The Last Poem I Loved: “The Hell Poem” by Shane McCrae
I’m fascinated that the speaker’s harm disappearing is a function of being in Hell.
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Posts Tagged: T.S. Eliot
A Metaphysical Inquiry: Nick Laird’s Feel Free
The work maintains a wondering backward, as it were, tracing the varied details of lived experience.
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The Evolution of Present-Day Greece: Talking with Nanos Valaoritis
Poet and author Nanos Valaoritis discusses the political and cultural situation in Greece today.
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The Last Poem I Loved: The Waste Land
It is March, almost April, and the year feels like a spool of days spliced out of order, leaping treacherously from sun to ice to sun to rain to snow.
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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.
...moreEliot to the Internet
Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he deployed in his poems. Mark Ford gets granular at the […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar discusses Singaporean poetry in the last fifty years, Hindu mythology, translation, and his complicated relationship to his heritage.
...morePresident Obama, Literary Critic
At the New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson shares with us part of a letter written by a young man who would eventually become President Obama, a small piece of literary criticism written in earnest to help his then-girlfriend unpack T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, “The Waste Land.”
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins
I wish I could tell my daughter to please don’t leave her world. To stay where she is as long as she can.
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Remarks On Walking Around in Boston
As you walk, you become intensely aware in two directions. There is the outer world, and there is your head space. It is not necessary or possible really to keep strict focus on one or the other. They blend together.
...moreA Look at Meek Mill vs. Drake through T.S. Eliot’s Writing
Rappers Meek Mill and Drake have been come to blows lately, since Mill claimed Drake doesn’t write his own raps. This also launched a series of Meek Mill memes which Drake projected on stage at OVO Fest while he performed. All of this takes into question originality in art, and over at The Quietus, writer Karl Smith […]
...moreToo Much For Leopold Bloom to Keep Track Of
Over at Guernica, Paul Stephens looks at the current state of “information overload,” and how it’s been explored in art from the avant-garde poetry of Lyn Hejinian to the conceptual writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, with additional commentary from Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. A fascinating look at what may be the crisis of the millennial age.
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The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show: Cate Marvin
In Episode 11 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, Cate Marvin discusses her new collection, Oracle, marsupials, and why she’ll never write a prose poem.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Let’s talk about sentences. Let’s talk about how poets, when they let their lines run long to prose, can make sentences sing. And if we’re going to talk about those sentences, we must also talk about details. Details, details, and more details. It all started on waking Thursday morning and reading David Ebenbach’s “Nobody Else […]
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The Last Book I Loved: The Delicacy and Strength of Lace
In letter-writing, we are not really talking, but the words represent the deep-heldness of our communication.
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“And She Went on Her Way Rejoicing”
Muriel Spark and the perennial question: “Am I a woman or an intellectual monster?”
...morePen Pals with Eliot and Marx
For the Tin House blog, Heather Hartley spends the holiday season perusing letters between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx. Through their love of “good cigars” and a “weakness for making puns,” Eliot and Marx show a humorous affection that inspires Hartley to do some letter writing of her own.
...moreWas Prufrock the First Hipster?
For the Atlantic, Karen Swallow Prior puts a new spin on the origin story of the “hipster,” arguing that T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock was actually one of the first: Prufrock of the cuffed white flannel trousers cultivates a detached earnestness that isn’t unlike the modern-day adult who is as eager to reject a hollow consumerism as […]
...moreRehabbing Poets’ Broken Records
New audio preservation technology just opened a treasure trove at Harvard: thousands of recordings of influential poets reading their work, once feared too deteriorated to salvage, are now being recovered. As WBUR reports, the IRENE program takes high-res 3D photographs of old records deemed too fragile to play with an ordinary needle, which can then […]
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The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show: Oliver de la Paz
In Episode 6 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, Dave Roderick chats with poet Oliver de la Paz about his new collection, Post Subject: A Fable, video games, and his weirdest writing habit.
...more90% More Prose
Calling all T.S Eliot nerds (or, just nerds): nearly 90% of Eliot’s prose has been unavailable or out-out-print; this year, Ronald Schuchard is publishing the first out of his eight-volume work, The Complete Prose of T.S Eliot.
...moreThe Pleasure of Perfectly Positioned Punctuation
As conscientious writers know, punctuation can make all the difference in a sentence, sculpting mush into meaning or cluing the reader in to nuances of intonation. Vulture’s Kathryn Schulz has compiled some of literature’s most effective and memorable instances of punctuation, from Nabokov’s parenthetical “(picnic, lightning)” to the ellipses in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love […]
...morePJ Harvey Tuesday #4: “When Under Ether”
By 2007, PJ Harvey had released six studio albums, which ran the gamut in style from explosive blues-punk to near-industrial electronica to soulful pop rock. To the surprise of all (and dismay of many), her seventh album, White Chalk, marked a dramatic departure from all that. Gone were the buzz-saw guitars and the androgynously low […]
...moreT.S. Eliot’s Long-Lost Lecture
In a letter of May 21, 1924, an English literary critic invited T.S. Eliot to speak to the club on “any subject connected with the Elizabethan drama.” As late as November 6, Eliot told Richard Aldington that the lecture was “still in very rough shape.” Shortly afterward he wrote to Virginia Woolf that, despite all […]
...moreHappy Birthday, T. S. Eliot!
Don’t let that Oxford education and British citizenship fool you: 125 years ago today, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He went on to become one of the defining voices of the modernist movement with poems like The Waste Land and plays like Murder in the Cathedral—oh, and that children’s book that eventually became the […]
...moreOff the Page and Into the Microphone
From Novels to Notes is a new blog by journalist Johnny Garcia chronicling songs inspired by fiction or poems. It’s still getting started, but it looks promising: there are already two entries about PJ Harvey, and there are bound to be more once Garcia discovers those lines she cribbed from T. S. Eliot. What are […]
...moreNew T. S. Eliot Papers To Be Revealed
If you enjoyed reading about T. S. Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne, in Rumpus interviewee Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines, you might be interested to know that Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, recently passed away at the age of 86. What does that mean for fans of modernist poetry? Biographers will have access to certain materials for the […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kate Zambreno
“I’m exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.” Novelist, theorist, historian and blog-girl, Kate Zambreno gives up a meaty, definitive interview.
...moreSaturday History Lessons: On Emily Hale and T.S. Eliot
One February night in T.S. Eliot’s mid-twenties, he went his aunt’s house in Boston. It was 1913, and the occasion was one of those delightful-sounding “evenings of amateur theatricals” that no one bothers with anymore. (It’s a tradition that really ought to be revived, if anyone’s asking me.) Eliot performed as Mr. Woodhouse in scenes […]
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