Andrew David King
Unwriting the Books of the Dead: Anne Carson and Robert Currie on Translation, Collaboration, and History
Before Anne Carson took the odes of Gaius Valerius Catullus as cartographical tools for navigating the all-too-unmappable space of her brother Michael’s death, Louis Zukofsky translated them. In the preface to the 1969 edition in which they were published, he wrote…
Short Takes: Against, or Despite, Autobiography
Harold Bloom on the reason why Walt Whitman was excluded from the ten “literary giants” selected by the US Postal Service for their set of 45-cent First-Class Mail Forever stamps featuring poets. Mary Biddinger talks with LitBridge about the conflation…
The hidden substance of absence: an interview with Brian Henry
Brian Henry’s Lessness is a book that eats itself, a catalog of wounds both festering and healing—though when they do heal, they heal to be torn open again. In Lessness, like most of Henry’s books, narrative is a more emergent…
Shakespeare’s body, Shakespeare’s ghost: erasure, canonicity, and the apophatic self
I’ll begin with a claim: that every text produces in its writer a sense of the self becoming unglued—that one creates, or expunges, meaning in the form of a literary work with the hope or sense that it will amount…
Stitching shut the holes: on concealed erasure
I began my last post with a discussion of the multiple valences the word “erasure” has when used to describe a poetic technique. But just as there are many different ways to parse the impetus for subordinating a number of…
