by lewis levenberg A few words, this week, on the vagaries of hanging out our shingle once more. We’ve encountered setbacks, delays, challenges, and so on. But we’re still dogging this startup—this conglomeration of our assets into publication, incubation, and focused curation—and it’s time to share what we’ve learned so far. Here’s to the phoenix, […]
by Tom Bair But youth is also that fragment of existence when one easily imagines oneself to be quite singular, when really what one is thinking or doing is what will later be retained as the typical trait of a generation. Being young is a source of power, a time of decisive encounters, but these […]
The object of my analysis is not a reinterpretation or any revelation about Beckett’s body of work, although as writer I am tempted to travel in that direction; rather, my focus is on the nature of reputation, the public nature or publicity-factor of a writer, and how this can be contended-with, examined, thought-about, and whether […]
by Tom Bair This week Tom is working on a multi-part article, beginning with an examination of Samuel Beckett and his reputation as a bleak post-existentialist. Buttressed by Alain Badiou’s comments on the Irish writer and a fun Venn diagram, Tom will begin by loosely sketching the context of these readings articles, their readings of […]
Witness Literature as a poetic movement has taken on the task of accumulating, compiling, and arranging documentation of the human race’s catastrophic failures. Keeping with our example, Carolyn Forche’s Against Forgetting is an expansive anthology of world literature, organized by event (ie “World War I”, or “the Spanish Civil War”), beginning with “the Armenian Genocide” […]
by Tom Bair I will concede that I am, have been, and will continue to be wary of Witness Literature. I am also aware that a part of me shrugs my shoulders to any act of poetry which attempts to disown its own witness. Well, let me be clear: I have not known a poet […]
