What to Read When: You Like to Look at Birds
I have long gravitated toward books that know where they are situated.
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Posts Tagged: Rilke
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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A Small Universe Set in Motion: Talking with Amanda Moore
Amanda Moore discusses her debut poetry collection, REQUEENING.
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The Lonesome Home: A Conversation with Aria Aber
Aria Aber discusses her debut poetry collection, HARD DAMAGE.
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How to Write about Nothing: Kate Zambreno’s Drifts
But the evasion is purposeful, and the purpose is to marvelous effect.
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The Joy of Play: Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (10th Anniversary Ed.) by David Biespiel
Biespiel offers a number of best practices—not just for writing poems, but for living a creative life.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #193: C.J. Farley
“My novel tries to write the contributions of men and women of color back in.”
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A Parcel of Stories: Hard Damage by Aria Aber
The speaker in Hard Damage, it seems, is writing herself to life.
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A Female, Bone-Deep Obsession: Talking with Jennifer Martelli
Jennifer Martelli discusses her new collection of poetry, MY TARANTELLA.
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On Returning to The Book of Nightmares as a New Father in the Trump Era
2018 began interlaced with a double helix of joy and fear.
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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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Moments within Days within Seasons: Talking with Alicia Mountain
Alicia Mountain discusses her debut collection, High Ground Coward, the surveillance state, and queer representation in the poetry world.
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Reading Ferlinghetti in the Age of Trump
This lesson feels especially relevant to our moment: that it’s possible to be both a frustrated activist and also a present and joyful human being.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jesse Ball
Jesse Ball discusses his new novel, Census, the inherent sinister nature of institutions, and creating imaginary authors.
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Becoming Bodies
[W]e wanted something different from each other’s bodies than what was actually there, which might be why our bodies sometimes came together.
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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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Moving Toward Answers: A Conversation with Stephen Mills
Poet Stephen Mills discusses his first two collections, He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices and A History of the Unmarried, teaching writing, and what’s next.
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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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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Gayle Brandeis’s The Art of Misdiagnosis
After my mom hangs herself, I become Nancy Drew. I am looking for clues, for evidence. Answers.
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Breaking Through: Gayle Brandeis Discusses The Art of Misdiagnosis
Gayle Brandeis discusses her memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis, out today from Beacon Press.
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Voices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
Shame is a treble hook that tells me that 1) I not only fail but am a failure, that 2) I not only damage people but I am damaged, and that 3) I not only lie but I am a lie.
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The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos discusses Abandon Me, confessional writing, Billie Holiday, reenacting trauma, cataloguing narratives, and searching for identity.
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The Rumpus Interview with Gonzalo Torné
Acclaimed Spanish novelist Gonzalo Torné discusses his first novel to be translated into English, Divorce Is in the Air, his ideal reader, and the economic crisis in Spain.
...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.
...morePoets in Place
Poet Ange Mlinko responds to a challenge from FSG’s Works in Progress series, to “tackle a question—or invent a new one—that lies within [Rilke’s] Letters to a Young Poet.” Mlinko muses on poets and places: do writers of beautiful lines need to be in beautiful places? Her answer, not surprisingly, pivots on the power of language.
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The Conversation: Joshua Bennett and Camonghne Felix
What scares me in the current work is how much I trust the concept, what I’m trying to achieve.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Be Wise, Drink the Wine
Be it Latin or poetry, or whatever it was—I was feeling woozy by then. If I couldn’t love what I was reading, I took it, it was better to have never read at all.
...moreThe Middle of Things
Amending Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Andrew Solomon offered advice to young writers at this year’s Whiting Writers’ Awards. An adaptation of the speech appears in the New Yorker.
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The Rumpus Interview with Edward Hirsch
Dean Rader talks with Edward Hirsch about his new book Gabriel, the pain of losing a child, and the challenges of writing grief.
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