Any important literary work is like the Trojan Horse at the time it is produced. Any work with a new form operates as a war machine, because its design and its goal is to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions. It is always produced in hostile territory. … [Read more...]

I’m in Trout Lake, Washington, visiting my parents. They live in a beautiful place, surrounded by evergreens, bordered by the narrow, fast-running White Salmon River, which feeds off snow fields on nearby Mt. Adams, one of the highest volcanic peaks in the state. … [Read more...]

Have you noticed how long in the tooth this war is getting? I recently went back to work on a piece I began more than two years ago, "Stepping over Bodies." It's not finished yet but I want to put it out there before we all forget what it felt like to be shocked at … [Read more...]

Last Sunday, Winston and I took a walking tour of Greenwood Cemetery. Although the cemetery is within a couple of miles of our house, neither of us had ever been there. “Brooklyn’s Victorian city of the dead” was how the outfit that organized the tour described … [Read more...]

I just heard my friend and teaching colleague Jocelyn Lieu (author of the story collection Potential Weapons) give a wonderful reading from a work in progress, a memoir of September 11th. The theme of the reading was “motherhood,” and she selected passages about … [Read more...]

I've been to a couple of wonderful poetry events in recent days. On April 27, I had the great privilege of participating in a public reading of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass at the New York Historical Society. In the event, we took over two and a half hours … [Read more...]

Is the apocalyptic mindset somehow a “white thing”? Is that why anti-nuclear demonstrations usually look so pale? Could it be that the “most oppressed” have more urgent things to worry them, that concern for the fate of the Earth is a bourgeois luxury? And could it … [Read more...]

It’s strange, isn’t it, that various government agencies have plunged into the regular production of the sorts of futuristic scenarios that were once left to awed journalists, sci-fi writers, utopians, and cranks; and yet we, as a nation, find ourselves in a kind … [Read more...]

The news cycle spins and, having spun, moves on. Before a certain topic vanishes down the memory hole, I want to offer a work in progress that enlists recent events in a meditation on an ancient theme, to wit: These Spectacles of Feminine Abjection The nail … [Read more...]

Human society is journeying to a terrible place. — Arundhati Roy What’s the use of imaginative literature? None whatsoever. That is, it cannot be made to accomplish anything. Not, at any rate, if you view the single work or author under the sign of the … [Read more...]