R.I.P. Norman Fruman May 2, 2012: According to this NY Times article: Norman Fruman, a scholar who roiled literary waters in the 1970s with a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that accused the poet of stealing ideas and disingenuously aggrandizing his own creative history, died on April 19 at his home in Laguna Beach, Calif. He was 88. The obit continues on about [...] by Harriet Staff

Shame May Be Fatal April 24, 2012: "The chrysalis breaks apart to form the wings."  Samuel Delaney.  I was asking him how to write a book. The future body of the book.  I think of these notes as wings: as the wet parts that will re-combine or fold: a living structure.  The essay is the chrysalis. In this weak attempt.  It is okay to feel this weak, this listless.  For [...] by Bhanu Kapil

The Burden of Artists’ Crap April 23, 2012: Recently, I witnessed a heartbreaking sight: the selling off piecemeal of Jackson Mac Low's library at a flea market near my house in New York City. One Sunday afternoon, while rambling through the market, I saw a bookstall and, leafing through the stacks of books, I saw incredible things: every book by Dick Higgins's legendary Something Else [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

The Soft Grid: A Response to Sina Queyras’s Lyric Conceptualist Manifesto April 11, 2012: Sina Queyras has posited the future of post-conceptual writing as lyric conceptualism in her striking Lyric Conceptualism, A Manifesto In Progress. This sort of tempering of first-generation purity with second-generation subjectivity and lyricism was played out across various art forms in the twentieth century: think of the lyricist gestures of a [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

Johanna Drucker: A Postscript to Beyond Conceptualisms April 10, 2012: Conceptual writing may or may not be played out. Certainly the works that have come to define it, by Kenny Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, Craig Dworkin and many others, have created a recognizable framework for critical appreciation and insight (such as Marjorie Perloff’s fine Unoriginal Genius). If I see many much [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

Poetry Is Dead, I Killed It: an Essay by Vanessa Place April 5, 2012: Even if conceptualism is facing crisis and decline, it is also being constantly (and artificially) reinvented, reinterpreted, refashioned, reborn, rechanneled, and repackaged. What allows this is an apparatus -- a survival mechanism -- that can seize upon any technique for squeezing out a pathway toward life: modulation, constant change, [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

Memories and Thoughts on Adrienne Rich April 3, 2012: I was nervous about our lunch. I might have even dreaded it since I was afraid that I would somehow disappoint her (she chose my book for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and said she’d like to meet me). The Warwick Hotel possessed a vintage charm amid all the midtown chain hotels. It was where she always stayed when she came to New York, where [...] by Cathy Park Hong

CONCEPTUAL WRITING WAS INTRIGUING AND PROVOCATIVE April 2, 2012: Of all possible categories, conceptualism does not seem to deserve a manifesto or an obituary; discredited as an intellectual problem, it is apparently on its way to extinction—like the dinosaur—through clumsiness, slowness, inflexibility, difficulty. But in fact, only conceptualism instigates the regime of complexity that mobilizes the full [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

“Diving into the Wreck”: An Appreciation April 2, 2012: To commemorate the passing of Adrienne Rich, I wanted to offer a different kind of experience: my failure to understand her canonical poem the first time I encountered it. Let me set the stage: high school, 1987, a series of college entrance exams: SAT, ACT and some Advance Placement rigamarole. I had been in this country seven years and [...] by Rigoberto González

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012 March 28, 2012: Jacket Copy alerts us to the shocking news that poet Adrienne Rich has died at the age of 82. A bit about Rich: The recipient of such literary awards as the Yale Young Poets prize, the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Dorothea Tanning Award given by the Academy of American Poets, Rich died Tuesday at her home in [...] by Harriet Staff