A couple of years ago, at the height of the first summer of the pandemic, when it felt like the world was coming apart at the seams (or, at least,…
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Contemporaries Essays, Little Magazines
Contemporaries Essays, Little Magazines
New York City Poetics and the Idea of the Mimeograph Revolution: Reflections on Teaching
The mimeograph revolution arrives just after the half-way point of my ten-week advanced undergraduate course entitled “‘multiple voices’: New York City Poetics 1960-1985,” which I teach at the University of…
Contemporaries Essays, Little Magazines
Asterisms Among the Magazines
murmurations Recent studies in animal movement modelling suggest that groups such as starlings aren’t acting on organized herd mentalities, but that individuals “sought to match the direction and speed of the…
Contemporaries Essays, Little Magazines
Hardbound Idiom: Convergences in Umbra Vol. I, No. I, 1963
” . . . exploring coloration and penumbralight-wise coloration magnifies what I seeand eclipse coloration here dense pitch densebeauty all light your halo opened out of darkness your good dense…
Contemporaries Essays, Little Magazines
“Key to a Savage Sideshow”: The Magazines of the Occult School of Boston
“The school of Boston in poetry, middle this century,” wrote Gerrit Lansing in 1968, “is an occult school, unknown.”1 For this school, comprised of the poets Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser,…
Contemporaries Essays, Little Magazines
Introduction: Deep Immersion in the Little Mags
This cluster emerged from two broad, reciprocal realizations about the study of little magazines: that post-1945 literary studies and periodical studies are largely not in dialogue, and that periodical studies…
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
An Interview with Mark McGurl
One of the most influential recent accounts of literary minimalism comes from Mark McGurl, now the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Stanford University. His…
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
On Undermediation
Hinge Wants You to Find Love Hinge, its tagline wants you to know, is the dating app “designed to be deleted.” This wasn’t always the case: launched in 2012, the…
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
Minimally Focused: Carver, TikTok, and Minimalist Form
Raymond Carver is the unwitting poster boy for the minimalist aesthetic in American fiction. His name acts as a stand-in for many things: the institutionalization of writing MFA programs,1 the…