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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Posts Tagged: Emerson
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 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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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.
...morePernicious 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 and Whitman to Safran Foer and Franzen.
...moreThe 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.
...moreThe 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.
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