Walt Whitman
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Beyond the Wishes of the Genie: Remembering Robin Williams
Williams is not free to “see the world” with a little brown suitcase in hand nor is he free to miss Aladdin or anyone else.
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How Books Used to Be Made
Ever wonder how books were made before modern printers and computers? At PBS, you can see photos from Arion Press in San Francisco, which makes handmade books using letterpress printing equipment that’s centuries old. In honor of their 40th anniversary,…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 5
There’s a unitary circulation between poet and reader. The poet dwells in the gap between dream and waking, and the reader is offered entryway to become alive and enlivened.
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“You are a true man.” A letter writer’s delight!
In what has to be one of the best examples of correspondence history, Letters of Note has published a fan letter from a young Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman: “The four years which have elapsed have made me love your…
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Real-Life Time-Traveling Fanfic
The Toast set social media on fire with a piece of literary gossip this week, and like all the best literary gossip, it’s over 100 years old. Here it is: Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde totally hooked up. Maybe. Probably.…
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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 do they really mean anything anymore? Click through to find…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Identity v. Identification
T. R. Hummer has a comely piece up on Slate, “The Intimacy of Walt Whitman’s ‘America,’” about the influence and pleasures of Walt Whitman, plus an alleged recording of Whitman reading lines from “America,” made by Thomas Edison:
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Poet and a President
A funny thing happened on the way to President Obama’s second inauguration Monday. The president’s speech and Richard Blanco’s poem got reversed. Broadly speaking, one’s expectations of political rhetoric is that, at its worst, it reduces complex argument to slogans…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Bruce Lee’s Advice to Poets
Who isn’t a devotee of advice from writers about writing? One of my favorite books in this guilty-pleasure genre to come out lately is Dennis O’Driscoll’s collection of witticisms and one-liners, Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry.…
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The Great Night
A modern retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Chris Adrian’s new novel The Great Night explores love and death at an evening feast in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park.
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THE BLURB #19: The Complete Thing
“As those early days blurred into weeks, I watched my newborn son losing weight. How could it be that we did not know how to feed our son? Where was our midwife now? Why, in the middle of this enormous…
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Less Is More
The stories in Mary Hamilton’s very, very short collection are vivid, surreal, experimental, funny, and emotionally devastating.