A Legacy of Wisdom: The Final Voicemails by Max Ritvo
Is death a miracle or destruction?
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Posts Tagged: Emily Dickinson
Poet-Cosmologist: A Conversation with Bruce Beasley
“The cusp of errand and awe is where poetry always is for me.”
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ENOUGH: Once You’re Trapped, You Lose the Game
A Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary people that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Peter Mishler
Peter Mishler discusses his debut collection, Fludde, the effect of ritual on poems, and childhood psychology.
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Faith and Identity: Fireworks in the Graveyard by Joy Ladin
To “ameliorate” the desire for death or the sense of self-annihilation, Ladin finds in religion a way of reconciliation, not only within herself, but also with her community and society at large.
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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 Book Club Chat with Terese Mailhot
Terese Mailhot discusses her debut memoir, Heart Berries, writing candidly about one’s personal life, and the good that can come from anger.
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Saudade Manifest: Biography, Myth-Making, and Haunted Houses in the Amazon
A myth is its own kind of truth.
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On Joy: Three Poetry Anthologies
With impermanence and “praise for the devil” all around, it’s a gift to rediscover joy, no matter how fleeting.
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It’s All Metaphorical: A Conversation with Laurette Folk
Laurette Folk discusses her new collection, Totem Beasts, the role of meditation and dreams in her work, and “seeking some heightened experience in the conscious world.”
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What to Read When You Want to Feel Thankful
Kick off the holiday season with a list of books that Rumpus editors are thankful for!
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On Speaking Plainly: A Conversation with Rajith Savanadasa
Rajith Savanadasa discusses his debut novel, Ruins, writing across oceans, and the chance encounter with refugees that led to the story at the heart of his novel.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #85: Elizabeth Metzger
I have known the poet Elizabeth Metzger since kindergarten—and ever since I have known her, she has been a poet. When we played the The Game of Life, a board game, she wrote small lyrics about the futures we ended the game with; when I had a crush, she wrote light verse about the boys […]
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We Have Met the Maelstrom, and It Is Us: Dean Rader’s Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry
Umbrellas are flimsy shelters from the maelstrom, and Rader keeps going because he can’t stop.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Pandora and the Naked Dead Woman
Bite that apple, open that jar at your own risk and see how your garden grows, how hopeful you remain. Paradise is, after all, blissful self-ignorance.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 9): “The City Limits”
[A] nation’s poetry degenerates if it does not embody the language of what is mysterious…
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My Voice for Their Drugs
Anxiety disorients me from inside. My heart moves so erratically I’m afraid it will give out, my breath so staggered I have to remind myself to take in air.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Life’s inequities can be cruel, but in the end we are all part of our communities; suffering though we may be, we are not alone.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jericho Parms
What is lost still has substance, is malleable, can take on new impressions, and be molded again to our experience, often resulting in the most lasting force that determines how we see the world.
...moreA Death Blow Can Be a Life Blow to Some
What does it mean to be carried away? To be captured, carried off, liberated? To lose control of oneself? Lerner doesn’t show concern for questions like these. More generally, The Hatred of Poetry takes little interest in the rarities of technique across a poet’s body of work and avoids questions about his or her sense […]
...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.
...moreNaturally Emily Dickinson
I became tantalized by the idea of a genius poet whose talent was nourished not by extensive travel, nor by formal literary training, but rather by an intimacy with the kinds of creatures Americans routinely encounter and rarely appreciate. For Slate, Ferris Jabr dives deep into the imagery of Emily Dickinson’s poetry to find new […]
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Ames Hawkins
Is it really that human capacity is limited? Or are we limited by what it is we believe we are able, and allow ourselves—are willing—to see?
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Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Jeff Nguyen reviews Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreEmily Dickinson Wasn’t Crazy
Emily Dickinson continues to appeal to literary critics fascinated by her poetry’s terse and alarming emotional breadth. Many biographies attribute her emotional poetry to a sense of agoraphobia, but at Lit Hub, Jerome Charyn makes the case for Emily Dickinson as a more complicated and clever character who was very aware of how the emotion […]
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The Amazing Disappearing Woman Writer
To refuse to disappear at mid-life—I am forty-two as of the writing of this essay—is perhaps the best rebellion a woman poet can make to the literary world and to the world at large.
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The Last Book I Loved: Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York
But when my loneliness feels as vast—and capable of drowning me—as the sea, this book about self-destruction comforts me more than any self-help.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Pretending to Pretend
Just as a body, like water, retains no constant shape, so in memory there are no constant conditions.
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The Rumpus Interview with Amy Fusselman
Amy Fusselman discusses her latest memoir/manifesto/philosophical treatise Savage Park, the rise of a new kind of nonfiction, and what kind of art “discombobulates her and makes her scream.”
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Cornerstones of American Poetry
The only way I can put it is, no American poet I have ever met regardless of disposition or poetics has disliked Frank Stanford’s poems.
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