David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Whitman Notebook: Summer Grass
Whatever is undiscovered in “Song of Myself” is in the soil.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
10 posts
A Tiny Wellspring of Comfort: Nina Riggs’s The Bright Hour
[Nina] is not a warrior but a reconnoiter at life’s edge.
A Megaphone for a Generation: Coming of Age at the End of Nature
[T]his generation is no longer sure that the future will be better than the past.
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.
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Primal Talk
One of the thrills of being a writer is becoming aware of the wildness that percolates inside of you. If you’ve learned to listen, you’re able to hear it.
Who’s the Leader of the Club?
Nearing his 90th year, Mickey has not only outlived his adversaries, he has conquered them. Emerson famously advised his readers that if they built a better mousetrap, people would beat…
Reading on Reading on Reading
Reading Montaigne, the god of the sinuous modern essay, the essay that invites the reader to watch the writer write, is “reading him reading,” and reading others reading him before.…
The Rumpus Interview with Paul Kingsnorth
Author and poet Paul Kingsnorth talks about writing an entire novel in a “shadow-tongue” of Old English, and what that taught him about our contemporary world.
Rewrite, Reboot, Remix
Rewriting the classics has become a stale and risk-averse strategy. But that shouldn’t spoil the fun of our larger culture of remixing.
The Ancient Art of the Book Blurb
Book blurbs—and the controversies surrounding them—go back as far as Thomas More, who gathered a bouquet of them for Utopia. Ben Jonson blurbed Shakespeare. Ralph Waldo Emerson blurbed Walt Whitman. But…