidden Just Beyond View: Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason
George interrupts us, clears her throat, makes us listen.
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Posts Tagged: Elizabeth Bishop
Poet-Cosmologist: A Conversation with Bruce Beasley
“The cusp of errand and awe is where poetry always is for me.”
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We’re All Unreliable Narrators: Talking with R.O. Kwon
R.O. Kwon discusses her debut novel, THE INCENDIARIES.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #131: Lisa Wells
“I always feel like I’m starting over. I don’t know how I ever wrote a poem. I really do have that feeling.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #127: Tara Skurtu
“A poem is not a perfect puzzle, yet it is precisely a perfect puzzle.”
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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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Visitations: Gwendolyn Brooks at One Hundred
A visitation is how I describe the past weeks walking with Gwendolyn Books. It is like she is just around every corner.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Iris Dunkle
Iris Jamahl Dunkle on her new collection Interrupted Geographies, writing against the pastoral tradition, the power of persona poems, and the town of Pithole.
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Saying What Shouldn’t Be Said: A Conversation with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, why writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world, and finding truths in fiction.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, the writers and books that influenced it, tackling addiction with compassion, and the magic of teenage girls.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Lucy Jane Bledsoe discusses her latest book, A Thin Bright Line, uncovering the remarkable story of her aunt, and illuminating history through the lens of imagination.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Martelli
Jennifer Martelli discusses her debut collection of poetry, The Uncanny Valley, growing up saturated with images of the Madonna, and her experience of motherhood first as a daughter and now as a mother.
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“Housefulls, Churchfulls, Airportsfull”
In an extended essay in the New Yorker, Megan Marshall, author of the forthcoming Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, writes about Bishop’s late, serendipitous move to Harvard where she met Alice Methfessel, a young “house secretary” who would become her caretaker, and the last great love of her life: “The poor heart doesn’t seem to […]
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 4): “Roosters”
the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare // with stupid eyes / while from their beaks there rise / the uncontrolled, traditional cries.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Janice N. Harrington
Janice N. Harrington on her new collection Primitive and critiquing the use of “primitive” to describe African American folk art.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #74: A Social Practice
Everywhere there is sterling musicianship, of the original, unexpected sort.
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The Rumpus Interview with Campbell McGrath
Campbell McGrath talks about his new collection, XX: Poems For The Twentieth Century, capitalism, history, and what it might mean to write a wordless poem.
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The Rumpus Interview with Robyn Schiff
Robyn Schiff talks about her collection A Woman of Property, the long con of “owning” land, her passion for early novels, how motherhood changed her poetry, and the generative powers of form.
...moreSelf-in-Landscape Art
It’s Women’s History Month at the Poetry Foundation. The editors peg Elizabeth Bishop’s poems—in volumes with titles like North & South, Questions of Travel, Geography III—to her wide-ranging geography, and to her illustrious cohort.
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The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show: Rick Barot
In Episode 13 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, Rick Barot discusses his newest collection, Chord, tone in poetry, and the selfies Bishop might’ve posted.
...moreBuddies, Bishop and Gunn
Colm Toíbín, author of On Elizabeth Bishop, has a lovely long reflection at the Guardian about Bishop’s friendship with Thom Gunn, and the parallels in the artists’ life and work. Bishop and Gunn both shied away from writing about mentally ill mothers and queer relationships for most of their lives, although Gunn addressed both in the 1990s. […]
...moreA New Read on Bishop
For a poet as anthologized as Elizabeth Bishop, it’s fair to say there’s a certain lack of serious criticism—or perhaps, critics thinking seriously—about her work, compared to the Modernists against whose influence she was writing. Eavan Boland reviews a new volume by Colm Tóibín that aims to begin closing the gulf. On Elizabeth Bishop is […]
...moreBuy Bishop’s North Haven
If you happen to know a poet with $130,000 burning a hole through his or her pocket, alert them at once: Elizabeth Bishop’s home in Nova Scotia is up for sale. Although Bishop lived there for only a few years, readers will recognize the landscape through its windows in poems throughout her career. The property […]
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The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show: Daniel Anderson
In Episode 5 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, Dave Roderick sits down with poet Daniel Anderson to chat about his latest collection, The Night Guard at the Wilberforce Hotel, finding the rhythm in lines of poetry, and baseball.
...moreElizabeth Bishop’s Favorite Island
We know Bishop primarily as the eager traveler who wrote of distant, tropical locations and lived for many years as an expat in Brazil. She was that, of course, but she was also an aficionado of her native landscape and climate. Our canon’s consummate poet of geography, maps, and the mystery of spatial awareness loved […]
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Insomnia” by Elizabeth Bishop
It is near the time of my college graduation. I’m graduating early, barely 20 years old. Among my friends, the stuff of my romantic self-sabotage is legendary.
...moreDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Dorothea Lasky v. Elizabeth Bishop
All of a sudden my inbox is filling up with links from friends to two essays related to poetry that have almost everything and nothing in common at once, and whose implications say a lot about how the art of poetry gets re- or de- artified. One is a link to an essay by Dorothea […]
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