Emerson
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The Rumpus Saturday Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 3
To deny violence is to do it. Our surprise at Sandy Hook and Cold Springs and Columbine is a form of violence in its own right.
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Corinne Lee and Finding an Antidote to America’s Toxicity
Poet Corinne Lee on writing her epic book-length poem Plenty and finding new ways to live in a rapidly changing world.
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On Self-Reliance: Frank Ocean as Emersonian Hero
As Emerson recognizes, someone who couldn’t care less about how they come across is all the more charismatic and convincing.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Monica Youn
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Monica Youn about her new collection Blackacre, hypothetical tracts of land, Milton, and infertility.
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Pernicious Individualism
If anything, Emerson’s transparent eyeball is now a webcam hacked by the NSA. Over at Lit Hub, Jonathon Sturgeon writes about the supposedly rampant and undying force of individualism in American writing—the “imperial self,” an all-encompassing and socially blind thing—from Emerson…
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The Rumpus Interview with Connie Wanek
Connie Wanek discusses her latest book, Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems, the challenge of looking back at older poems, and what prioritizing writing looks like.
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The Great American Sermon
After all, the essay, in its American incarnation, is a direct outgrowth of the sermon: argumentative, insistent, not infrequently irritating. Minimalist prose. Maximalist ideas. A long tradition of anti-intellectualism. Adverbs. At the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham asks what makes an essay American?
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The Rumpus Interview with Chris Jennings
Chris Jennings talks about his new book Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, incremental reform, Transcendentalists, Shakers, and creating a more perfect future.
